Kitakyushu JALT Meeting Reports: Archive for 2005
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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12 February 2005
Ronald Schmidt-Fajlik
Multiple Intelligences Theory and Its Application to the Second Language Classroom
As a warm-up to the topic, we first formed pairs to brainstorm what we thought intelligence was. Schmidt-Fajlik then gave us some expert definitions from the literature since the eighteenth century, which have evolved from measurement based on the shape of a person's head to the IQ test.
He followed this with an introduction of Howard Gardner's theory of eight intelligences: linguistic-verbal, logical/mathematical, visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, musical/rhythmic, naturalist, interpersonal and intrapersonal, all of which are used in combinations.
By matching definitions, drawing our own representative symbols and inventing gestures for each intelligence, we expanded our awareness of them, then completed questionnaires to discover our personal strengths and weaknesses among them preparatory to forming larger groups and adapting lesson plans to incorporate as many intelligences as possible into classes.
The necessary time spent upon introduction and theory of what was for many a new concept did leave some of us wanting more practical ideas for classroom applications of multiple intelligences. These may well come from further investigation of this important topic, inspired by Schmidt-Fajlik's thorough overview.
Reported by Dave Pite
12 March 2005
Hiroshi Otani, Kitakyushu National College of Technology
What CALL Can Do in EFL Environments
Otani began his presentation by relating his teaching career, a series of moves that he characterized as taking him to schools whose students had lower and lower levels of ability, or—more positively—equipping him to deal with an ever-widening range of students. In an attempt to provide motivation for five-year college of technology students, who do not need to pass a university entrance exam, he joined a team who developed an online vocabulary program. They began by compiling their own list of 3300 words (partly through concordancing British science textbooks), and then created learning and testing activities.
After letting those of us who had brought along laptops play with his site, Otani showed us other sites developed for Japanese students, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses. He believes two advantages to computer use are the endless repetition and instant feedback it provides. He has also found that developing online materials has made him a better classroom teacher because of the attention he now pays to ordering of activities and clearness of instructions. Referring to Vygotsky's theories, Otani said he believes CALL helps create the mechanical and meaningful repetition and practice that are necessary to push learning into acquisition in an EFL setting.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
9 April 2005
Hiroshi Matsusaka
Ambiguity, Neutralization and Telling the Truth: A phonetic approach to the teaching of EFL listening comprehension
Hiroshi Matsusaka feels that students often don't know the sounds of English or, more importantly, the sound changes. They get the erroneous impression that sounds are strung together like beads on a necklace, with little or no relationship with those preceding or following. Teachers tend to only explain that a sound has changed—without explaining how, or why.
A handout was distributed listing some common examples of sound change, with explanations of how they make listening comprehension difficult because of 'phonetic ambiguity' that occurs as a result. We listened to recordings of spoken English to try to identify problem areas for students. Highlighting the possibility of neutralization, one of the recordings had been deliberately tampered with to trick the audience into believing that a nonexistent sound was actually there. In many instances of spoken language, neighboring phonemes will create a semblance of an extra one between them. Language instructors should acknowledge this, "tell the truth", to avoid misunderstanding.
The presentation finished with some examples of training students to do predictive listening—anticipating the grammar or logic/discourse that will come next in a listening passage. Questions were then invited, which instigated some intense discussion. Matsusaka believes it is through a greater awareness of and empathy with student phonemic misconceptions that teachers can allay a great deal of confusion. In this very informative and entertaining lecture, he pointed out some ways for us to begin doing that.
Reported by Dave Pite
14 May 2005
various
My Share
In April, Hiroshi Matsusaka of Waseda University visited our chapter to present his phonetic approach to the teaching of EFL listening comprehension. We followed this up with a My Share session the following month on "Listening Activities for the High School Classroom."
Daniel Droukis presented an activity he calls "Topic Quest" in which students work in groups to make one question on each topic from a list he provides. One student then goes to the teacher and asks the question. If it is phrased correctly, an answer is given which the student dictates to the group. He then follows this up with a reverse activity called "Did You Get That." One student from each group is given a question from the teacher which is dictated to the group. The group then decides on an appropriate response which is reported to the teacher.
Takashi Inomori reported on the effects of the addition of a listening component to the Centre Test from 2006, and his high school's response to it. They use a text called Uplift Eigo Listening Practice (Zettokai). The activities in the text involve using listening, dictation, and translation skills, and follow a format similar to Matsusaka's approach of repetition and a focus on structure.
Kana Higashijima discussed a daily study group she ran in her high school which used NHK's early morning English radio lessons for material. Then Raymond Stubbe introduced an activity to teach destress using one of Carolyn Graham's Jazz Chants.
Following that, Peg Orleans showed a series of Internet-based listening resources: Ello! English Language Listening Online; Voice of America Special English: English made easier to understand; Student Times Online; Pulse of the Planet (National Geographic); BBC World Service: Learning English; National Public Radio archives; Real Audio Jukebox (all can be located on Google).
Lynda Batty finished the evening by demonstrating the THRASS system of phonetic education, which uses rap-like chants to teach all the different vowel and consonant sounds. The evening finished with a chapter officers meeting.
Reported by Malcolm Swanson
25 June 2005
Steve Brown, Konan Women's University
A Drama Approach - Engaging Learners in their own learning
Steve Brown has a degree and a long interest in Drama in Education. He sees it as a useful tool to achieve his aim of learner autonomy, getting students to take more control of their own learning-- and shaking off some inhibitions in the process. "Learning by doing" is what he sees as a drama approach, allowing students to bring something of themselves to the learning situation and think about how people communicate, offsetting teacher-centeredness and telling students how to act.
As a warm-up, we role-played a situation in pairs, some performing while others tried to guess the relationship portrayed, effectively demonstrating how quickly inhibitions can be dropped and new roles taken on, just for fun. Brown then described a project his students are currently working on and showed some of it on video, followed by some discussion of communicative techniques exemplified in drama and ways he uses peer evaluation and self-reviews
Steve Brown is currently serving as the national JALT president so we took the opportunity to finish the evening with a question and answer session regarding the present and future direction of our organization.
Reported by Dave Pite
9 July 2005
Robert Long
Helping Exchange Students Respond to Intercultural Conflicts and Dilemmas
Robert Long has been working with overseas exchange programs for many years; something he finds lacking with them is adequate preparation for awkward, difficult or dangerous situations arising from common misunderstanding. Standard textbooks generally provide basic language patterns appropriate for the most common linguistic situations that may be encountered in the target culture but fail to address some of the cross-cultural sociological challenges. Students from places where deference to the perceived group values always takes precedence over individuals', for example, may find themselves in undesirable situations as a result of unwitting acquiescence. They need to learn the kind of language to clearly state their intentions and desires, to stand their ground, persuade others to their way of thinking.
Long's students are provided with "worse case scenarios" that they have to deal with using appropriate language. He showed us eighteen examples of the many discourse completion tasks he had made-- based on past experiences in the exchange program-- where his students had written their responses to the given situations, and then we tried to construct some tasks ourselves. We read dialogues selected from published EFL textbooks and spiced them up a little, imagining situational contexts, speech acts and emotional/physical attributes. Following this, pairs performed the dialogues for the rest of the group. It was an entertaining and interesting way to think about mining standard material for more realistic language practice.
Reported by Dave Pite
24 July 2005
Chris Hunt; Linda Wittig
All Together Now; Laugh and Learn
Explaining that he made the switch from competitive (Mutually Exclusive Goal Attainment) to non-competitive games and activities to avoid putting a certain student in the role of the constant loser among a group of friends, Hunt showed how letting learners set their own goals and rules can create an atmosphere that emphasizes learning and participating. He showed how activities can be structured so that students are required to comprehend larger and larger chunks of language. Speaking only English with a group of 20 students he has never met before and who come with very little English, he is able to engage them in over an hour's activities. Hunt's two main tools are a timer (to set the duration of an activity, to regulate turns, and even to cause an effect within a game) and student feedback. The first four English words he teaches any student are adjectives with which to evaluate their levels of learning and fun. He recommended books by Alfie Kahn and Spencer Kagan.
Five minutes into Wittig's presentation, everyone agreed that 100-yen shops and pet stores are the best sources of educational materials. Using her own interests in clowning and juggling, she showed how each teacher's skills in any area, along with lots of colorful objects, can be used to encourage students to produce meaningful English. In fact, Wittig sometimes finds herself stopped on the street by students demanding a chance to sing a song or tell a story they have learned in class. There will probably be lots of handkerchief mice and crashing-lightbulb chew toys appearing in Kyushu classrooms come September.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
11 September 2005
Raymond Stubbe
Examining Friends: Using Genre Analysis to Analyze TV Scripts
Raymond Stubbe took us through a step-by-step introduction to a few of the research and teaching tools available at The Compleat Lexical Tutor, www.lextutor.ca. We started by breaking some of Aesop's fables into their moves. Then all the titles, all the introductions, etc., were collected into separate documents and analyzed in terms of their vocabulary range and profiles. We built concordances and extracted phrases in order to look at vocabulary that might need to be pre-taught and grammatical patterns that might be exploited. Finally, we constructed both on-line and paper cloze exercises.
Stubbe had separated the dialogue for each character in an episode of Friends, stripping the stage directions and character names from an online script , http://www.friendscafe.org/scripts.shtml. He has found this a useful way for students to examine language features beforehand, without spoiling the plot for them. Using the same analytical programs, we attempted to learn something about each character and to isolate useful teaching points before watching a DVD version of the episode (while enjoying our usual popcorn). Because of the materials Stubbe had prepared, those members of his audience who had brought along laptops had a hands-on experience with the resources of The Compleat Lexical Tutor.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
13 October 2005
Clyde Fowle
Talking Texts
Clyde Fowle, a Thailand-based teacher trainer, underlined the need for students to be given opportunities to speak. However, discussions need to be well structured, giving students plenty of support in terms of task clarity and vocabulary. He suggested that both reading and listening texts can offer that kind of scaffolding as well as stimulating student memories and imagination to provide ideas for the ensuing discussion.
Teachers traditionally do well in planning lead-ins to texts, but are often poor at designing follow-up activities. Speaking tasks in which students can recycle vocabulary, grammar and ideas while localizing the topic of the text seem to be the ideal solution. Fowle feels that for student progress, it is vital to repeat the task—with other students or in a slightly different form.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
15 October 2005
Dr. Beniko Mason, Dr. Tom Bradley, Ms. Yoko Matsuo and others
Sharing Our Stories
Kitakyushu JALT's contribution to "International Week" was organized around the theme of Sharing Our Stories. It started with a keynote lecture by Dr. Beniko Mason entitled "Vocabulary Acquisition through Storytelling"
Dr. Mason showed us how she facilitates the acquisition of vocabulary by allowing her junior college students to naturally experience the language through changing tones and inflection accompanied by gestures in storytelling—as opposed to 'list learning'; the still widely practiced, conscious memorization of words—and has more fun doing it. Based on Krashen's notion of 'comprehensible input', she told a children's folk tale, imaginatively explaining each vocabulary item as it came up. Distributed wordlists and research data helped the audience see how many new words were being learned and how effectively her students retained the words over time.
Our local novelist, Tom Bradley, was up next with a reading from one of his short stories, a lighthearted look at Russo-Nippon relations. A group of children then performed their own dramatization of a German folk tale, directed by Yoko Matsuo of the Kitakyushu-based troupe Uzume Gekijo. This was followed by recitations and speeches by prize-winning students from local junior and senior high schools and universities.
Reported by Dave Pite
12 November 2005
Ronan Brown
Extensive Reading Activities
Ronan Brown led us through a variety of group activities he has designed to help EFL students access English books to maximum advantage. Targeting high-level learners (some of us native speakers were struggling to follow) the focus was upon brainstorming, with a variety of worksheets for participants to fill in together, enough background and related information to create a context that could help ground novice readers of English and orient them to the supralinguistic aspects of the texts they read. From this point, the students should be equipped to develop their language further in reading, writing and speaking skills classes.
While Brown's focus was on specifically implementing an effective extensive-reading program to be integrated into the overall language curriculum, most of the activities might also be usefully adapted to support reading as a supplementary activity as well as other kinds of language investigation.
After this stimulating lecture and announcements of imminent chapter activities, masses of sample textbooks were distributed for our perusal.
Reported by Dave Pite
10 December 2005
Malcolm Swanson and Nigel Stott
Managing Students' On-line Learning with MOODLE
Malcolm Swanson introduced MOODLE, which is a Course Management System—along with similar programs such as WebCT, Blackboard, and Desire2Learn. Advantages of MOODLE over others are that it is free, and, as an open source offering, it is in a state of constant development as well as being reasonably easily installed and configured. It is very adaptable and extensible to different needs. For example, the Hot Potatoes program works well with it.
On-line courses such as self-checking quizzes, assignments, discussion forums, writing journals, surveys, lessons, resources, etc., can be made with the MOODLE system. It is being used by educators in a wide variety of institutions around the world, not just in language teaching but in all subjects for all ages, for distance learning as well as classrooms.
Nigel Stott then showed how listening and reading comprehension sites can be assigned for homework and checked on-line, freeing class time for speaking activities. His students read and comment on four other student essays on-line as well as submitting work for the instructor to correct and mark. By seeing various examples of students' work, we were able to get an idea of what was possible with this system.
Some of the audience had brought laptops and Malcolm and Nigel provided several more, to convert our meeting room into a big cubicle and let us MOODLE together for the second half of the meeting.
Reported by Dave Pite
