Manaka Wakae

Using an English grammar book and a dictionary effectively is indispensable for college English learners. But most remedial students don't have this skill. This prevents them from learning English by themselves and learning at collage English classes. But learning this skill becomes too boring for them when college teachers use the same approach as these students have already taken them at junior high schools or high schools. Therefore to make learning this skill effective and interesting for them, the author requested a junior high school to hold an extra-curricular class in which the remedial students could teach basic English grammar. Through this arrangement, the college remedial students tried to learn more eagerly because they didn't want to get embarrassed in front of the junior high school students. As a result, they managed to acquire the basic English skills of how to use an English grammar book and a dictionary. They are now ready to study English by themselves with less help.

There are some differences between Japanese subtitles and the English scripts of movies . Those differences stem from the cultures or the mother tongues. It is important to teach those differences and using movies is a very effective way. I chose the movie "Running on Empty" for our third year high school students because some of the situations the hero faces seem to be shared with what my students face at the same age of life. I had students translate some parts of the English script into Japanese so that they could learn the differences between them. My finding is that reading English is not always an uninteresting task for students. Because most of the students liked that movie, they were willing to look up words in the dictionary while they were reading the English script. Students also learned about cultural differences and idioms while comparing the scripts.