Annual Conference

JALT2018 is JALT's 44th Annual International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Exhibition. Join us for Technology in Teaching Workshops on Friday, November 23, 2018 and stay on for the main conference from Saturday, November 24 to Monday, November 26, 2018. There will be sessions (presentations, workshops, roundtables, forums) held by hundred of speakers, including plenary speaker Rebecca Oxford. The deadline for vetted submissions and SIG forums is February 12, 2018.

The 43rd Annual JALT International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Exhibition is one of the premier professional development events for language educators worldwide. It will be held at the Tsukuba International Conference Center (Epochal Tsukuba) in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.

JALT2015: 41st Annual International Conference on Language
Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Exhibition
Friday 20th to Monday 23rd November, 2015
Shizuoka Convention & Arts Center "GRANSHIP"Shizuoka City, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan
Get full-color preview brochures:1. Theme and Main Speakers2. Registration, JALT Junior, and Travel3. Invited Speakers, Film, and Getting around Shizuoka
Full conference handbook

Call for Participation – Focus on the Learner

The theme of the conference is an opportunity for participants to reflect on our current knowledge and practices as learners, as teachers of learners and as designers of environments for learning. We would like to invite you, to start (or continue) that process of reflection now to make the conference meaningful for you by pondering upon:
How are students approaching learning differently?
Where do their motivations come from?
What have you learnt as a teacher during and after each class?
What are students learning that is not being consciously taught?
How do students feel during different stages of the class or learning process?
By reflecting on learners and their learning process, we open up to new ideas, theory, research and practices. Please join us at JALT 2015 to continue this process of reflection and transformation of ourselves as learners and as teachers.
- Conference co-chairs: Kay Irie and Dexter Da Silva
学会参加のご案内：JALT 2015 ~ 学習者に焦点をあてて~
学会参加のご案内：JALT 2015 ~ 学習者に焦点をあてて~
本年度のテーマは、参加者が学習者として、学習者を指導する教員として、または、その学習環境作りに携わる者として、現在の学習者に関する知識と実践を振り返る機会を共有することにあります。学会参加をより有意義にするために、いくつかの質問を自分に投げかけることで、その振り返りのプロセスを「今」から、静岡に来る前から、初めてみませんか？
学習者たちの学習に対するアプローチにはどのような違いがありますか？
学習者たちのモチベーションはどこから来ていますか？
教員として、あなた自身、授業中、そして授業後に何を学びましたか？
生徒たちはあなたが意図したこと以外に何を学んだと思いますか？
学生たちは授業や学びのプロセスの各々の段階で何をどう感じていると思いますか？
学習者とその学びのプロセスを改めて見つめることで、新しい考え、理論、研究、そして実践を受け入れることができるのです。そしてJALT 2015で、教員として、学習者としての振り返りと自己変革 のプロセスを分かち合いましょう。
- Conference co-chairs: 入江 恵 ; デクスタ ダ シルバ
Call for Papers (Closed)
Focus on the Learner
Ultimately, language education revolves around the learner and learning. Our teaching philosophies, metaphors, and practices are based on our implicit or explicit theories of learning and learners' characteristics and needs. It is a basic principle, but is often forgotten in our busy day-to-day lives. At JALT’s 41st international conference we will take the opportunity to focus our attention on and to celebrate what we have learned and wish to learn about, with, and as learners. We welcome submissions for innovative presentations that reflect the vast possibilities within and surrounding this topic.
- Conference co-chairs: Kay Irie and Dexter Da Silva
JALT2015: 学習者に焦点をあてて
言語教育は、つきつめて言えば、学習者とその学びのためにあります。そして自覚の有無に関わらず、私たち教育者の学びや学習者に対する考え方が、その根幹となっています。日々の忙しさの中で、この基本的なことが忘れられていることも少なくありません。第4１回全国語学教育学会年次国際大会では、改めて学習者に目をむけ、私たちが今までに学習者について、そして学習者として学んだこと・学びたいことに敬意を表したいと思います。この限りない可能性を秘めたテーマに対し、皆様からのクリエティブな発表の応募をお待ちしております。
- Conference co-chairs: 入江 恵 ; デクスタ ダ シルバ

JALT2014: Conversations Across Borders
40th Annual International Conference on Language
Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Exhibition
Friday, 21 November - Monday, 24 November 2014
Tsukuba International Congress Center (Epochal Tsukuba)
Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan
*** Registration Information ***
*** Complete Conference Handbook Download ***

Conversations Across Borders
Language learning and language teaching carry us across all sorts of borders: national, cultural, disciplinary, psychological, and of course linguistic. JALT’s 40th annual conference will explore this phenomenon with its theme, “Conversations Across Borders."- Conference co-chairs: Peter Hourdequin and Diane Nagatomo
Plenary Speakers
Thomas Farrell - Professor, Brock University
Bill Harley - Grammy-award winning musician, story-teller, and author - Sponsored by Yokohama JALT
Claire Kramsch - Professor, UC Berkeley
Kimie Takahashi - Lecturer, Graduate School of English, Assumption University - Visiting Associate Professor, International Christian University. Update: JALT regrets to announce that Kimie Takahashi has had to cancel her appearance at JALT2014.
Additional Invited Plenary Speaker
Gerry Yokota – Professor, Osaka University
Featured Speakers
Andrew Boon - Sponsored by National Geographic Learning | Cengage Learning
Miles Craven - Sponsored by the Materials Writers Special Interest Group
Lesley Ito - Sponsored by Atama-ii Books
Sonthida Keyuravong - Balsamo Asian Scholar
Jeanne McCarten - Sponsored by Cambridge University Press
Leslie Turpin - Sponsored by SIT Graduate Institute
Crayton Walker - Sponsored by University of Birmingham
Special thanks to Tsukuba Tourist and Convention Association
We are pleased to announce we are able to held the conference in Tsukuba with the aid and kind assistance of the Tsukuba Tourist Convention Association.
Special Pre-conference Issue of The Language Teacher
A special non-password-protected excerpt of our publication, The Language Teacher, is available for download. This PDF includes articles from and interviews with our Plenary and Featured Speakers as a preview of their presentations.
Conference Preview and Handbook
Download this shorter PDF (10MB) for site maps, access information, hotel details, schedule overview, and much more in a handy size for your iPad or other tablet. Conference Preview PDF
Download the complete Conference Handbook for information about all presentations, speakers, events, and more.
Access from Tsukuba Express
Getting to Tsukuba
EPOCHAL Tsukuba Access
Map of Surrounding Area
Exit the Tsukuba Express. Go up the escalator at Exit A3. Turn right at a ticket office, then go up the steps. Go straight for approximately 800m.

39th Annual International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Exhibition Kobe Convention Center, Portopia, Kobe, Hyogo, Japan October 25th - 28th, 2013

Learning is a Lifelong Voyage

We start to learn even before we are born and continue learning throughout our lives. It’s an important part of the life voyage of each human being. Every one of us has learning stories—our own stories as well as the ones we contribute to as friends, partners, parents, and teachers. What are your learning stories? What are your learning memories? Bring them to Kobe in 2013 and share them with your colleagues. JALT2013 promises to be a captivating port on your lifetime learning voyage.
Registration
Registration for the conference is in Kobe International Exhibition Hall 3. Turn left after you exit the turnstiles at Shimin Hiroba. It is the large building diagonally to your left as you exit the station. Directions: http://kobe-cc.jp/english/tenji/index.html
Onsite registration will be offered at the conference site from 25 October, 4:00-7:00 pm, and throughout the remaining days of the conference. VISA and MasterCard will be accepted. Please bring your membership card to register at member rates. See the conference fees page for registration option details.
Plenary Speakers
Penny Ur (Sponsored by Cambridge University Press)
Caroline Linse (Sponsored by JALT Junior)
Kristin Sherman (Sponsored by Oxford University Press)
Keith Folse (Sponsored by National Geographic Learning | Cengage Learning)
Featured Speakers
Charles Browne (Cambridge University Press)
Christine Pearson Casanave (CUE SIG )
Crayton Walker (University of Birmingham)
Curtis Kelly (Nova Southeastern University )
Daniela Papi (GILE SIG)
David Harrington (Language Solutions Japan )
Elka Todeva (Osaka JALT/School for International Training)
Grant Trew (Oxford University Press )
Scott Thornbury (Kobe JALT/The New School)
Conference Preview
Download a 36 page full-color Conference Preview for your tablet or laptop. It includes, maps, venue information, hotels, schedule, extended abstracts for all the great plenaries and workshops, and great photos from JALT2012. [13 MB PDF, click here to download]
You can also get a head start on the conference by downloading the complete conference handbook, again in PDF format. You can find the handbook here.

38th Annual International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Exhibition
12 – 15 October, 2012
ACT City, Hamamatsu.

Download the conference handbook PDF. (Note: Due to missing fonts in the original document, there are some issues with the layout in the PDF).

Making a Difference

The theme of JALT’s 38th annual conference is “making a difference” and we hope that the conference will make a big difference in your professional life, whether you attend as a presenter, an exhibitor, an event organizer, an invited speaker, an audience member, or a guest from overseas.
We believe that teachers are people who make a difference in other people’s lives, and we invite you to join us in Hamamatsu next October to honor and celebrate those people whose lives have intersected with yours.
To get things going, as conference co-chairs we would like to share two brief memories of people who ‘made a difference’ in our respective lives. We hope that reading our stories will encourage you to share your own. You’ll notice that making a difference works both ways: sometimes we are the recipients of that change, and sometimes we are lucky enough to initiate and support it in others.
Whatever difference you feel like honoring is welcome; we want everyone to feel that they are part of the network of connections that makes JALT the uniquely rich organization that it has become over the past 4 decades.
Steven Herder remembers . . . “Joe J. Vacheresse (J.J.) made a lasting difference in my life. He was my high school principal in the late 1970s in Nova Scotia, Canada. I now realize how clearly and consistently he showed all his students the things that he believed in: the importance of cleanliness, the power of believing in people and the honor of being a school principal in so many simple ways. Firstly, our school was spotless – he believed that a clean school was important and pride in our school was worthwhile. We all bought into that idea under his leadership. Next, as our small school’s chorus conductor, J.J. taught me to believe in myself and showed me that even a scrawny little kid like me could boom like Pavarotti if I put in the effort and believed in myself. Finally, he was always accessible to students and he treated everyone individually and equally. It’s been 32 years since I graduated from Westville High School, but I still think of him regularly and I’m still in awe of the difference he made in my life.”
Deryn Verity recalls . . . “a student I had in an ESL drama class I taught many years ago. He was a very self-conscious speaker of English, and was not throwing himself with anything approaching abandon into the creative exercises we did every week. Our final performance, an evening of semi-structured improvisational games, drew near.
While the other members of the class continued to explore wild and crazy scenarios that developed spontaneously from their interactions, this guy stuck closely to familiar routines that had already worked for him. The day before the show I asked him if he would risk giving up his note cards and his written cues and engage in some real improv.
He declined, politely but firmly; he really didn’t think he was that good in English, and the last thing he wanted to do was to humiliate himself onstage... I thought, for a very short minute, about forcing the issue with him, but finally just said, ‘Well, I know you’re going to be great, whatever happens.’ The next night, he exploded with original ideas, risked falling flat in every scene, but in the end blew us all away with his courage and his fluent performance. I take very little credit for what happened onstage that night, except that I know the class had made a real difference to him. It helped him get close enough to the edge of linguistic freedom that he felt strong enough to jump. And he flew.”
We know you have your own memories and mentors to honor, and we hope you will share and celebrate them at Hamamatsu. We’re working hard on a number of ideas to allow conference goers ways to display, discuss and demonstrate how they and their students are making a difference. The sky’s the limit. The conference is our collective destination, but we hope that you’ll share some of your journey along the way.
As usual, this is announcing the Call for Presentations; please click here for the JALT2012 Call for Presentations and more detailed information. Unusually, we’re also putting out a call to everyone in JALT to spend the next 10 months before the conference continuing to make a difference—in your classes, in your community, in the lives of people you see all the time.
A final note: JALT2012 “Making a Difference” will be held in mid-October, nearly a month earlier than usual. Many deadlines will be moved up to accommodate this change. Keeping the new dates in mind and complying with our requests for earlier submission of proposals, conference registration, and equipment reservations will surely make a difference to the wonderful staff at JCO and the hard-working volunteer conference team!
Looking forward to seeing you in Hamamatsu in October,
Steven Herder and Deryn Verity
Conference Cochairs, JALT2012
 

Join us in Tokyo for JALT2011, the 37th Annual International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Exhibition. The conference theme for this year is "Teaching • Learning • Growing."
 

JALT2010
36th Annual International Conference on
Language Teaching and Learning
& Educational Materials Expo
19 – 22 November, 2010,
Aichi Industry and Labor Center, Nagoya.

Creativity: Think Outside the Box
The world is changing. We are preparing people today for jobs and contexts that do not yet exist. The key to thriving, not merely surviving into the future is creativity.
Creativity is the theme for JALT 2010. Creativity was once thought to be inspired by the gods or a gift bestowed upon humans from other worldly sources. In recent years there has been a growing acceptance that creativity is a cluster of skills, attitudes and motivation that comes about via a complex interaction of biological, psychological and social factors. Several types of creativity have been identified (Boden, 2001) including combinational creativity (the skills to produce new ideas by associating or combining old ideas in unfamiliar ways), exploratory creativity (learning rules and then exploring what the rules allow one to do), and transformational creativity (altering, adapting or breaking conceptual rules). Creativity is a habit of mind, which strives to be creative.
Teaching as an art
"Any experience that results from the interaction of an individual with his or her environment—and in which the individual manipulates and shapes that environment—can be called art. The quality of this interaction is influenced by teachers' decisions, their timing, their choice of tasks, even the use of their voices. When all this happens, when everything flows, …teaching ceases to be an action and becomes art" (Pugliese, 2005).
Creativity is part of every teacher's capacity to think on his or her feet—a kind of 'improvisational performance,' which requires the teacher to be able to develop a capacity to feel the environment and react accordingly. Creativity also allows the teacher to devise ways to solve more complex instructional problems, design new exercises, or even think of a new teaching method.
Why creativity for teachers?
Many teachers express their creativity through intellectual curiosity—the compelling desire to study and understand a situation. And it is driven, of course, by a desire to teach more effectively, to learn from our experiences, because thinking outside the box is not just a matter of coming up with completely original and spontaneous thoughts out of thin air. Rather, it is sparked by the context that individuals find themselves in: thinking outside of this contextual 'box' allows them to see it from a different angle and opens up limitless possibilities.
Creativity is also part of a life long drive for self-actualization. In other words, creativity provides the space for the development of a sense of personal and professional achievement. It reminds us that we are more than just working teachers seeking professional satisfaction: we are individuals aspiring to higher planes of achievement. Aside from all this, creativity is a huge antidote for those phases of burn out that hit us all from time to time. Creativity is fun!
So join us at JALT 2010 for something beyond the usual workshops and plenary speeches. Along with traditional presentation formats, the conference committee welcomes unusual ideas, proposals and innovations. Come on and surprise us—show the world what can happen when we think outside the box.
Steve Brown & Donna Tatsuki
JALT 2010 Conference Co-Chairs
References
Boden, M. (2001). Dimensions of creativity. Boston: MIT Press.
Pugliese, C. (2005). Teaching out-of-the-box: Creativity in the classroom. Imagine…International Alliance for Learning Newsletter, June 2005.

JALT2009
35th Annual International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Expo
The Teaching-Learning Dialogue: An Active Mirror
20 – 23 November, 2009: Granship, Shizuoka, Japan

Conference Theme
JALT's annual conference will be 35 years old in 2009, the same age that Dante was when he wrote "The Divine Comedy." Though we do not expect the conference to be infernal in any way, we do like the image that Dante used in that famous first line: "Nel mezzo di cammin di nostra vita……In the middle of our life's path….." The age of 35 is a pivotal one. It is a point at which we are old enough to look back at the past, while still looking forward to an exciting future; a measure of maturity and presence has been attained. At 35, the JALT annual conference is now an established major international event on the professional circuit, and continues to attract outstanding professionals from around Japan and from around the world.
Our theme for JALT2009, "The Teaching-Learning Dialogue: An Active Mirror," embraces the multiple perspectives of being 35. Mirrors allow us to look at a single object from many different angles. In a good teaching-learning situation, there is always another way of looking at any issue. Teachers do not work alone, and neither do students. All of us, whether we are teaching, studying, writing, editing, or training, are engaged in an active dialogue of exploration. This dialogue is often audible, as in a classroom lesson, or visible, as on a textbook page. But just as often, it is silent, as in private speech, or invisible, as in the hours of feedback and revision that go into every manuscript before publication or every presentation before delivery.
Like a dialogue, a mirror is both a reflector and a stimulus to further action. What is a mirror but a tool that clarifies the gaze of the 'other'? We use mirrors to see ourselves in close-up detail, and for increasing our ability to see others, for signaling, for review, for adding space and light to rooms. Mirrors can work like periscopes, to refract both the image and our viewpoint of it. Mirrors offer not only duplication but continuation, multiplicity towards infinity. It is our belief, as co-chairs of a conference about education, that learning and teaching function together as socially-constructed mirrors of each other, in a dialogue that is always open to expansion and increase, embracing both the tiny detail and the need for more space and light. Language teaching, like language learning, proceeds successfully only when reflection and a variety of perspectives are involved. As Dante wrote, true wisdom, "…through its own goodness gathers up its rays within nine essences, as in a mirror, itself eternally remaining one…" The dialogue is not only many-sided but stronger for it.
As you prepare to submit a proposal, think about registering, or board a train or plane to attend, think—as the poets do—about the questions that underlie the journey: a first step towards participating in the teaching-learning dialogue is to look into the active mirror yourself!
Who Is My Other?
At the conference, who will I be talking to? Who do I talk to when I teach? Who is it that I want to reach with my ideas? What do I hope to hear in return?
What Will Be Reflected?
What will I learn? What will I teach? What images will be multiplied, for me and by me?
Where Am I Going?
What will come from this dialogue? Where do I want to take my listeners? Where does this journey lead?
JALT2009 will certainly be, like previous conferences and future ones, an exciting, collaborative, many-sided forum of ideas, materials, suggestions, reflections, questions, and discussions. With your collaboration in the global, on-going dialogue of language teaching in Japan and abroad, we will open new spaces for reflection as well as action, for listening as well as speaking, for giving as well as taking. Please join us at Granship Shizuoka to continue the conversation!
Steve Cornwell
Deryn Verity
Co-Chairs, JALT2009

Shared Identities: Our Interweaving Threads
31 October – 3 November, 2008
National Olympics Memorial Youth Center
Tokyo, Japan

Our JALT2008 International Conference promises to be a very special event for language learners and educators alike. It will not only mark the 34th annual JALT conference but also the 7th joint conference of the Pan Asian Consortium (PAC) as well as the 6th Asian Youth Forum (AYF). We are pleased to be hosting PAC members from ThaiTESOL (Thailand), KOTESOL (Korea), ETA-ROC (Taiwan), FEELTA (Russian Far East), ELLTAS (Singapore), and PALT (Philippines) as well as many visiting young people from across Asia who will be participating in the Asian Youth Forum.

The conference theme, Shared Identities: Our Interweaving Threads, reflects the international focus of the conference. It also refers to the important interrelationships between learners and teachers, languages and cultures, communities and nations, as well as the connections between thought and language, interdisciplinary studies, elementary and secondary education, oral and written communication, theory and research, and much more. We are looking forward to a productive conference sharing ideas, issues, and concerns which face language learners and teachers throughout Asia today. The presentations by members of JALT, ThaiTESOL, KOTESOL, ETA-ROC, FEELTA, ELLTAS, and PALT will focus on content areas currently in the forefront of dialogues in these respective organizations. We are also pleased to have the added perspective of our future educators through the discussions and presentations of participants in the concurrent Asian Youth Forum.

Through the collaborative efforts of presenters and participants from diverse language and cultural backgrounds, everyone will benefit in a multitude of ways. This interweaving of ideas from our many unique experiences, our cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and our different teaching and learning situations will produce a spectacularly colorful tapestry of shared ideas to take back to our homes and educational institutions. May the 34th International JALT Conference also strengthen the ongoing sharing of ideas and interweaving of our lives with our colleagues and friends in PAC. We look forward to your participation.

Caroline Latham & Alan Mackenzie, JALT2008 Conference Chairs