with high school students

In this semester, I go to a local high school every Friday to help teaching Japanese as an assistant. (I will write about this volunteer work later...) Normally, I follow a Japanese teacher and attend Japanese classes at the school. But today, students had an excursion. Kindly, the teacher took me with students for free!

We got on a bus and went to the Nihongo Tanken centre (Japanese Language Centre) in Kirawee high school (30minutes from Central by trains). In the campus, there was a Japanese traditional building like a house next to a gym, which was a bit strange. Staff members are a native Japanese and an Australian who can speak Japanese very well. A lot of activities in Japanese had already been prepared for students such as Interview game, Kansuji game (calculation with kansuji), and so on. For students, it must have been the first time to be in Japanese tatami mat room with a tokonoma and shoji screens. Also, they had rice crackers and a Japanese lunch box. I wish I had such an excursion some times to promote studying English! I do not know what style of excursion we could do though...I strongly thought that there is no culture like Japanese one! Everything there reminds me of Japan.

Students seemed to enjoy activities. However, some students could not catch up with games because two staff members did not speak English at all. It was because they tried to do activities following a new styled teaching strategy. I had heard about the strategy which is done only in the second language without explanation in the first language. Which is better to acquire language skill? No one would have known yet...Today, I did think about language education.