JALT Event

Looking for activities to capture and keep your students' attention at the beginning, middle or end of class? If so, you won't want to miss this workshop, which will provide you with more than enough ideas and activities to reach every single one of your students!
レッスン冒頭や中盤で生徒の興味を引くアクティビティを探している先生方に最適な、生徒のニーズに応えるための多彩なアイデアとアクティビティが習得できます。

This workshop is intended for language teachers who want to familiarize themselves with Excel, a spreadsheet software package, at the beginner level. The presenter will start with a simple presentation of some very basic features of Excel as an alternative to word processing software. Participants will learn how to make settings for creating and printing documents containing a number of columns or complex tables. In the latter half of the session some useful functions and formulas will be introduced for dealing with numeric data such as students' scores on assessments and/or examinations, and we will touch on some simple calculations and graph drawing.
Dr. Takahiro Ioroi is a Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Kochi Women's University. He started his teaching career at a high school in 1986 and joined the faculty at KWU in 1994. His research activities include the theoretical study of English phonology and morphology, and more recently he has focused on the acquisition of the English word stress system by Japanese EFL learners. His interests also extend to the use of information technology in language study (Corpus Linguistics) and education (CALL). Professor Ioroi teaches EFL, English linguistics/phonetics, and teacher-training courses. He serves as Publicity Chair for East Shikoku JALT.

Toyohashi JALT will hold its annual May barbecue and picnic at the usual place, in Takashi Ryokuchi Park. Everyone is welcome - members, guests and visitors - and although barbecue will be provided, we would ask you to contribute something to eat and drink. There are stores located around the park, which lies to the south of the Aichi University campus.

There will be two parts. During the first hour, Professor Nakamura will lead a workshop-lecture dealing with how interviews are organized to draw out interesting information. This has important implications for how teachers talk with students. During the second hour, everyone present is encouraged to talk for a few minutes about effective teaching or intriguing linguistic ideas.

For our fourth meeting of the year, we welcome back for a third time a popular teacher at Kansai University, as well as a noted and prolific ELT materials writer and presenter. This time, he will have two parts to his session. In the first half, he discusses how “brain-compatible teaching” calls on us to develop teaching practices that focus less on language and more on how it is learned and remembered. In the second half, he will ask us to consider how we can reshape our teaching or learning in relation to these issues. He will then describe how he overcame similar problems in co-writing his latest course book.
For updated information on this and other meetings, please check our websites at http://jalt.org/groups/Nagasaki and http://www.kyushuelt.com/jalt/ nagasaki.html or look for our Nagasaki JALT and Friends Facebook Group, or simply sign up for our monthly e-mail newsletter at http://www.kyushuelt.com/jalt/nagamail.php3
All welcome!

The conference organizers are proud to announce the formation of a new conference in Niigata City. The International University of Japan, the new University of Niigata Prefecture and the Niigata Chapter of JALT are cooperating to bring the N.E.A.R. Language Learning Conference to Niigata City in May 2009.
Considering Niigata's position on the Japan Sea Coast and our strong connections to the other countries around the Japan Sea Rim, we are focusing the conference on Language Learning in the North East Asia Region (N.E.A.R.).
The conference will feature key note addresses by Tim Murphey and Kensaku Yoshida, displays of publishers' materials, a poster session and 30 presentations from local, national and international teachers. We are opening the floor to presenters who work with not only English, but also any of the N.E.A.R. languages - Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
The conference will be an excellent opportunity to share ideas with a diverse group of colleagues. Be sure to mark your calender for May 30, 2009.
http://www.iuj.ac.jp/language/conference/near/index.html

Aleda Krause, co-author of the kids' text series Super Tots and Super Kids, is coming to speak about teaching children. This will be our first JALT Niigata event to be focused on teaching kids so we are looking forward to meeting some new people and learning some new approaches.

We all use strategies when we speak: to confirm or clarify what we are saying and what we are hearing, to show interest, to maintain and develop conversations, to help with fluency, to compensate for language we don’t have. Alastair Graham-Marr, author of Communication Spotlight, a text that teaches students how to use these strategies, will ex-amine the whys of teaching strategies and look at the sort of strategies he argues should be taught. Alistair is a very well-known speaker in the TESOL community and his presentation is sure to be very inspiring. We will be going out for supper after the session, where you will be able to chat more with Alistair. All are welcome!

The speaker will discuss TASK based learning in CLT programs he has developed, offer suggestions for developing TLB programs that consider learners’ needs & ability, teacher experience & training, and program constraints.

Many Japanese journals require native checks for English abstracts. Are these native checks effective? The presenters describe a study that explored nursing researchers' experiences with and attitudes towards native checks.