Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn
Oct. 12-15 2012, Act City, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka
http://jalt.org/conference
Here you can find details of upcoming events held throughout Japan by our chapters and SIGs.
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Meetings are open to all, but an admission fee is usually required. JALT membership allows for either reduced or free membership to many of the events. Click on an event title to view full details.
Note that the calendar archives of events from 2001 to November 2008 are still available online.
Discover how your classroom can be enliven by using fully interactive online course materials designed to get false beginners / pre-EAP level to write a lot and to write meaningfully.
Improving students' communicative strategies the aim of many if not most EFL teachers and researchers. This presentation includes the tools students need to interrupt, ask questions, give verbal and non-verbal signs they did or didn't understand, to ask questions for meaning, and to rephrase and describe vocabulary. Testing these skill can be a problem for many teachers.
The Lexical Portfolio: is computer-based/online corpus-based course for learning all high frequency words missing from student's vocabulary. Teachers can lead this course and interact with students while presenting a rich array of methods to learn and remember words. Features of the interactive Learning Management System (LMS) and corpus-based tools will be demonstrated
The Lexical Portfolio: is computer-based/online corpus-based course for learning all high frequency words missing from student’s vocabulary. Teachers can lead this course and interact with students while presenting a rich array of methods to learn and remember words. Features of the interactive Learning Management System (LMS) and corpus-based tools will be demonstrated.
As of 2004, all universities in Japan must submit to an external accreditation evaluation every seven years. They receive detailed written assessments which are made public. They also receive grades: pass, probation, and fail. MEXT, hopes these new requirements will induce improvements in teaching and research quality. Universities are being prodded into a greater level of transparency in regard to finances, grading policies, and even hiring practices. Harassment prevention procedures have had to be adopted. These accreditation assessments also serve to confirm both the presence of on-campus "Faculty Development" committees and the effectiveness of their various activities.
University accreditation, at least in theory, represents an unparalleled opportunity to achieve meaningful, lasting educational reform in this country. However, as is often the case with reform attempts of this scope, the reality is much more complex and, particularly with regards to EFL classes and their (often non-Japanese) instructors, troubling.
In his presentation, Bern Mulvey will provide a critical overview of the accreditation requirements, including both the associated problems and the potential opportunities they represent.
Speaker Profile:
Bern Mulvey has served as Dean at a Japanese university which was undergoing accreditation and headed an accreditation committee. He is therefore able to provide valuable first-hand insights not available elsewhere in English. He currently works at Iwate University, so this may be your only chance to hear him speak in Western Japan.
** Please contact Gerry McCrohan at Kagawa University for further details:
gershin2003@gmail.com
Many people who come to Japan to teach English have had no formal teacher training, and others of us may have forgotten many of the things we learnt. In this workshop we will discuss ways to make our teaching more effective, and how we can better support language learners in our classrooms.
Topics to be covered include:
1) EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION WITH LOW LEVEL STUDENTS
- Strategies which help avoid the need to use L1
- Helping students, and teachers write legibly - the mechanics of handwriting.
** Please bring a pen, a sharp pencil and a notebook so you can join handwriting 'experiments'
2) CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT
- Establishing a sense of community in the classroom
- Using eye contact to discipline students
- Dealing with reluctant students
3) STUDENTS WHO SLEEP
- Why do they sleep?
- Why are they reluctant to learn?
- Is sleeping a form of politeness to the teacher?
Speaker Profile:
Based in Okayama, Shirley Leane has many years experience, in Australia and Japan, conducting teacher-training workshops to experienced classroom teachers as well as those who have just started their career.
Many academic journals in Japan require "native checks" for English abstracts accompanying submissions in Japanese. However, the efficacy of such native checks has not been confirmed empirically. It has even been suggested that native checks done by English teachers on texts produced by scientists may be superficial at best, and harmful at worst, particularly in terms of lexical cohesion. The presenters, an English teacher and a Nursing instructor, will describe an ongoing study that centers on the nature and efficacy of native checks. Ten native English speakers were asked to edit an abstract produced by a Japanese nursing researcher, and the changes made were identified and categorized from a socio-cognitive perspective. Follow-up interviews were then conducted. Results reveal a variety of approaches and attitudes towards editing, suggesting that a simple native check is in fact a complicated phenomenon yielding diverse results.
Recent work on listening has attempted to shift the emphasis to alternative approaches which place more focus on the learner perspective, with instructional procedures focused on what goes on during the process of listening. We can then diagnose a specific area in need of more explicit teaching attention. This presentation will suggest practical ways to use authentic spoken texts for teaching listening. A range of visually supported authentic materials will be presented including brief streams of natural English provided by well-known actors in response to interview questions and selected dialogues from television sitcoms. After providing a brief rationale for using authentic materials, the presentation will highlight the need for increased focus on the bottom-up processing of language required for effective listening. The presentation will describe how the listening materials are used to help learners deal with the many problematic features of natural spoken language.
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