Teaching English to Police Officers

Monday - bored

Tuesday - bored

Wednesday - taught English to the police

Thursday - bored

Friday - bored but productive

Saturday - collected stamps

Sunday - bored and stressed

Well, let's focus in on Wednesday then. I mentioned in the last blog I did for January 2026 that I was going to be teaching some English for interviewing witnesses to the Nagasaki police department. It's pretty much the main thing tht happened that wasn't painting miniatures, reading academic papers or tidying up the rest of the office so I'm going to try and focus this week's blog on that.

Anyway, the Nagasaki police department have been asking one of our teachers to teach a roughly 3 hour long lesson going into a specific skill for a few years now. I volunteered this year. It's normally a more senior member of the faculty but I begged my senpai to let me do it because I think the experience will look good on my CV and he relented.

They provided me with a roleplay activity between a foreigner who witnessed an assault, and the officer interviewing him in English. The roleplay was in Japanese and the officers taking the class would prepare translations in advance. My job was to provide them with help with terminology, gramamr and pronunciation. They were very firm that I needed to return those lesson materials at the end of the lesson.

They predicted this section would take about an hour and a half, so they wanted me to create an activity that would take up another hour and a half and focus on either slang, listening comprehension, reading comprehension or a combination of the three. I figured that I should give them some authentic language, so on Monday I made a little resource pack about the Huntingdon Train Stabbing from last year.

Now, whenever I say that, I sound like a bit of a sociopath, don't I?

Okay, let me explain, I wouldn't normally use a lesson about a real-life crime for students but this class were made up of police officers and were more familiar with this sort of language and terminology. I based the video off of one of the initial BBC News reports about the crime. This was because it included a fairly lenghty interview with an eyewitness. I felt this was useful because not only did it feed in to the main goal of the lesson, but it let me highlight some common English gap-fillers, a little bit of slang and also how English speakers will sometimes say "going" to mean "said" instead of "going somewhere".

I'm actually legitimately proud of this lesson, it's on iSL Collective if you'd like to check it out and use it for some of your higher-level classes. The content, obviously, may not be super-appropriate for all classes and the listening section can be a little complicated, but I'm overally very proud of it, the classs seemed to enjoy it too! The last activity is a reading one based off of the IELTS question where you have to match people mentioned in an article to the things they did. It could be really useful for an IELTS prep class.

I actually really enjoyed the lesson, I stressed about it a lot on Monday and Tuesday (and last week ... and the week before ... and the week before) but on the day I really, really enjoyed it! The class were engaged, and we even ran over time because everyone was having a lot of fun. They've invited me to do some conversation classes with the police department starting in April and I'm really looking forward to them!

So, that's been the highlight of my week, does it seem like a good lesson plan? Should I try and make some more "case study" style lessons about crime? Have you ever used news reports for English lessons?