JALT Event

Attendees will be encouraged to share a vocabulary teaching/building idea during the workshop, to share the educational skills of the various attendees. Feel free to bring along your favorite vocabulary building activity.

Creative imagination inspired by arts in the curriculum of language classes is particularly important in the sense that it contributes to the development of essential cognitive skills, such as perception, critical analysis and aesthetic awareness. This presentation explores the benefit of integrating arts into university English classes. Several lesson plans and activities will be introduced.

There will be two parts. During the first hour, Professor Taiji HOTTA of Hiroshima University will introduce an online English-learning system which he has developed, using authentic American college lecture videos. He will explain how teachers can adapt this system to their classes.
During the second hour, EVERYBODY present is encouraged to speak for a couple of minutes about the most effective ways to learn Japanese! Professor Hotta, who has taught Japanese for many years, will lead the discussion.

This presentation will begin with a video presentation of my involvement in organizing THT in the Philippines for the last three seminars and the future plans to expand the program. I will also discuss my involvement as Conference Organizer of the Asian Youth Forum, in Manila on December 2009.
I will then proceed to give a lecture on the utilization of Contextual Learning Theory and Functional Literacy Approach in the study of English as a foreign language using powerpoint presentation. We can then have a question and answer time.

The saying goes that “There’s a book inside all of us”, but how does one go about writing a persuasive publishing proposal for an EFL textbook? For some, the process seems so intimidating, confusing or demanding that they don’t even start. This workshop very briefly outlines the publishing process as a whole then goes into the specifics of how to write a strong proposal. This will be a very ‘hands-on’ workshop with audience members forming small groups, each working through the various stages of proposal writing to produce the skeleton of a textbook proposal in a EFL-related area of interest to them (Speaking, Listening, Business English etc.). It is also hoped that this workshop will provide the impetus for those in the audience with an idea for a book to actually start writing their proposal.

Global issues headlines confront us every day. Our students, however, need a way to approach such themes that can honor their creativity and empathy, while raising their awareness of the contexts of global issues. The presenter will
introduce activities using short poems as source texts for language learning. Participants will be invited to consider ways in which poems can be approached. The presenter will also share online sources for activities adaptable for EFL classrooms. (PLEASE NOTE: The information in October's Language Teacher Chapter Events column is incorrect. The date and venue have been changed to sponsor a joint event with the Gifu Chapter.)

Part Two of a multimedia presentation on how English came to be as it is now. We will look at different influences on English, including French, Latin, Dutch, and German. We will examine the characteristics and influences of the Queen's English, Cockney, Irish and Scottish Englishes before turning to American, Australian and New Zealand varieties. Music and video clips from movies will illustrate various varieties.

Abstract: This workshop will examine the ties between culture and the use of communication strategies in L1 and will look at the extent to which communication strategies employed in a learner L1 transfer naturally to English. It will then look at the two broad categories of communication strategies, affective strategies and management strategies. Participants will be asked to consider the possibility that students from different cultural backgrounds may differ in their need to be introduced to communication strategies. The use of affective strategies may differ between speakers from different cultures and how the use of management strategies may be affected by cultural differences in the employment of politeness strategies. Finally, the workshop will examine whether or not learners of English within an Asian context benefit from the explicit teaching of communication strategies and if so how these strategies might be introduced to learners.
Biography: Alastair Graham-Marr, M. Appl. Ling., has been teaching in Japan for over 20 years. He has presented at conferences in Thailand, the UAE, the US, Taiwan, Korea, Brazil and is a frequent presenter in Japan. For the past five years he has been an instructor on the David English House / OUP Certificate in Teaching Japanese Students course. Alastair is also author of Communication Spotlight: Speaking Strategies & Listening Skills, a series of textbooks for Oral Communication classes for high-school and college level students and is a full time teacher at Tokai University in Kanagawa.

SUMMARY
The 2 presenters will introduce the Immediate Method, developed in
Japan by French teachers several years ago (see their website for more
details http://www.almalang.com/about.html) They will show how they
use it in their university language classes (although the method is
also used in J and SHS. What is "immediate" about this method? Simply,
the instructor drills the class in a small number of grammar and
lexical items that are grouped around a central theme, and, after
allowing some time for independent practice, the instructor then
"tests" students individually or in small groups by requiring them to
"immediately" use what they have learned in conversation.
The developers of this method have created textbooks to be used with
it, but it is possible to use this method with other textbooks or no
textbook. The presenters will describe how they use this method both
with and without the official textbook.

BIO - MARC
A linguist by education and personal history, Marc learnt French from
his mother, English from his father, and has taught himself other
languages since then, with varying success. He came to Japan with the
Black Ships, and is now full-time at some university in Nara he can
never remember the name of.
BIO - KORY
A musician by education and necessity, Kory decided to become an
English teacher rather than an employee of a fast food restaurant. He
has taught in English in Canada, Korea, and Japan. He is currently
working at 5 universities in Kansai. He plays in a hard rock band and
writes music with a few friends. For 5 years he played in a Funk `n'
Soul band called BumpSkool.

The presenters have been using this method for ages, at least two
years, and have used it both with the IM textbook and with other
(required) texts. They have used the method with both English majors
and with non-majors, in small (15 students) and large (50 students)
classes. They will report the successes and problems they have
encountered using this method, and ways they have adapted it.
As long as nobody asks any long questions, we can all be finished
early and go out for a drink afterwards!

This study investigates Japanese high school teachers’ (N = 139) beliefs and practices regarding communicative language teaching (CLT). Results show that CLT has not yet been widely used in Japanese high schools despite teachers’ positive beliefs about CLT. They also demonstrate that contextual factors and teachers’ perceived teaching efficacy influence the teachers’ use of CLT.