View Content #22953

Aska Okamoto is a graduate student in the Language Teaching Specialization program at the University of Oregon.

This lesson was created for high school Japanese students learning English, to raise their pragmatic awareness of how to refuse invitations politely via email.

Learning objectives:

At the end of the lesson, students will be able to:

• Students will be able to apply the reasons of refusals using “will not be able to” in invitation situation.
• Students will be able to choose the right choices of words and not to translate from Japanese when they write emails with refusals.
• Students will be able to analyze the differences of pragmatics in Japanese and English in refusal emails.

Modes: Interpersonal Communication

Materials needed: Handout, teacher’s collected sample email refusals

References:

Osuka, N. (2009). Japanese learners’ refusal and apology problems: A pilot study. In A. M. Stoke (Ed.), JALT2009 Conference Proceedings. Tokyo: JALT.

Procedure:

1. This lesson is spread out over three days.
2. On the first day: Pass out the handout. Have students write an email in English to an English teacher who invited them to an international hour this Friday after school.
3. Next, have students write an email in Japanese to a Japanese teacher who invited them to an international hour this Friday after school.
4. Then pass out 3 email examples in English that you have collected on refusing an invitation via email to groups of students. Students should circle the parts of the email that are refusals and underline the reasons given. Students should use the handout to see what category the emails fall into.
5. On the second day: Using the information on their handout that the collected yesterday in the example emails, students should now re-look at the English email the wrote at the beginning of class and compare it with the 3 examples they just analyzed. Are there ways they could improve their email?
6. Students should now write a new draft of an email in English refusing the invitation to the international hour, using what they’ve discovered through analysis to help them.
7. On the third day: Students share their email draft with one or two other students for peer review, then they should edit the draft and actually send the email to an English speaker (you can specify who they email), as well as cc’ing you on the email.