JALT Event

For people with either some experience with extensive reading or none at all, this presentation will explain its benefits as well as how to get students engaged with reading books that are appropriate for their levels so that they make reading a routine. How to start using reading circles will also be discussed and shown how they can be incorporated into speaking classes to make engaging conversations.

Charles Adamson - The Socratic Method
Pictures can be a wonderful stimulus for creating comprehensible output. Charles will first discuss some of the reasons for having a class that consists almost entirely of pairs of students talking in their own English with no correction. Then, He will very briefly describe the course that he has developed using pictures. Finally, the group will enjoy playing with one of the lessons from the course in order to understand the students' experience in these classes.
Ken Schmidt - Using Photo News Materials
The pictures and captions from Photo News (写真ニュース) displays, seen in many libraries and schools in Japan, can be a stimulating resource for communication in the language classroom. Ken will discuss a number of ideas for their use, and participants will try several activities, such as… proposing alternate scenarios to explain a photo, drawing a scene based on a partner’s description, finding photos based on captions, creating dialogs to match a scene, and speculating on why a photo was in the news.
Charles Adamson, PhD, has been teaching in Japan since 1976 and is now retired but still teaching part time. His main research efforts have been directed at teaching methodologies, and he was a member of the group that founded JALT.
Ken Schmidt teaches English at Tohoku Fukushi University. One of his main interests is designing classroom learning activities.
For more information/updates see... http://jaltsendai.terapad.com/

This joint JALT/Apple Store event will prepare teachers to use Keynote software for presentations, lessons, and other educational purposes. The first half of the event will be aimed at those who have never used this software before, while the second half will focus on more experienced Keynote users. Please note space is limited to 16 participants, so you need to contact Jane Harland via the link below to reserve a place. There are still a few openings left.
Contact Jane Harland at http://www.fukuokajalt.org/membership-chair.html

Bonus Pre-session (12:30pm-1:45pm): Join us to watch and discuss the PBS special, "Happiness 101," featuring Tal Ben-Shahar (formerly of Harvard), which introduces some of the key ideas behind "Positive Psychology," which Marc will be expanding on in his session. Feel free to bring a bento and have lunch as we watch.
Regular meeting (2pm-5pm) Positive, motivated students -- engaged in what they are studying and with each other -- learn more. How do we facilitate that positive attitude in the classroom? This activity-based session looks at ways positive psychology (TIME magazine calls it “the science of happiness”) can be combined with clear language learning goals for active, invested learning. This is more than “positive self-talk”. It is sharing with our students the concrete behaviors that happy people engage in. We’ll look at the set-point of personal affect and the tipping point of positivity.
Bio-data: Marc Helgesen is author of more than 100 professional articles, books and textbooks including the popular English Firsthand series and has led teacher development workshop on 5 continents. He is a professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University, MA Program, Tokyo. He maintains a website on this topic at http://ELTandHappiness.terapad.com.
Check the JALT Sendai website http://jaltsendai.terapad.com/ for updates/info.

The JALTCALL 2010 annual conference will be held at Kyoto Sangyo University in Kyoto, Japan from May 29 - 30, 2010. Our Keynote speaker will be Joy Egbert from Washington State University. You are invited to submit a proposal for a presentation at the conference.The submission page is now open. Proposals can be submitted until February 15, 2010. Submit early!
Refer to the conference website for more information.

In this workshop, the audience will learn how to blend Moodle into their language classes. They will get hands-on experience in setting up a course and populating it with resources and activities. The presenter will emphasise those aspects of Moodle that facilitate collaborative learning.
Peter Ruthven-Stuart has been using Moodle since 2003 as both a teacher and administrator. He is interested in constructivist and collaborative online task design.

If you teach children, then this mini-conference will be perfect for you! You will get lots of ideas from the innovative presentations as well as from the other teachers you will be sure to meet there. There will also be book displays and teaching materials for sale. Check http://jalt.org/events or http://hiroshimajalt.wordpress.com/ for details. For more information, call 082-224-3816 (JALT Hiroshima chapter).

In this workshop, the audience will learn how to blend Moodle into their language classes. They will get hands-on experience in setting up a course and populating it with resources and activities. The presenter will emphasize those aspects of Moodle that facilitate collaborative learning. By the end of this workshop, the audience should be in a position to have their own students take a constructive role in their own Moodle courses.
Peter Ruthven-Stuart has been using Moodle since 2003 as both a teacher and administrator. He is interested in constructivist and collaborative online task design.

In this presentation, Rob Waring will focus on the process of writing a graded reader. He will look at the story formation stage by identifying story plot and development, and showing key elements that should or should not be in place for a good story to be told. Then Waring will look at how a graded reader syllabus is created by investigating in detail how words are selected and grammar syllabuses selected. Following this, the presenter will show how to put it together to write motivating graded reading materials.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) represents the evolution of communicative language teaching into a more structured performance-based approach. Gone is the day when anything-goes "free conversation" passed for language teaching; instead, TBLT's emphasis on achieving clear, quantifiable, authentic goals allows students to gauge their strengths and weaknesses in meaningful ways, boosting motivation and the possibility for a sustained virtuous cycle of language learning.