Criminal
Craig Brierley (description by Ed Edgar)
Level | Aims | Grammar | Time | Materials |
junior high school | speaking | wh' words | 25 mins | worksheets |
This article was given to me by Ms. Sakamoto of Wakakusa junior high school. She got it from Craig Brierley, my predecessor here in Nasu. Many thanks to Craig for e-mailing me from Britain to explain how to use it properly. (It came to his attention after he typed his own name into a search engine and it brought up "Criminal Criag Brierley".) Craig also deserves the credit for Evening News.
Find out the name of your students' favourite celebrity. At the beginning of the class, anounce that they have been murdered. Younger students may start crying at this point.
Some of the kids are suspects, and some are police. The police have to question the suspects and find the killer.
Normal police procedure in cases like this is to round up a suspect, deprive them of sleep, shut them in the same over- or under-heated room for hours on end, sit them at an uncomfortable, undersized table and keep asking them the same questions over and over again until they crack. But I prefer team-taught classes to be a little bit different from normal lessons, so here's my alternative:
Give the police worksheets like the one below, but with all the answers blanked out.
Give the suspects cards with various bits of information. In this example, Ken Miyake's card might say something like,
At 8.15 on Monday night? I was singing with V6. We were at one of our concerts. We were there from 6.00 until 8.00. It was coldy and windy.(If you're too busy to make cards you could just write the answers for the suspect in question onto a copy of the worksheet and give it to the suspect.)
The kids have to question the suspects and write the answers on their worksheets. If they find someone whose story doesn't add up, they must be the murderer.
Here's the kids' worksheet, with answers. (Obviously you would blank all or most of them out.) Here's Ms. Sakamoto's version:
Who are you? | Ken Miyake | [ALT] | Tomoya Nagase | Mr. Nagashima | Ami Suzuki | Takashi Okamura | Anna Umemiya |
Where were you on Monday evening? | I was at a V6 concert | I was at a V6 concert | I was at a V6 concert | I was at a baseball ground | I was in Hawaii | I was in Alaska | I was at my house |
What time were you there? | from 6pm. to 8pm. | from 6pm. to 8pm. | from 6pm. to 8pm. | from 7pm. to 9pm. | from 6am. to 11pm. | a whole day | from 5am. to 10pm. |
What were you doing? | I was singing. | I was singing. | I was dancing behind V6. | I played the baseball game. | I was sleeping. | I was sleeping. | I was reading a book. |
Who were you with? | I was with V6. | I was with my friend. | I was with Tokio. | I was with Giants. | I was with my staff. | I was with my partner Yabecchi. | I was alone. |
How was the weather? | It was cold and windy. | It was cold and windy. | It was cold and windy. | It was sunny. | It was hot. | It was snowy. | It was cold and windy. |
These need to be updated to keep up with fickle teenage trends.
Somewhere amongst all this information you need to have hidden the clue that someone is lying. There are all kinds of ways to do this.
One way is to use the students' general knowledge. The worksheet above is an example of that. In this case the murderer is Mr. Nagashima. He can't have been at a baseball game on Monday because there aren't any baseball games on Mondays.
Another option is the put the vital information elsewhere. For example, Craig's original uses a made-up newspaper article describing the murder of a well-known TV talent. (In this case, Morita from V6). Here's Craig's original text: (scanned copy here)
V6 Star Killed!!!
Go Morita is Dead
It was cold and windy on Monday evening. Go Morita came home from a V6 concert. He said "Goodbye" to his friends and then went to his room. Police found Mr. Morita on Sunday morning. He was dead. A knife was in his back! Ken Miyake said, "Go was my friend. He was a good singer." Police said, "Mr. Morita had many enemies. Many musicians and TV stars didn't like him. But who killed him?"
At the bottom, he has put some commercials:
On the worksheet, instead of having somebody saying they were at a baseball game that couldn't have happened, he has one of the suspects saying they were at the sports center until 9.00. A look at the second commercial shows that at this time the sports center would already have closed.Cowboy Tours - the world's cheapest tours! Holiday anywhere in the world for less than 10,000 yen. Just send us 10,000 yen and we'll tell you how! c/o Craig Brierley
Sports Centre - Tennis, swimming, soccer, volleyball, gym... Every day 8:00 am - 7:30 pm. Shibuya, Tokyo
A third possibility is to have the suspects contradict each other. In my version (with my own worksheet), I have Suzuki Ami claim to have been singing Karaoke in Utsunomiya with me and the Domoto brothers. But me and the Domotos make no mention of the presence of Suzuki Ami. Not only that, she claims that it was sunny in Utsunomiya that evening, whereas the other three of us say that it was raining. (Of course that doesn't completely exclude the possibility that me, Tsuyoshi and Doichi were all in it together and are trying to frame Suzuki Ami, but three-against-one should be good enough for the average Japanese court.)
This is a very flexible activity, and there are lots of different ways to treat it. There are also lots of things you could do to set the scene. You could write a news article, like Craig did. You could make a radio news broadcast to announce the murder and some of the details, or dub the news of the murder in English over a video of an actual Japanese TV broadcast. Or you could lure the TV talent of your choice to a secluded spot, murder them in cold blood and dump their body in the broom cupboard. Make sure the celebrity in question is Nomuro Sachiko.
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