Another first for me this entire week is the fact that I ran RPG sessions for every one of my English classes, using Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. The students used Level 2 pre-generated characters downloaded from the DnD official site. I wish I was able to plan for more weeks, using the game to improve their speaking and writing […]
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I’m clearly in red
Herein lies the collection of blog posts about my teaching English as a second language to university students.
A Meeting With A Poet Laureate
Another thing I would have never thought I would ever do if I were still back in KL was to meet A Samad Said, the national laureate, who was in town because of Perlis Book Festival 2019. The Centre for International Languages Bahasa Melayu team organised a talk with the renowned writer and poet. Because I had no classes at […]
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Students in the Amphitheatre
After two semesters absent, English Theatre Arts has been offered as a UniMAP co-curricular course once again. Like before, I am the course teacher. But unlike before, instead of less than 15 students I now have to handle 40 students. I returned to my course notes to adapt it for many. Thankfully, the students are very proactive and hands on […]
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DnD: Winter at Stonehaven
We have visitors this week. The language educators from Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University, Thailand are on a three-day working visit of Universiti Malaysia Perlis. There are a number of activities that the Centre for International Languages scheduled from them. One of the activities is a tabletop role-playing game session. I was given a table to set up books, dice, maps […]
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It’s Still Chinese New Year Season
I guess everyone is still on vacation this week.
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DnD: Pretty Werewolves
Once upon a time at a time forgotten by lore, there was a city known as Big Dark Mountain. It was once a great mountain which had been hewn into a plateau. Humans, elves, dwarves and dragonborn came to build a city upon the plateau. Even a number of drow eventually settled there. Over the centuries, it grew into a […]
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DnD: Fallen Nation
Once upon a time, a cadre of wayward mercenaries – warriors lost without a kingdom – roamed around in search for adventures and a purpose. They hired themselves out to protect the common folk from a growing evil that has begun to stalk the land. Dramatis Personae Sage – Drow Rogue (Aminin) Mordred – Human Druid (Ganesan) Kaisa – Half-elf […]
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Interview at Asians Represent!
Late last month, I did an interview with Agatha Cheng and Daniel Kwan. It was for their podcast, Asians Represent! over at One Shot Podcast. The episode was released a couple of weeks ago. In the show, I talk about the benefits of using tabletop RPGs to teach students English here in Malaysia. Also, how RPGs can be indirectly used […]
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Students Comparing and Contrasting
For this entire week I had to teach the students compare and contrast essay. Additionally, the theme for the week was “Social Issues”. How should I get them to understand the structure of the essay and the framing for each body paragraph? Firstly, I got each class to list out the social issues that they knew about. (I highlighted the […]
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DnD: An Assessment of an Island Economy
Dungeons and Dragons in Class I ran Dungeons and Dragons for the first time… in a classroom. On Wednesday, I found that there was time to run a role-playing game session for the class while giving them a focused objective language wise. So I bought my D&D books. This class had never played any RPGs before, so I hoped that […]
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Combat Missions Game
During semester break week, I was assigned to the team that would be teaching a class for a contingent from the Royal Malaysian Army. For my “role play” segment of three hours, I decided to design a card game that doubles as a rudimentary roleplaying game (RPG). Two nights before, I spent up till 0200 hours designing the mechanics and […]
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First Week of Social Social in Class
The first week of the first session of the 2018/2019 academic session has begun. Do the students possess the not-very-instinctive ability to position words in an adjective phrases — specifically the positions of the noun and the adjective? I would like to happily report that this semester, the students have this ability… mostly… as these Kahoot quiz results show among […]
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Last Exam of the Semester
It is the last final exam I have to invigilate in; the last activity with students I have this semester. I will miss this batch of students. Although none of the exams tonight were English language course papers, there were a number of my English students for the semester taking them. Somehow, exam invigilation feels like a blast with these […]
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Gaming at the Geomatics Carnival 2018
Today, the Centre for International Languages was officially invited by Zainee to UiTM Arau nearby for their Geomatics Carnival 2018 exhibition. There was a hobbies exhibition section where I set up shop with tabletop RPGs with my colleague Bazli. I would talk to visitors about using RPGs as a language learning tool. Also, to run games if and when I […]
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Multicultural Night
With Ain away at Pasir Mas to take care of some things there, it was just Irfan and I at home for the weekend. After spending most of the weekend binging on The Terror, an excellent show by the way, we would have nothing else to do until the weekday rebooted itself. Thankfully, I had bought a couple of tickets […]
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SWD6: A Hot Day in Mos Espa
I brought West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game 2nd edition Revised and Expanded with me to class on Monday. There was time for me to run an hour of Star Wars RPG for my students, so I mustered together all the ones who would speak and ones who would take notes on behalf of their characters, which meant […]
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