Event

Form-Focused Instruction and Interactional Feedback in Immersion Classrooms

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005, 4:20 PM - 5:50 PM

Speaker: Professor Roy Lyster, McGill University, Canada

The Counterbalance Hypothesis predicts that pedagogical interventions that shift learners' attention away from the predominant communicative orientation of their instructional setting will be more facilitative of interlanguage restructuring than interventions that are congruent with the predominant communicative orientation (Lyster & Mori, 2005). This means that learners in meaning-oriented classrooms benefit from shifting their attentional resources toward form and momentarily away from meaning, whereas learners in form-oriented classrooms benefit from reorienting their attentional resources towards meaning in ways that avert an overemphasis on form at the expense of meaning. This talk will report on research conducted in immersion classrooms, including observational studies of interactional feedback and experimental studies of instructional interventions, illustrating the effectiveness of interventions that act as a counterbalance to the predominant communicative orientation of a given classroom setting.

Organization: The School of Education, Waseda University (Waseda University)

Cost: free

Venue: Room 407, Building 16, Waseda University (Nishi-Waseda Campus, map)

Location: Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolis, Japan

Contact Waseda University

Tetsuo Harada

Work phone: 03-5286-9754 ext. 3891