Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn
Oct. 12-15 2012, Act City, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka
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Mobile devices such as iPads and iPhones have become very popular with teachers and students. Combined with Apple’s AppleTV, instructors can mirror the screens on their iPads with screens or TV monitors in the classroom to demonstrate examples and use reference apps websites with learners.
The presenter will introduce her unique model for teaching cultural understanding, the Culture Tree, and demonstrate how this model can serve as a guide for student deduction of cultural traits when analyzing stories. Teacher-created worksheets will be distributed and participants will have the opportunity to analyze a short folktale in small groups.
A language course that incorporates conflict resolution techniques can promote an alternative view of conflict as a potential opportunity for enhanced communication and understanding, with material that may have great power to stimulate interest and engage higher order thinking as learners and teachers use language not for its own sake but rather to communicate, negotiate, and mediate.
This presentation outlines the framework design of a tri-semester process drama project. Students chose the theme of “homelessness” as a subject that they wanted to research about. There were many possible points of access into the subject, but for the purpose of this project, the issue of homelessness was experienced through the eyes of Japanese-Americans, incarcerated in internment camps, during World War II. Through video clips, role-plays, writing-in-role, a guest speaker from Afghanistan, students traced the journey from wealth to involuntary homelessness and subsequent homelessness on return. In a similar vein to current events, the students took all the news stoically and almost every student commented on the value of family and hope for the future.
Eucharia is a PhD student of Drama and Theatre Studies under the supervision of Dr. Manfred Schewe, University College Cork, Ireland. Her field of specialty is process drama in language acquisition for the Japanese university level student in particular. She completed and a tri-semester long process drama project which focused on the social issues of bullying, emigration and homelessness while working as an English instructor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan. She currently works as an English lecturer for Sophia University, Tokyo and is adapting her previous teaching drama-based pedagogy to be used in classes with large student numbers.
Why do we remember the jingles and theme songs we heard on television ten, twenty, thirty or more years ago?
What is memory and what role does it play in language learning?
How does music and rhythm trigger long-term memory and how can we tap into that as a virtually gold mine in our classroom?
Most teachers present at some time in their careers. Yet the process of researching, planning and delivering presentations is seldom treated with the same level of care and attention to detail used when gathering / analysing the data presented. This session aims to address this by providing a detailed overview of current theory that can improve your presentations.
How can we break students out of their cycle of failure brought on by feelings of inadequacy? How can we inspire drive, encourage success and nurture personal growth? How can we take critical thinking to the next level so it deepens learning and leads to real-world action and changes in behavior? Why is this essential for language learning? Participants will explore these questions before being introduced to a variety of projects and activities designed for Active Skills For Communication but appropriate for any classroom where teachers wish to promote success, growth and active learning. Come try some.
Chuck Sandy is an ELT materials writer, professor, teacher trainer, essayist and poet who has coauthored several English Language Teaching series including Active Skills For Communication with Curtis Kelly for Cengage Learning ELT. He’s a frequent presenter at conferences around the world where he passionately speaks about the joys of engaging students in project work, the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking, and the necessity of learning / teaching practices which encourage positive personal change.
Graduate School Student Presentations
1. What are the rules for turn-taking in a conversation? In this presentation, the researcher will compare how different groups took turns. She compared a Japanese discussion of the economy, a panel discussion, a TV program discussion and a political discussion to see if there were any differences between the various groups.
2. Talking on the telephone has been a primary means of communication for many years; however, the cell phone has recently become a greater necessity in Japanese society. Because cell phones are different from non-mobile phones, there has been a change in the way phones are answered. In this presentation, the researcher will examine how university students answer their cell phones.
3. Biases specific to particular newspapers are reflected in how they report on a story. In this presentation, the researcher compared discourse from The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, both London newspapers. How the newspapers reported on war events in Afghanistan revealed their general opinion of the events and the war.
4. Communication on Facebook has become commonplace even among Japanese. Because Facebook is an American-based social networking site, the language users tend to use English. This study looked at Japanese to Japanese propositions on Facebook to see how often users opted for Japanese, how often they used English and how often they engaged in code-switching and code-mixing.
The Gunma Seminar for Teachers of Young Learners of English (Gunma Jido Eigo Shidosha Koza) was held at Maebashi Kyoai Gakuen College on November 21, 2010. It was supported by the Gunma International Education Foundation. In this presentation, I will explain the rationale of the seminar and report on the lectures and presentations. I will also present an overview of “English Activities” which will officially start at public elementary schools in April this year. After the break, the participants will be invited to discuss how we can support “English Activities” locally.
Info: Barry Keith, 0277-30-1944, keith@eng.gunma-u.ac.jp
Morijiro Shibayama, 027-263-8522, mshibaya@jcom.home.ne.jp
Hisatake Jimbo, 0274-62-0376, jimbo@waseda.jp
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