A Teaching Plan for Self-introduction

Objective: Upon completion of this lesson, students will strengthen the ability of
introducing themselves to others in a friendly setting.
Class size: About 20.
Class level: Senior high school first-year students (who correspond to high school
sophomores in the U.S.).
Materials: 20 copies of a lyric sheet of the childrens song Old MacDonald had a farm;
20 copies of the information sheet where the students fill in personal information that they
hear from partners; big topic cards where topics for self-introduction are printed and are
used for teacher instruction.
Procedure
1) Taking the roll in English
2) Warm up
After giving a lyric sheet to each student, the teacher sings the whole verse of Old
MacDonald had a farm. Then, the teacher demonstrates how to sing it line by line, and the
students follow him. This step may be repeated a few times until most students get to sing
the song smoothly. Finally, the whole class sings along the song all together. Either an
ALT or a Japanese English teacher can take the lead in this instruction, or maybe both can
cooperate. In our lesson, the ALT first modeled how to sing at a natural speed, and the
Japanese teacher took over the floor to teach how to sing each line.
3) The main activity: The Get-to-Know-Each-Other Game
Basic expressions for self-introduction have already been studied in junior high
schools. So, using topic cards, the teachers first make the students recall some such
expressions. In our lesson, we prepared 11 self-introduction topics (i.e., name, age, family
members, transportation, favorite food, favorite sport/player, favorite music/singer, favorite
TV program/TV star, personality, and free time). We printed these topics on big white
cards. And, holding those cards in front of us, the Japanese teacher elicited the expressions
that the students already knew for self-introduction. For example, holding up the word
family, he said: I have Father, Mother, one brother, and one sister. How about you? What
family members do you have? When we picked up a few volunteers for each topic, most
of them made a correct response to our questions.
Then, we started the Get-to-Know-Each-Other activity. In this activity, the students
stand up, walk freely in the classroom to find three partners, ask five questions to each of
them, and write down the findings on their information sheets. (The five questions are
available on the information sheet that is given to each student. To see the questions, click
on the link to the information sheet listed next to this teaching plan.) An important rule of
this activity is that two students do paper-rock-and-scissors before the interview, and only
the student who wins it can ask the five questions. The loser only answers the winner and
is never allowed to ask any question. So, if a student is unlucky, he or she may just keep
answering the questions in the first few encounters. The first student to successfully
interview three persons gets three extra points; the second student to do so gets two extra
points; the third student get one extra point. All the others get only participation points. (We

made this rule as an incentive for making the activity a little more enthusiastic to the
students. And, it worked as was expected.)
We recommend that the teachers take enough time to demonstrate each step of this
activity before the game starts. Thus, after we gave the information sheet to each student,
we actually did paper-rock-and-scissors in front of the class. We had made an arrangement
so the ALT would win. Then, the ALT asked me (the Japanese teacher) the five questions.
He even pretended to record my answers on his information sheet. We called the start only
when we were convinced that the students completely understood their task in this activity.
4) Wrap up
The students fill in the review sheet where a lesson summary, an impressive word or
phrase in the lesson, and a question about the lesson need to be written down.