Kitakyushu JALT Meeting Reports: Archive for 1999
Our meeting reports archive contains reports of our meetings from 1999 to June 2008.
To see reports for later events, visit the reports page.
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9 January 1999
Christopher Carman, University of Occupational and Environmental Health
Teaching and Learning by Video
While we munched on popcorn at our January meeting, Christopher Carman demonstrated ten kinds of video-based activities that can be used in language classes. Most involved clips from TV shows or movies, though commercially produced language videos can also be used. Carman particularly recommended TV programs, since they are written in 10-minute scenes to fit between the commercials.
Activities included ordering about 12 lines of dialogue (predicting from a worksheet and then checking with the video), identifying the speaker of selected lines from a longer clip, and providing dialogue and/or narration for silent material--either originally with little dialogue ("Mr. Bean" is good for this) or played without sound. Multiple choice answers for this last exercise can point up some fruitful topics for discussion of cultural differences. Playing the soundtrack without the picture can provide students opportunities to predict the setting, mood, number of characters, etc.
Teachers can check comprehension or focus on language points with T/F questions, gapped dialogue, or a list of plot statements and distractors to put in order. Even fast-paced material with difficult dialogue from news reports can be utilized by providing a chart on which listeners can organize the content, provided enough supporting information appears in visual form on the screen.
Similar scenes from different parts of the same movie ("Back to the Future" works well) can be used for paired information gap activities, though having half the students leave the room for a couple of minutes can present logistical problems. Detective stories often contain scenes introducing all the suspects, which teachers can use to test students' understanding of relationships. Questions for use with commercial messages include: What's the product? Would you buy it? Why? What's the slogan? How does it differ from a Japanese commercial for the same product?
When using bilingual videos, Carman suggests avoiding comedies, where the languages often don't match. Advanced students can watch a scene in Japanese and then try to predict the English dialogue. Since most students say they want to learn English in order to enjoy foreign movies, Carman recommends a self-study technique: Replay the parts that contain expressions you particularly want to learn.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
13 February 1999
Hiromichi Tsuchiya, Christopher Carman, Margaret Orleans
Fun and Games in the Language Classroom - My Share
Hiromichi Tsuchiya demonstrated his use of tapes, puppets, and a guitar to spark students' flagging interest toward the end of the lesson. Students fill in gaps, chant, and finally sing lyrics in order to familiarize themselves with the rhythm of English, always hearing the words before they see them. Meanwhile the teacher and puppet carry on an entertaining dialogue concerning the apparent lack of grammaticality in the lyrics.
Christopher Carman explained "Yes, No, Maybe", his adaptation for EFL of a commercially produced board game. Students choose from a set of questions about courses of action in social/ethical dilemmas the one they want to ask a classmate and try to predict that classmate's answer before they hear it. Students can challenge unexpected answers, asking for explanations which often lead to short discussions.
Margaret Orleans demonstrated a number of language and logic games, stressing that once students learn the rules of the game they can prepare their own questions for the next round of the game. She also explained how to use audio/video tapes of native speakers playing the same games (or tapes of the students themselves) for consciousness-raising about discussion strategies.
Reported by Dave Pite
13 March 1999
Margaret Orleans, Malcolm Swanson, Chris Carman
First Day Activities - My Share
With the new scholastic year starting soon the My Share event focused on how to deal with the students for the first class or two. The presenters covered a variety of different approaches in which group and individual activities were demonstrated. A common impetus seems to have been the importance of creating a relaxed atmosphere in the class.
Orleans began the evening by demonstrating a game that she uses to get her high school students to loosen up and speak English from day one. In Who am I? the students have a name of a famous person stuck on their back and they must, as the name of the game implies, find out who they are by asking questions to the other people in their group. Orleans points out that to make the game go smoothly it is necessary to have a demonstration with a student at the front of the class, with the rest of the class acting as information providers. Writing the questions asked onto the board serves as a reference for the others when they are later broken up into smaller groups. The brainstorming of question topics also helps the exercise along. Although the students start off slowly they soon get into the action - in English.
Swanson sets a collaborative and learner autonomous tone to his classroom from day one. On the first day he has the students look inwards to their expectations of both themselves as students and those of the teacher. To demonstrate this he had the participants split into two groups representing "A" students and "C" students. The "A" students had to come up with attributes of what they believe an "A" student to be; the other group does the same for what they believe are the minimum requirements for a student to receive a "C" in the course. Interestingly enough the participants in the "A" group came up with what appeared to be a list of teacher generated desired qualities. The generation of expectations is then focused onto what the students expect of the teacher. Finally, the students must set goals for themselves, focusing on their weaknesses, which hopefully has them realize the responsibility for their own learning.
Carman closed the evening demonstrating a more individual approach with the students. The students start off by standing and each student must ask him a question. The answer is then followed by a question back to the student. This approach allows the teacher to get a preliminary feel for each student's abilities. It also allows the students to get to know their teacher and hopefully make them feel more open to talk to the teacher. Some classes need a slightly different approach whereby the students write three questions to ask the teacher onto a piece of paper. In this way a repetition of questions can be avoided and interaction can be had with several students. It also permits problems to be addressed without having any one student singled out.
Reported by Andrew Zitzmann
10 April 1999
Christine Lee Chinen, Fukuoka University
Using Interviewing to Teach English
After the brainstorming session that opened our April meeting, we came to the same conclusion as Christine Chinen, that interviews are a valuable activity in a language course because they call for practice of the four skills in an integrated way and involve using English outside the classroom in unpredictable situations.
In order to prepare her students for a final outside-of-class interview, Chinen first isolates such skills as making appointments by telephone, writing questions for the interview, developing follow-up questions, using language for clarification, etc. After interviewing the teacher, conducting role-play interviews, and interviewing each other, the students are ready to arrange and carry out an interview with a native or near-native speaker of English outside the classroom, on which they will report to the class.
As she showed us video clips of student reports and a summary of student positive student evaluations of the project, Chinen stressed the importance of having students interview someone with different life experiences (from another country or generation) for maximum effect, and pointed out the additional benefits of learning to see life from another perspective, acquiring a first-hand view of historical events and situations, and viewing practitioners of their future careers at work. In the past fourteen years, she has adapted the course to a variety of educational settings, and run low on possible interviewees, so she ended with a call for volunteers from the audience.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
8 May 1999
Bill Pellowe, Aso Foreign Language Travel College
Using Concordances from Small Corpora: Video Transcripts and Newspapers
Our May meeting was held in a computer lab so we could try out for ourselves the CONC concordancing freeware that Bill Pellowe was demonstrating for us. He began with a video clip from a used car lot in his neighborhood that illustrated the importance of context in determining appropriacy and with short exercises that clarified terms for talking about relationships among words, such as "paradigmatic" and "syntagmatic" before moving on to the notions of collocation and corpus.
He introduced us to asahi_1, a collection of 357 newspaper articles from two weeks' worth of the Asahi Shimbuns. Following a meticulous twenty-page illustrated handout, we installed the CONC software and used it with the asahi_1 corpus. Next we built a concordance from the transcripts for two videos: "My Neighbor Totoro" and "When Harry Met Sally", which Pellowe uses in his classes, since none of us had been industrious enough to bring along our own texts, as he had suggested. Tiling the windows to show the text, concordance, and index (arranged according to frequency) simultaneously, he demonstrated how the software helped him mine the text for pedagogical possiblities, such as identifying phrases repeated in the films.
Before we ran out of time, Pellowe quickly cited research by Willis and others on language insights that have become available only through the use of concordancing programs, pointed us towards resources (including Windows software and collections of texts on the internet) in the handout, and encouraged us to open the Readme files he had carefully prepared for our further instruction on the disks we got to take home with us.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
8 June 1999
Hiroshi Abe, Yuko Akase, Takashi Inomori, Fumiko Yamazaki
Ask a Native - Part 1
In a two-part panel discussion, seven bilingual teachers of English fielded questions presented beforehand or on the spot about their attitudes, experiences, and practices as teachers of English.
Part One, in which "Native" meant a native of Japan, featured Yamazaki, representing elementary education, Akase speaking for junior high, Inomori for senior high, and Abe for higher education and teacher training. Both public and private education were represented, as well.
In a lively give-and-take with the audience, they answered questions about their own experiences as learners and techniques for improving their English ability and about the future of English education in Japan. But as most of the audience comprised language school teachers and college-level teachers, neither of which groups sees the inside of a JTE's classroom, they dwelt mostly on methodology, course content, and institutional strictures. They talked about the pressures of entrance exams and the need for students to acquire a massive vocabulary in a short time and ended up recommending that, for a better understanding of their students, their listeners acquaint themselves with the Mombusho-approved English textbooks.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
10 July 1999
Patricia Kasamatsu, David Pite, Ian Ruxton
Ask a Native - Part 2
For Part Two of the "Ask a Native" panel discussions, "Native" was defined as "native speaker of English," and the panelists were Ruxton, who spoke for British English and tertiary education, Pite, on behalf of Canadian English and secondary education, and Kasamatsu, representing American English and teachers of children and adults.
Thirty questions had been submitted beforehand, with topics ranging from sure-fire tricks through error corrections and the influence of the speakers' own experiences as learners of Japanese to advice for learners (to which the common answer was extensive reading), but only a fraction of them could be adequately addressed in the ninety minutes available. Kasamatsu frequently pointed out that the assumptions underlying most of the questions did not apply to children as learners. Questions on relationships with Japanese colleagues led to a discussion of the sorts of discrimination foreign teachers experience in the Japanese system, most of which the Japanese members of the audience had been unaware of.
Audiences for both the June and July session left with the feeling that they had gained greater insights into the work and thinking of their counterparts and with an increased desire to collaborate more fruitfully.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
11 September 1999
Jane Hoelker
Which Learning Style Are You?
An old adage suggests that people are interested first in themselves, next in other people, then in things, and finally in ideas. This may explain why Jane Hoelker had the rapt attention of her audiences when she told the Kitakyushu and Kagoshima groups that she was going to talk about their personal learning styles. She suggested that not only teachers, but also students have different learning styles and challenged us to.....make teaching more efficient and accelerate learning by teaching to all four learning styles which could result in a 90% retention rate, while teaching one or two leads to only a 20% retention rate, according to McCarthy. Hoelker introduced Kolb's learning style theory to the Kitakyushu and Kagoshima chapters by giving the audiences a learning style test. The participants answered questions and ranked themselves in one of four learning styles: CE (Concrete Experiential), RO (Reflective Observation), AC (Abstract Conceptualization) and AE (Active Experimentation).
Next, Hoelker placed the participants into groups according to their learning style, and had them make a poster representing "the good teacher". Then, discussion results were shared with the entire audience. Consensus within each of the four style groups was reached. But, when those results were shared with the large class group, members were surprised at the different contents of the posters, and even the presentation style of the contents. Some groups prioritized accuracy, while others ranked flexibility as high on their list. The audience concluded that even though every teacher tries to be the best she or he can be, they are clearly influenced by what works for them when they learn. The natural tendency is to use activities that best suit one's own learning style, thereby unwittingly ignoring the learning styles of the students. As each learning style has its strength and its weakness, teachers want to give each a chance "to shine" in the class and also a chance to stretch in weak areas. In that way, all students can reach full development.
Reported by Dennis Woolbright
13 November 1999
Malcolm Swanson
Home-Grown Texts
Swanson began by having the audience divide itself into pro- and anti-textbook groups and brainstorm the advantages and disadvantages of commercially published textbooks. Advantages included giving students a sense of organization and accomplishment, while disadvantages included the closed nature of most activities and the sameness of layout unit after unit.
After all the points raised had been throughly debated back and forth, Swanson introduced the notion of a homemade textbook printed in a ring binder format, which allowed for spontaneity, adaptability to abilities and interests, student input in syllabus planning, inclusion of timely materials, and a ready-made clear-cut assessment resource.
The remaining time was devoted to a discussion of plagiarism and how to avoid it, collaboration, and the factors to be considered when setting a price.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
28 November 1999
David Paul
Motivating Japanese Children to be Active Learners
This presentation was held at Kitakyushu International Conference Center on November 28th. There were about thirty participants, mostly Japanese teachers of English from this region. David Paul's performances were full of fun and they were in full swing with various activities.
In order to avoid the tendency that Japanese children generally start learning English with enthusiasm and curiosity but gradually become passive learners, he introduced and examined some concrete activities. For instance, arrow-shooting game to practice basic patterns of phonetics, relay race to combine phonemes to complete new target words, guessing words with picture-cards to raise their vocabulary, fruit basket game to train them to good listeners, and so on.
On the other hand, some well-known songs going along with music were also evaluated through his activities. He sometimes changed their lyrics to his original ones in order to devise more effective use of them for the children.
It was very impressive that the way of introducing them was always with much fun and excitement. He often excited us though we're adults. It is his focus that these activities should be emphasized student initiated. Since he also showed us how to adapt those activities and songs and fully integrate teachers into a planned course, participants must have obtained significant ideas through this presentation and felt like trying to import them.
Reported by Go Yoshizawa
11 December 1999
Robert Long
Designing Interactive Gambits
Long said he was first attracted to DiPietro's notion of Strategic Interactions as a way of combating teacher boredom. He found that such interactions helped develop student confidence, fluency, linguistic accuracy and four types of pragmatic competency: orientation, socialization, problem solving, and conflict resolution. It provided context for language in order to help students develop personal grammar (the grammar they feel the need for in order to express what they want to express).
In his adaptation of the approach to his own classroom in Japan, he arranges students in long lines of pairs so they can quickly change partners to gain additional practice without numbing repetition. In step one, a student exchanges worksheets with her partner, who will then record her comments. Step two builds fluency as students respond to the same questions in shorter and shorter periods of time, ultimately without reference to notes. Step three introduces the constraints of particular settings, attitudes, and prompts. Finally, step four involves a consolidation of the student-corrected grammar found on the worksheets, formally or informally, by the teacher.
Sample gambit (step three):
Inviting someone to play tennis
I would say, "__________________________________________________."
American responds, "I think you are too good for me."
My response: "_________________________________________________."
Reported by Margaret Orleans
