JALT Event

I would say that I have not taught English but taught through English. Through this session I would like to share with the participants various merits of ENIE: English Newspaper in Education. Many kinds of activities of ENIE will be introduced.
Originally from Hokkaido, Toshihiro Yamanishi received his master’s degree from Heidelberg University. He has taught English at both public and private high schools, as well as at the tertiary level. He is currently an associate professor at Okayama University. His research areas vary from TESOL, Testing, and Lexicography to ENIE. Yamanishi is the author of several bilingual dictionaries and textbooks for Japanese students.

The presenter will briefly introduce tasks related to motivational theory based on Pintrich & De Groot, before taking participants through a receptive listening lesson focusing on task sequences and their effect on student learning/motivation. An action research project will provide evidence of how task sequences improved student motivation. Participants will discuss how teachers and educators can improve student motivation in their own teaching situations.

This workshop will explain the process of helping students research, prepare and deliver speeches in English, no matter what level of English ability they have at the beginning of the course. Students with low English ability need a lot of structure. Don't expect too much at first, give simple instructions and work with the student step by step.

Nowadays tadoku, or extensive reading, has become established in many secondary schools and institutions of higher education. Indeed, tadoku has become a kind of rage (!) at some schools and colleges. I will describe how and why Oxford Reading Tree, a reading programme for younger learners, got it all started.

Engaging our students with alternative activities sometimes takes more time than we have. One way to save time is create by following the admonition in the title. So the alternate activities we create are related to your day-to-day teaching, please bring one of the textbooks you use to the workshop.

We all use strategies when we speak: to confirm or clarify what we're saying and what we're 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 new text that teaches students how to use these strategies, will examine the whys of teaching strategies and look at the sort of strategies he argues should be taught.

Implementing the Teaching-Learning Cycle Effectively
This seminar will provide teachers with a principled and theoretically motivated support for the development of teaching writing skills, using the Teaching-Learning Cycle (Hammond, Burns, Joyce, Brosnan, Gerot, 1992). The Teaching-Learning Cycle is based on the notion of scaffolding, which draws from Vygotsky’s (1978) view that higher thinking processes, including language, arise as a consequence of human interaction. Grounded in this social perspective, the seminar will outline in practical terms how this Cycle can be used effectively in the classroom with students of all levels of English language proficiency and in all teaching contexts.
Profile
Dr Eva Bernat is an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney, and a Lecturer in TESOL at the University of New South Wales. Her research interests and publications cover metacognitive and affective learner contributions to language learning, and teacher education and development – particularly issues related to non-native speaker teachers.

Most Japanese students (and many teachers of English as well) believe that poems, short stories, and plays have little or no place in classrooms oriented to developing communicative competence in English or that literary texts are only for advanced learners. In fact, Japanese students often say that the study of both English and Japanese literary texts is boring and difficult. This unfortunate situation is probably the result of teaching literature in the wrong way: choosing extremely difficult texts, relying on word-for-word translation, and lecturing to students (often in Japanese) on literary criticism and the meaning of English texts. For EFL learners, this is surely not the way to develop either language skills or literary appreciation. Is there another way to use literature in the EFL classroom?
The basic premise of this presentation is that, yes, there is a better way. Effective literature-based lessons engage learners and capture their interest. They make learners excited about understanding how language is used to express an author’s communicative purpose. They make learners active participants in tasks that lead them to discover objective language features and arrive at their own well-supported interpretations of a text. They teach learners that their own understanding of a text is worthy of respect, if it is supported by evidence from the text. They are the springboard for creative communicative post-reading activities. They make learners want to read further literary texts on their own.
Such lesson outcomes do not happen by accident; teachers must carefully plan for them. This presentation will be firmly based on the theoretical principles behind such lessons, but it will focus most heavily on experiential learning in a workshop format. So, participants will experience an example lesson based on a simple poem that teaches specific language features as a means of understanding the poem. The main goal is that participants will come away with a sense of the practical skills to use in their own teaching of a poem. A second goal that usually is achieved is that participants will themselves gain a fresh appreciation of literature.
Bio: Dr. Patrick Rosenkjar, Ed.D. Temple University Japan, M.A. English San Francisco State University, teaches at Temple University, Japan, and has published articles on using literature and literary stylistics for EFL students and teacher trainers.

Two presentations will be given, one focused on more practical issues of how students are demotivated in language classrooms and one focused on research on how demotivators can be measured and analyzed.
Demotivators in English Language Learning
How can teachers help students to be more motivated to learn a foreign language? This is a question that many foreign language teachers ask themselves. I identify common demotivators based on the findings of several qualitative and quantitative studies of demotivation.
Questionnaire Construction and Analysis with Rasch, Factor Analysis, and Structure Equation Modeling
I examine important steps in questionnaire development and the use of Rasch measurement analysis, and structural equation modeling for confirmatory factor analysis. Examples based questionnaires of demotivators will be discussed.

This 2-hour workshop has two parts. The first hour is an opportunity to consider and discuss issues relating to motivating students in general, but particularly university students. This includes the symptoms and underlying causes of low motivation and practical solutions. The second hour outlines and exemplifies a framework for developing discipline-specific projects intended to increase motivation among non-English majors. Though this relates more to tertiary level students, it could be applied to other settings.