Event

Ways That Work in Teaching Children

Sunday, September 16th, 2012, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Speaker: Takako Watanabe, Watanbe English School; Kazuo Watanabe, Professor of English and English language education at Nara University of Education.

This presentation will outline how a mini-immersion program has been conducted for the past 9 years with a special emphasis on the first 6 years, comparing these students' achievements with those of other students in once-a-week and twice-a-week programs. Our mini-immersion program is defined as a type of partial content based program in which several elementary school children learn English in English under the guidance of an experienced, balanced bilingual teacher. It has five interesting characteristics: it is language-conscious content teaching rather than contextualized language teaching; it is more or less based on Palmer's principles of language teaching--from primary skills to secondary skills; it is taught by an experienced, balanced bilingual; it is interactive; the class size is quite appropriate in that it is fewer than ten students. Some of the outstanding achievements of this program are as follows. Four out of six students passed Grade 2 of the Step Test, in sixth grade, and two in seventh grade. One of them passed Grade Pre-1 in 9th Grade in July of this year. She went to the Prince Takamadonomiya Trophy oratorical contest in Tokyo last year as the 1st prize winner in the local contest. Two other students are going to attend the local contest in October this year. Also, three students were chosen out of over one hundred candidates for the Fukui City Junior Ambassador programs – one last year and two this year – and they all enjoyed communication with people without much difficulty in two sister cities in the US. All of these were made possible by this program; they acquired knowledge of English sufficient to enjoy communication in English with positive attitudes.

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

Cost: JALT Members: free
Non-members: 500 yen

Venue: Yumekaze Hiroba (map)

Location: Nara City, Nara Prefecture, Japan

Contact Nara JALT

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