Annual Conference

38th Annual International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Exhibition
12 – 15 October, 2012
ACT City, Hamamatsu.

Download the conference handbook PDF. (Note: Due to missing fonts in the original document, there are some issues with the layout in the PDF).

Making a Difference

The theme of JALT’s 38th annual conference is “making a difference” and we hope that the conference will make a big difference in your professional life, whether you attend as a presenter, an exhibitor, an event organizer, an invited speaker, an audience member, or a guest from overseas.
We believe that teachers are people who make a difference in other people’s lives, and we invite you to join us in Hamamatsu next October to honor and celebrate those people whose lives have intersected with yours.
To get things going, as conference co-chairs we would like to share two brief memories of people who ‘made a difference’ in our respective lives. We hope that reading our stories will encourage you to share your own. You’ll notice that making a difference works both ways: sometimes we are the recipients of that change, and sometimes we are lucky enough to initiate and support it in others.
Whatever difference you feel like honoring is welcome; we want everyone to feel that they are part of the network of connections that makes JALT the uniquely rich organization that it has become over the past 4 decades.
Steven Herder remembers . . . “Joe J. Vacheresse (J.J.) made a lasting difference in my life. He was my high school principal in the late 1970s in Nova Scotia, Canada. I now realize how clearly and consistently he showed all his students the things that he believed in: the importance of cleanliness, the power of believing in people and the honor of being a school principal in so many simple ways. Firstly, our school was spotless – he believed that a clean school was important and pride in our school was worthwhile. We all bought into that idea under his leadership. Next, as our small school’s chorus conductor, J.J. taught me to believe in myself and showed me that even a scrawny little kid like me could boom like Pavarotti if I put in the effort and believed in myself. Finally, he was always accessible to students and he treated everyone individually and equally. It’s been 32 years since I graduated from Westville High School, but I still think of him regularly and I’m still in awe of the difference he made in my life.”
Deryn Verity recalls . . . “a student I had in an ESL drama class I taught many years ago. He was a very self-conscious speaker of English, and was not throwing himself with anything approaching abandon into the creative exercises we did every week. Our final performance, an evening of semi-structured improvisational games, drew near.
While the other members of the class continued to explore wild and crazy scenarios that developed spontaneously from their interactions, this guy stuck closely to familiar routines that had already worked for him. The day before the show I asked him if he would risk giving up his note cards and his written cues and engage in some real improv.
He declined, politely but firmly; he really didn’t think he was that good in English, and the last thing he wanted to do was to humiliate himself onstage... I thought, for a very short minute, about forcing the issue with him, but finally just said, ‘Well, I know you’re going to be great, whatever happens.’ The next night, he exploded with original ideas, risked falling flat in every scene, but in the end blew us all away with his courage and his fluent performance. I take very little credit for what happened onstage that night, except that I know the class had made a real difference to him. It helped him get close enough to the edge of linguistic freedom that he felt strong enough to jump. And he flew.”
We know you have your own memories and mentors to honor, and we hope you will share and celebrate them at Hamamatsu. We’re working hard on a number of ideas to allow conference goers ways to display, discuss and demonstrate how they and their students are making a difference. The sky’s the limit. The conference is our collective destination, but we hope that you’ll share some of your journey along the way.
As usual, this is announcing the Call for Presentations; please click here for the JALT2012 Call for Presentations and more detailed information. Unusually, we’re also putting out a call to everyone in JALT to spend the next 10 months before the conference continuing to make a difference—in your classes, in your community, in the lives of people you see all the time.
A final note: JALT2012 “Making a Difference” will be held in mid-October, nearly a month earlier than usual. Many deadlines will be moved up to accommodate this change. Keeping the new dates in mind and complying with our requests for earlier submission of proposals, conference registration, and equipment reservations will surely make a difference to the wonderful staff at JCO and the hard-working volunteer conference team!
Looking forward to seeing you in Hamamatsu in October,
Steven Herder and Deryn Verity
Conference Cochairs, JALT2012
 

Join us in Tokyo for JALT2011, the 37th Annual International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Exhibition. The conference theme for this year is "Teaching • Learning • Growing."
 

JALT2010
36th Annual International Conference on
Language Teaching and Learning
& Educational Materials Expo
19 – 22 November, 2010,
Aichi Industry and Labor Center, Nagoya.

Creativity: Think Outside the Box
The world is changing. We are preparing people today for jobs and contexts that do not yet exist. The key to thriving, not merely surviving into the future is creativity.
Creativity is the theme for JALT 2010. Creativity was once thought to be inspired by the gods or a gift bestowed upon humans from other worldly sources. In recent years there has been a growing acceptance that creativity is a cluster of skills, attitudes and motivation that comes about via a complex interaction of biological, psychological and social factors. Several types of creativity have been identified (Boden, 2001) including combinational creativity (the skills to produce new ideas by associating or combining old ideas in unfamiliar ways), exploratory creativity (learning rules and then exploring what the rules allow one to do), and transformational creativity (altering, adapting or breaking conceptual rules). Creativity is a habit of mind, which strives to be creative.
Teaching as an art
"Any experience that results from the interaction of an individual with his or her environment—and in which the individual manipulates and shapes that environment—can be called art. The quality of this interaction is influenced by teachers' decisions, their timing, their choice of tasks, even the use of their voices. When all this happens, when everything flows, …teaching ceases to be an action and becomes art" (Pugliese, 2005).
Creativity is part of every teacher's capacity to think on his or her feet—a kind of 'improvisational performance,' which requires the teacher to be able to develop a capacity to feel the environment and react accordingly. Creativity also allows the teacher to devise ways to solve more complex instructional problems, design new exercises, or even think of a new teaching method.
Why creativity for teachers?
Many teachers express their creativity through intellectual curiosity—the compelling desire to study and understand a situation. And it is driven, of course, by a desire to teach more effectively, to learn from our experiences, because thinking outside the box is not just a matter of coming up with completely original and spontaneous thoughts out of thin air. Rather, it is sparked by the context that individuals find themselves in: thinking outside of this contextual 'box' allows them to see it from a different angle and opens up limitless possibilities.
Creativity is also part of a life long drive for self-actualization. In other words, creativity provides the space for the development of a sense of personal and professional achievement. It reminds us that we are more than just working teachers seeking professional satisfaction: we are individuals aspiring to higher planes of achievement. Aside from all this, creativity is a huge antidote for those phases of burn out that hit us all from time to time. Creativity is fun!
So join us at JALT 2010 for something beyond the usual workshops and plenary speeches. Along with traditional presentation formats, the conference committee welcomes unusual ideas, proposals and innovations. Come on and surprise us—show the world what can happen when we think outside the box.
Steve Brown & Donna Tatsuki
JALT 2010 Conference Co-Chairs
References
Boden, M. (2001). Dimensions of creativity. Boston: MIT Press.
Pugliese, C. (2005). Teaching out-of-the-box: Creativity in the classroom. Imagine…International Alliance for Learning Newsletter, June 2005.

JALT2009
35th Annual International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning & Educational Materials Expo
The Teaching-Learning Dialogue: An Active Mirror
20 – 23 November, 2009: Granship, Shizuoka, Japan

Conference Theme
JALT's annual conference will be 35 years old in 2009, the same age that Dante was when he wrote "The Divine Comedy." Though we do not expect the conference to be infernal in any way, we do like the image that Dante used in that famous first line: "Nel mezzo di cammin di nostra vita……In the middle of our life's path….." The age of 35 is a pivotal one. It is a point at which we are old enough to look back at the past, while still looking forward to an exciting future; a measure of maturity and presence has been attained. At 35, the JALT annual conference is now an established major international event on the professional circuit, and continues to attract outstanding professionals from around Japan and from around the world.
Our theme for JALT2009, "The Teaching-Learning Dialogue: An Active Mirror," embraces the multiple perspectives of being 35. Mirrors allow us to look at a single object from many different angles. In a good teaching-learning situation, there is always another way of looking at any issue. Teachers do not work alone, and neither do students. All of us, whether we are teaching, studying, writing, editing, or training, are engaged in an active dialogue of exploration. This dialogue is often audible, as in a classroom lesson, or visible, as on a textbook page. But just as often, it is silent, as in private speech, or invisible, as in the hours of feedback and revision that go into every manuscript before publication or every presentation before delivery.
Like a dialogue, a mirror is both a reflector and a stimulus to further action. What is a mirror but a tool that clarifies the gaze of the 'other'? We use mirrors to see ourselves in close-up detail, and for increasing our ability to see others, for signaling, for review, for adding space and light to rooms. Mirrors can work like periscopes, to refract both the image and our viewpoint of it. Mirrors offer not only duplication but continuation, multiplicity towards infinity. It is our belief, as co-chairs of a conference about education, that learning and teaching function together as socially-constructed mirrors of each other, in a dialogue that is always open to expansion and increase, embracing both the tiny detail and the need for more space and light. Language teaching, like language learning, proceeds successfully only when reflection and a variety of perspectives are involved. As Dante wrote, true wisdom, "…through its own goodness gathers up its rays within nine essences, as in a mirror, itself eternally remaining one…" The dialogue is not only many-sided but stronger for it.
As you prepare to submit a proposal, think about registering, or board a train or plane to attend, think—as the poets do—about the questions that underlie the journey: a first step towards participating in the teaching-learning dialogue is to look into the active mirror yourself!
Who Is My Other?
At the conference, who will I be talking to? Who do I talk to when I teach? Who is it that I want to reach with my ideas? What do I hope to hear in return?
What Will Be Reflected?
What will I learn? What will I teach? What images will be multiplied, for me and by me?
Where Am I Going?
What will come from this dialogue? Where do I want to take my listeners? Where does this journey lead?
JALT2009 will certainly be, like previous conferences and future ones, an exciting, collaborative, many-sided forum of ideas, materials, suggestions, reflections, questions, and discussions. With your collaboration in the global, on-going dialogue of language teaching in Japan and abroad, we will open new spaces for reflection as well as action, for listening as well as speaking, for giving as well as taking. Please join us at Granship Shizuoka to continue the conversation!
Steve Cornwell
Deryn Verity
Co-Chairs, JALT2009

Shared Identities: Our Interweaving Threads
31 October – 3 November, 2008
National Olympics Memorial Youth Center
Tokyo, Japan

Our JALT2008 International Conference promises to be a very special event for language learners and educators alike. It will not only mark the 34th annual JALT conference but also the 7th joint conference of the Pan Asian Consortium (PAC) as well as the 6th Asian Youth Forum (AYF). We are pleased to be hosting PAC members from ThaiTESOL (Thailand), KOTESOL (Korea), ETA-ROC (Taiwan), FEELTA (Russian Far East), ELLTAS (Singapore), and PALT (Philippines) as well as many visiting young people from across Asia who will be participating in the Asian Youth Forum.

The conference theme, Shared Identities: Our Interweaving Threads, reflects the international focus of the conference. It also refers to the important interrelationships between learners and teachers, languages and cultures, communities and nations, as well as the connections between thought and language, interdisciplinary studies, elementary and secondary education, oral and written communication, theory and research, and much more. We are looking forward to a productive conference sharing ideas, issues, and concerns which face language learners and teachers throughout Asia today. The presentations by members of JALT, ThaiTESOL, KOTESOL, ETA-ROC, FEELTA, ELLTAS, and PALT will focus on content areas currently in the forefront of dialogues in these respective organizations. We are also pleased to have the added perspective of our future educators through the discussions and presentations of participants in the concurrent Asian Youth Forum.

Through the collaborative efforts of presenters and participants from diverse language and cultural backgrounds, everyone will benefit in a multitude of ways. This interweaving of ideas from our many unique experiences, our cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and our different teaching and learning situations will produce a spectacularly colorful tapestry of shared ideas to take back to our homes and educational institutions. May the 34th International JALT Conference also strengthen the ongoing sharing of ideas and interweaving of our lives with our colleagues and friends in PAC. We look forward to your participation.

Caroline Latham & Alan Mackenzie, JALT2008 Conference Chairs