Over the last month, the English classrooms at SMAN 1 Sedayu have been filled with active learning, dialogic role-playing, and sweaty board race games. As of late, ETA Allison Gross and her co-teachers have thoroughly enjoyed opening the class with a few challenging rounds of Hangman, a game in which her students are impossibly skilled. (It only took them three turns to correctly guess the word “METACOGNITION”).

After the students are warmed up, English classes usually begin with a brief review or introduction of the week’s learning focus. For the last two weeks, students have focused on Procedural Texts. The students impressively related what might have otherwise been a dry subject to their daily lives, writing, discussing, and sharing the steps of how to use an ATM machine, how to cook nasi goreng (fried rice) or make Indomie (an Indonesian favorite – think an elite Cup of Noodle).

Allison and her co-teachers have learned that the students’ brains work best when they can get up and move about after sitting for some time. With this unit, the students loved miming the actions of various cooking verbs that accompanied their personal procedure texts (“boil,” “chop,” and “fry”). Allison will never boil water and rice again in the US without thinking of her beloved students!!

Allison Gross is currently teaching at SMAN 1 Sedayu, Special Region of Yogyakarta.