A Live Radio Show With a Live Audience Project for the Classroom

By: David Kluge

I used to listen to AM radio when I was in high school in 1970, WLS in Chicago. The music that I loved listening to in high school was from the 60s and early 70s; in university from the 70s; and when I was teaching in my first job as a high school English teacher, I listened to the music of the late 70s and early 80s. So, the music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s was MY music.

Then I moved to Nagoya, Japan in 1982, and it was good, but I felt homesick. In 2000 while driving to my part-time teaching job, I started to listen to the 79.5 AM radio station, Radio-i, the station where the DJs spoke English and played 60s, 70s, and early 80s music. I felt at home. One day, while listening to Radio-i, I thought, creating a radio program such as the one I was listening to would be a great project for a class!

Situation

I taught a class called Small Group Communication in a women’s junior college in Nagoya in Central Japan from 1990 to 2011. One syllabus in 2000 was for a live radio broadcasting course. In this course, around 70 students met fifteen times once a week in 90-minute class sessions.

Project Description

The project ran for the complete 15-week semester. It involved a short introduction to the project, a few weeks to listen to a variety of radio programs, a few weeks for students in groups of around seven students to create the outline of the radio program they wanted to create, and a few weeks to practice the running of their program. Finally, in the last two classes, each group performed their radio program live in front of the whole class.

Radio Show Components

Students were required to create a radio show with the following components. Each “Corner” was a segment of the program devoted to a different topic.

1. Introduction to the Radio Show: Groups chose instrumental theme music and recorded a voice-over introducing the radio show. They did the same for each of the corners (described below) in the show. Although we used a tape recorder, if the project were implemented now, digital resources could be used for all stages of the project.
2. Music Corner: Groups chose the kind of music that they wanted to play.
3. News Corner: Groups selected a news article from a copy of the front page of a major English-language newspaper in Japan.
4. Interview Corner: Groups chose a person at the college they wanted to interview, using the interview protocol and language provided by the teacher. The interview was recorded so the audience could hear the interview even if the interviewee was not able to attend during the performance time in class.
5. Unique Corner: Groups chose an interesting topic to present and perform.

A Memorable Radio Show

The group that sticks out in my memory was the group that was inspired by a Radio-i program that I introduced to the class: “Island Style in Guam.” This group chose Hawaii as their topic and wore Hawaiian shirts for the performance. They rented a CD of traditional Hawaiian music and selected their theme music from it, including “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a song of a popular Hawaiian artist, Israel Kamakawiwo’olealled, nicknamed Bradda IZ (Brother Iz). For the News Corner, the students selected a news article from Hawaii from a copy of the major English-language newspaper in Japan. One News person did a traffic report as if they were speaking from a helicopter, complete with helicopter background sounds.

For the Interview Corner, students chose me to interview as I always wore a Hawaiian shirt to class. For the Unique Corner, students chose wave conditions for surfing as a weather report. The group did an excellent job of performing as if all of them were in Hawaii.

Evaluation

On the day of the performance, each group received a sheet of paper with the roles listed. The group filled in the roles they played. Each group’s performance was video recorded to be watched by the teacher for evaluation. While watching the video, I evaluated both each person’s contribution and the group’s whole project, so each student received an individual grade and then a small-group grade, based on how well they collaborated during the project.

Students were then asked to view the video of their own performance and comment on how they thought they individually performed and how the group performed.

Interesting Anecdote

One of the most unbelievable, serendipitous events in my long teaching career happened in the creation of the teaching material that I had to create before each lesson. As I wanted to show the students what a radio show sounded like, I took a boom box, popped in a cassette, then tuned to Radio-i and started recording my favorite program “Collin and Cocoro.”

At one point in the recording, they took phone calls from listeners. Suddenly, one of the callers gave her name, and I recognized it—the name of one of the students in my course! She explained that her college offered a course where all the students had to create and produce a radio show, and she wanted advice on something she found difficult to do. She asked Collin and Cocoro, “How do you give the main information on the singer, the song, and interesting facts about the song during the song’s musical introduction before the vocalists start singing?” Collin’s reply was the same one that I had given students: “You just have to practice, practice, and practice.” Later that same week, I played the tape in class and when students heard the name and the question, they got so excited! It was such a cool moment!

Conclusion

In writing this article, I remembered so many wonderful things from this period, almost a quarter century ago.

These are the key points of this project:

1. The students were excited to create and produce a radio show and were proud of what they accomplished.
2. The audience enjoyed watching the live show, and they applauded when the performing group did a smooth technical transition.
3. It was the first time for me to teach this type of radio program class, and it was so rewarding.

Will I teach this course again? Probably not, as students do not really listen to the radio anymore, although, to be honest, this was also true of students when I taught the course. However, digital versions of radio, such as internet streaming and digital audio, which includes webcasting, digital broadcast standards, and on-demand audio exist today. Teachers interested in adapting this project to fit a modern digital radio format can find a step-by-step overview of the entire project and handouts for students in the linked appendices.

As a final point, I was so proud of my students in that course, and this project remains a highlight in my teaching career that I remember so clearly, even now.

Appendices & Further Resources

Appendix 1: Project Steps
Appendix 2: Handout for Students Outlining the Project
Appendix 3: Handout for Students: Overview of Who’s Responsible for What
Appendix 4: Teacher’s Evaluation Sheet
Appendix 5: Handout for Students Explaining the Role Responsibilities
Link to Appendices
Video of elementary students doing radio broadcasting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiD7gaakFsQ
Video of high school students doing radio broadcasting: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=601570451258169
Video of university students doing radio broadcasting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuWzfADComY

David Kluge has been teaching English and Theatre in junior and senior high schools and universities in the US and Japan for 44 years.