The kids only understand maybe 20-30% of what I say. But I repeat myself a lot, I draw a lot of pictures on the whiteboard, I've given them some key words ahead of time (cancer, surgery, etc.).
So I just talk. I actually teach this way a lot – providing kind of personalized "stories" or narratives. "Almost-comprehensible input" I call it. It's deliberately a little be above ability level. But this narrative was quite a bit longer than most I do – and more deeply personal, too.
Despite their limited understanding, their eyes were wide and they were utterly attentive throughout. They know the topic, they know it's REAL, they're fascinated.
I go off on a little bit of a political-leaning statement at the end, saying the kids should be proud of their country that they have better health insurance than in the US. I believe this, but it's also calculated – I often try to get my students to reflect that their country isn't as "poor" and "bad" as they like to believe. Koreans love to talk about how bad things are in their country, and I want them to recognize that they exist on a continuum where in some realms they're really quite well off.
I feel a little bit self-conscious posting this. It's not perfect, but it's very much how I tend to conduct a class, just on a more intensive subject than usual with a much longer "lecture" part. As I listen to it, I'm hyperaware of how much I use "filler" transition words like "so" and "and then." All of us do this, but stylistically this has become a bit of an affectation for me – I've "Koreanized" my sentence structure: I add transition words the way that Korean non-native speakers of English tend to add transition words. It sounds weird, to me, played back. But I have come to feel that especially for lower level students, it gives them something to "hang on to."
I kind of fudge on a few aspects of the story – I leave out the complicating infection and attribute my second surgery to my own talking too much. There are other corners cut in the narrative – it's not for a medical journal. But overall I think it's sincere to what I experienced.