I made three handouts: one for vocabulary, one with the dialogue, and a menu. I'm kind of proud of the menu: I found free clipart for each of the items, used Paint to edit and stitch them together, and arranged them all in a Word table. Recalling a small but important detail from last year's effort, I made it a point to teach the students how to read the symbol #. (All but about five of my 160 students only knew that symbol as "sharp.")In the first class, we introduced the vocabulary and dialogue. Just like last year, I had to break them of the Japanese-English habit of attaching "-burger" to meats to indicate that kind of sandwich. (Fast food restaurants here advertise chicken burgers, fish burgers, shrimp burgers, croquette burgers, etc.) I decided the distinction that "burger" is used for sandwiches containing a patty of ground substance was a little too difficult, especially as it was to be mentioned as an aside. I settled on the explanation that -burger usually indicates beef; this distinction adequately explains hamburger and cheeseburger, as well as "chicken/fish/pork (/cheese/egg/...) sandwich."
All classes--even the lowest-level students--tore through the dialogue with very little difficulty. (The familiarity of the situation probably helped.) Most groups finished with enough time left over for money show-and-tell. I was able to give every student a dollar, nickel, and dime to look at. This beautifully illustrated the concept of cents, which I tried to connect to the concept of "hundred/hundredth" by reminding them of percent and century. Most people knew who Washington was, and most of them asked about the face on the dime and nickel. I almost embarrassed myself in the first run-through by briefly forgetting it's Jefferson; Monticello on the back saved me.
I had enough fives to give one to each pair of students, and everybody immediately recognized Lincoln--even before reading the name written under the portrait. I then told everyone to hold the bill up to the light, and there were gasps around the room as they saw the Lincoln watermark: "There's somebody there!"
Upon seeing the $1, one of the students--in one of the lowest classes, of all places--shot his hand up and began asking about the symbols on the bill. He had learned somewhere about the Eye of Providence and the bill's suggested Freemason symbolism. His English isn't very good, so the teacher had to translate for him. After a few seconds, though, she was so stunned by how much he knew that she forgot to translate for me, instead asking him questions about it. The whole class was mesmerized by the discussion, and I had his undivided attention for the remaining ten minutes.
In the second class, we finished up the show-and-tell and gave everyone the menu. I quickly taught them how to read #--everyone here uses "No." when writing it in English. The size words were a review from the shopping lesson, with extra large having been omitted. (After discussing different possibilities--king, super, and jumbo--with the other teachers, we had settled on jumbo.) Teaching them to use the menu to customize the corresponding part of the dialogue was straightforward enough.
We did some quick arithmetic practice together, with me asking the class how much change they'd get back if they paid $5 for a (random size) (random combo). This got responses from several students who normally don't say very much. I had hoped this would do a good job of drawing out students who are good at math but either not good or overly shy about English; it seemed to work.
I then explained the activity we'd planned: there would be four teams of five students each. Each team would choose one person to be the cashier; the remaining four students would be customers. Two teams would compete at a time: their cashiers would stand at the front table, with $1s and coins for change, and their team's customers would line up on the other side of the table. Each customer would order a meal from the cashier, pay, and get correct change from the cashier. The first team to get through all its customers would win. We did this tournament-style, with semis and finals. I stood close by (explaining that I was the manager) to ensure nobody reverted to Japanese. For the faster classes, we ended up using a time limit, thus allowing customers to go back through the line.
The students on the winning team would receive a bonus point--in the form of my signature on their point card--and the cashiers all received a point, regardless of their team's performance. Everyone enjoyed the activity, and it proved very effective at getting them to practice the dialogue repeatedly--especially for the cashiers. I had to stay after the lower-level students--especially the boys--to keep them from murmuring unintelligibly in place of the dialogue.
Two teams in the highest-level class, however, were devious in a splendidly creative way. The most time-consuming part of the dialogue was the exercise of computing the change based on what the customer ordered, and physically counting out the bills and coins. A couple of teams appreciated this enough to only order combos with full-dollar prices. These two teams, however, all began ordering the Jumbo #4 with an apple pie. That brought the total to $5, which completely eliminated the steps of computing, amassing, returning, and announcing the customer's change.They blew away the competition in the semis, but then were pitted against each other in the finals. Everyone was frenetically speaking English as quickly yet coherently as they could, much to the delight of Mrs. Masuda and me.
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