Attendance is limited to 100 people.
Early registration for JALT Sendai members only till April 4: Early registration
On or after April 5, open to all—first-come-first served: (link will be posted April 5)
If you register, but later learn you can’t attend, please use the “Cancel” link in your confirmation email or let our chapter president <jaltsenpres@gmail.com>know so we can open the slot for someone else.
Speaker bio:
Scott Thornbury is a teacher and teacher educator, with over 30 years’ experience in English language teaching, and an MA from the University of Reading. He has taught and trained teachers in Egypt, UK, Spain, and in his native New Zealand. His writing credits include several award-winning books for teachers on language and methodology, as well as authoring a number of papers and book chapters on language and language teaching. He is series editor for the Cambridge Handbooks for Teachers (CUP). He is also the co-founder of the dogme ELT group.
Abstract:
Terrence Rattigan’s popular comedy French Without Tears (1936) was named after a well-known textbook of the time. The title plays on the widespread longing for a language teaching method that is painless, pleasurable, and fast. Fun, in short. But can language learning really be fun? Isn’t it about effort, concentration and the long haul? In these two back-to-back talks (All work and no play and No pain, no gain) I’ll argue the case for and against foregrounding fun as a guiding principle in methodology and course design. Just for fun, you won’t know in which order I’ll be doing the talks.
