Event

Back to School - practical ideas to help start the year off right

Sunday, April 25th, 2010, 10:00 AM - 4:30 PM

Speaker: Oana Maria Cusen, Steven Herder, Rebecca King, Brian Wojtowicz, Joshua Cohen, Raymond Bolger, Harry Carley, and Jeff Crawford

The theme of this event is practical hands-on activities, tips, & techniques that may be applicable to teachers of a wide range of levels, from elementary school, junior & senior high school, and university level. We intend to make this a time for diverse teachers to come together and share ideas that will help us all get re-energized and off to a great start to the new school year.

Doors and registration opens at 12:45, presentations start soon after 1:00.

Jeff Crawford
Dictogloss
The presenter will introduce a format of dictogloss that is simple to use, takes very little preparation and can be used as a post-task consciousness-raising activity. The input is based on mistakes learners make during a main task. It can be tweaked to accommodate a variety of levels and has been used effectively at junior high school as well as academically oriented universities. It has also been used to implicitly introduce target forms in PPP style lessons.

Brian Wojtowicz
Effectively Utilizing Simple Utterances: Preparing to Step Outside the Box
This presentation will not attempt to reinvent the wheel but rather will aim to tighten the spokes and strengthen the frame by reviewing some standard communicative patterns through a unique and versatile perspective. The concept presented is adaptable for teachers of all or most professions and applicable for learners from all or most levels and ages.

Raymond Bolger - Hiroshima Prefectural Junior and Senior High School
Effective Games for Grammar Practice
The presenter will demonstrate how card games and board games can be used to practice a variety of grammar patterns. By playing the games, students can gain valuable speaking practice by repeatedly but enjoyably using selected sentence patterns.

Joshua Cohen - Kwansei Gakuin University
Five Principles for Building Oral Reading Fluency
Successful approaches to improving reading fluency in L1 learners suggest a set of principles which language teachers may find helpful in planning classroom activities for reading fluency development. This workshop will propose five fluency-building principles that can be applied in any L2 or foreign language classroom and suggest multiple ways of implementing each principle.

Harry Carley - Matsuyama University
The Eigo Note and...
For the school year 2009-2010, all 33 elementary schools within Imabari City, Ehime Prefecture, began utilizing the Eigo Note text. The presenter will offer ideas and tips on what additional material was added to each lesson to make them more meaningful and educationally enhanced for the 5th and 6th graders.

Steven Herder (Doshisha Women's College) and Rebecca King (Seibo Jogakuin)
Extensive reading ideas both inside and outside the box
Since 2007 we have been using our 1440-book library of graded readers in our junior and senior high school English classes. Simply relying on reading the books for fluency practice and merely doing book reports doesn't sustain younger student interest and it isn't the most effective way to get the most out of this giant learning opportunity. Therefore, in addition to published graded reader activity ideas (Bamford & Day, 2004), we have experimented in a number of ways, using graded readers both creatively and traditionally. This session will begin with a very brief introduction of pedagogical reasons for doing ER and an equally short outline of our program. We will then share up to a dozen or so ideas of things we've done and finish with some reflections on what works and doesn't work for us. We hope to encourage others to share their experiences and spark some new ideas for all participants.

Oana Maria Cusen - Ritsumeikan University
Blending teaching content with project-based teaching: A classroom project
Combining project-based teaching and content-based teaching allows teachers to shift their roles in the classroom from controllers to facilitators of learning. This presentation will show, through the means of a classroom project, how the teacher can facilitate students' learning by giving them the responsibility for their own projects, as well as the opportunity to use English in a natural way, to accomplish various academic tasks. The project, along with students' work and their feedback at the end of the project will be introduced in detail, along with some ideas for using similar projects in different classrooms.

Dinner and drinks will follow the presentations at the nearby Indian restaurant on the fifth floor of the O-CAT building.

Organization: Osaka Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (Osaka JALT)

Cost: JALT Members: free
Non-members: 1,000 yen (500 yen for students)

Venue: Room 4, Namba Shimin Gakushu Center (Osaka City Municipal Lifelong Learning Center - Namba Branch), O-CAT bldg. 4F, 06-6643-7010

Location: Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture, Japan

Contact Osaka JALT

Bob Sanderson