General Meeting

Come join Nagoya JALT for their September event with Dr. Charles Browne at Nagoya Kokusai Center 4th Floor (４階) No.3 Room (第３研修室).. This presentation will briefly introduce 7 open-source, corpus-derived high frequency vocabulary word lists that the presenter helped to create for second language learners of English, and then move on to introduce a large and growing number of free, pedagogically-driven online tools, apps and resources for helping to utilize these lists for teaching, learning, assessment, materials creation as well as research and analysis. The tools include interactive flashcards, diagnostic tests, games, vocabulary learning apps, text creation tools, and more.  Most lists were developed in a modular approach so they can be efficiently mixed and matched to meet a broad range of academic needs. The presentation will also briefly review recent NGSL research, including several studies which show NGSL lists giving extremely high coverage not only for daily life but also for high stakes exams such
as Japan's high school entrance exam, the Center Test and the TOEIC test.

Dr. Browne is Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Meiji Gakuin University. He is a specialist in Vocabulary Acquisition and Extensive Reading, especially as they apply to online learning environments.

A short talk about Extensive Reading from one of our members or from the wider ER community on Sunday 25 June 19:00-19:30. The event will involve a short 20-30 minute casual talk from our PresentER, followed by around 15-20 minutes of questions and discussion.
PresentERs takes place on the last Sunday of each month online on Zoom. It is free for anyone to attend.

This month’s PresentER is Romain Jourdan-Otsuka at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, who will share about running an extensive reading program for Japanese students just getting started in French.

Abstract:

As Krashen advocated in the introduction of The Power of Reading (2004), “[Free voluntary reading] is one of the best things a second language acquirer can do to bridge the gap from the beginning level to truly advanced levels of second language proficiency.”

Teaching French in university from complete beginner to intermediate level, I started in April 2021 a home-made extensive reading program, to help my students bridge the aforementioned gap.

Research and resources on extensive reading in French language education are scarce, but I managed, through trial and error, to have my students read on average each semester 25 books or close to 9,000 words, and to gather to this day a collection of more than 200 books fitting my students various levels and interests.

In this presentation, I will showcase the most popular book types (GR, YR, non-graded) and book lengths for low to intermediate (A2-B1) level, based on two years of data and more than 4,700 books read in total, hoping it will encourage educators in similar conditions to experiment with extensive reading and enjoy its many benefits

Join the event
Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86937792669
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/groups/ersig

Also, if you are interested in sharing something about how you do extensive reading at a PresentERs meeting in the coming months, please complete this Google Form.
https://forms.gle/8i7ZwpstiuxinRdF7

You could talk about your library, how you use graded readers, you or your students' favorite books, how much your students read, your own extensive reading in another language, or anything extensive reading related. We would love to hear from people working in different contexts (language schools, eikaiwa, public schools, private schools, kindergartens, libraries, universities...) so we can learn from each other.

We will be joined by Irina Kuznetcova, Assistant Professor at Akita International University, Global Connectivity Program.

Professor Kuznetcova will give a lecture on ChatGPT and its implications in education.  

Meeting Details:

Date - June 11th    (Sun)                                     

Time- 1pm---3pm   

Venue- Yamagata-shi Tobu Community Center   

(2 blocks north of YU Kojirakawa Campus) 3F      

山形市東部公民館実習室 

Cost- Free for regular members, ￥1000 for non-members.

At our May meeting we will be joined on May the 14th by Karolin Jiptner, who teaches in Yamagata University's engineering campus at Yonezawa.

Karolin will talk on "English for Science and Engineering", and cover the structure and activities in her classes to engineers, and how she has evolved her classes to increase both student motivation, and engagement with English.

As engineering students are often thought of as those least interested in improving their English, I'm sure that this talk will not only be of interest to those who teach Engineering students, but also educators dealing with low-motivation classes of any colour.

Meeting Details:

Date & Time: 13:00 to 15:00, Sunday May 14th

Place: Yamagata-shi Tobu Community Center (山形市東部公民館講堂), 2F    (2 blocks north of YU Kojirakawa Campus) 

Parking: Free parking available on site

Cost: Free for regular members, ￥1000 for non-members - but free for students and first-timers

For our April meeting we will be joined by Kanon Yamada, and Hinako Osawa, two recent graduates of Yamagata University.

Kanon works at British Hills, and Hinako is a JHS English teacher.

They will be sharing their experience of using English in their jobs, and how university did, and did not prepare them for using English professionally.

Kanon's presentation is on How university helped me to get a job, and how it didn’t, and Hinako's presentation is on My first-year English teacher experience and how I used what I learned at YU.

The event will be held at Yamagata-shi Tobu Community Center 2F(山形市東部公民館講堂), which is 2 blocks north of YU Kojirakawa Campus. Parking is available onsite. The meeting starts at 1 pm, and will close at 3 pm.

These talks should not only be an interesting insight into the professional lives of recent English-using university graduates, but also should give ideas for recalibrating English classes for students soon to enter the workforce.

More information can be found on the Yamagata JALT website 

There is no simple formula to getting published, but in this presentation, Melodie will give some actionable advice for getting your research published in JALT. She will explain the differences between JALT’s three main publications (The Language Teacher, JALT Journal, and the Post-conference Proceedings) and give hints and tips for things that writers should and should not do to improve their chances of getting a manuscript accepted. She will also provide general information about publishing as well as introduce other publisher recommendations.

出版されるための簡単な公式はありませんが、このプレゼンテーションでは、メロディがJALTにあなたの研究を掲載するための実行可能なアドバイスをします。JALTの3つの主要出版物（The Language Teacher, JALT Journal, Post-conference Proceedings）の違いを説明し、原稿が採用される可能性を高めるために著者がすべきこと、すべきでないことのヒントとなる情報を提供します。また、出版に関する一般的な情報や、その他のお勧めの出版社も紹介する予定です。

Dr. Melodie Cook, Professor at the University of Niigata Prefecture is past JALT International Director of Membership. She has extensive experience as Associate Editor and Editor of the JALT Journal and is currently a Series Editor for Candlin & Mynard Publishing. She has published in various journals and hopes to share her experiences with current and future writers.

新潟県立大学教授メロディ・クックは、 元JALT国際会員担当理事。JALTジャーナルの副編集長および編集者として豊富な経験を持ち、現在はCandlin & Mynard Publishingのシリーズエディターを務めている。様々なジャーナルで出版しており、その経験を現在および将来のライターと共有したいと考えている。

If you are planning to join online as a one-day member, please pay the fee to the following bank account:　

Shinsei bank 
Account number : 400 1656054 (柳在熙 Jaehhee Ryu) 
Branch:本店(Head office)
Account type : 普通(Saving account)

Endorsements:

Matsuyama City; Matsuyama City Board of Education

（後援:　松山市、松山市教育委員会）

Titles & Presenters- Teaching, Coaching and Activity Design, Joshua Pako; Tweeting as a way to enhance students' output experience in ESL writing, Yukiko Koizumi
 
Abstracts-

Teaching, Coaching, and Activity Design. 
Students can spend up to 5 hours a week in an English classroom setting, whereas they can spend up to 10 hours a week participating in sport. The goal for teachers and coaches remains the same, but how can some of the principles of coaching or teaching be transferred to one another? This talk will focus on how sport-based coaching principles can be used in the classroom to improve areas such as classroom engagement, material, and resource adaptability andstrategies for language production. In addition, this talk will dive into some large-scale activities that utilize these principals in a language classroom setting.

Tweeting as a way to enhance students' output experience in ESL writing. 
The pandemic has changed many aspects of our daily lives, and we as instructors were forced to quickly learn and put into practice remote/online instruction in class. In this presentation, I will share how my own teaching practices have changed in the Covid era. Specifically, I will talk about how using a social media platform like Twitter can make a "low-stakes" journal writing assignment in online teaching. Sharing some examples and comparing with the traditional in-person way of journal assignment, I will explain how Twitter may enhance the students' output experience in writing and can motivate them to keep writing further.

Bios: Joshua is currently working as a fully registered Japanese high school teacher in Yamagata. In addition to teaching English, he is also an assistant homeroom teacher and head basketball coach for the school. Having worked as an accredited High School Japanese language teacher in Australia and working 4 years in Yamagata as an ALT, he is constantly trying to improve the standards of language learning and is deeply interested in unlocking student potential in the classroom.

Dr. Yukiko Koizumi is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Yamagata University. She has experience living, studying and teaching in London and New York, where she pursued her graduate degrees. Her research interests are in linguistics, especially psycholinguistics and English education.

Please note the change in venue: Yamagata-shi Tobu Community Center (2 blocks north of YU Kojirakawa Campus) 2F 山形市東部公民館講堂

Machine Translation and the Future of Language Learning
Keiko Sakui & Neil Cowie

Machine Translation (MT) software such as Google Translate or DeepL is ubiquitous in society, and its level is now higher than that of most language learners. As a result, teachers need information about how best to use MT in the classroom. This workshop will provide opportunities for participants to share their experiences and opinions about using MT for language learning.

Topics include an overview of MT and how it is used; sharing of teacher/student MT experiences; suggested procedures for educational use of MT.
- Key issues to explore:
- How to make the most of MT
- How MT affects language use and language learning
- How our roles as teachers might evolve

It's that time of year again for our Annual General Meeting (AGM) to report and reflect on the past year as a Chapter and discuss plans for the coming one, including chapter officer positions. Nominations for all officer positions are open to Osaka Chapter members up to and during the meeting. Officer terms are for one year, starting January 1st. If a position is contested, we'll hold an online election after the AGM.

To get a better sense of our team of officers, here is our current roster.

RSVP HERE to get the Zoom link, to give feedback, and/or to let us know whether you might be interested in serving as an officer or in some other way in the coming year. 

This is a good chance to learn more about Osaka JALT, share ideas, and meet several of our officers and regular members. We do hope to see you online at the meeting, but if you're not able to attend, you can still nominate yourself or another Osaka JALT member for an officer position, or give us feedback on the RSVP link. 

JALT2022 International Conference Four Corners Tour

Abstract: This workshop will focus on ways to foster students' (especially young learners’) critical thinking skills as part of the 21st century learning. The speaker who has extensive experience in classroom teaching and teacher education in both ESL and EFL settings will share strategies to incorporate effective questioning techniques which can be adapted for all levels of learners. She’ll also discuss critical 21st century skills that EFL teachers can incorporate in their classes.

Yilin Sun is a tenured professor (Emeritus Professor) who directed faculty development programs at the Seattle Colleges in Seattle, WA, U.S.A for the past three years before her retirement. She has served the field of TESOL for over 35 years as a classroom teacher, program leader, teacher educator, and researcher with many higher education institutions in China, Macau, Canada, and the USA. Dr. Sun is a former president of the TESOL International Association (2014-2015) and the founding president of Macau Association for Applied Linguistics (MAAL). In 2021, The English Language Specialist Program of U.S. Department of State recognized Dr. Sun as one of thirty specialists who have made a lasting impact on the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) field since 1991. Dr. Sun is also serving as Chief Editor of the series Foreign Language Teacher Education and Development: Selected Works of Renowned TESOL Experts published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Over the years, Dr Sun has given numerous keynote/plenary and featured presentations at international professional conferences. She has authored and coauthored books, book chapters, and journal articles. Her research interests include curriculum development, program assessment and evaluation, L2 reading, vocabulary learning, critical thinking, classroom-based action research, teacher education, ESP/EAP, Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT), and NNEST/bilingual/multilingual English speaking teachers in the ELT field.

Event Access:

Aomori University of Health and Welfare

 
C block, 2nd floor, room C204.