Event
HomeALT Agora 4
Thursday, May 20th, 2021, 7:30 PM - 8:45 PM
Speaker: Peter J. Collins, Daniel R. Pearce, Cheyenne Weaver, Chelanna White, Kuniaki Sakai
Join us for the fourth ALT Agorà, the series of monthly interactive webinars designed with both new and experienced ALTs in mind. Come watch May's spotlight speaker and choose your themed breakout room to engage with other ALTs in a professional and friendly environment. As always, the event is free and open to all, even for those ALTs and JETs still stuck outside of Japan because of COVID-19! This month join us to talk about the following topics!
SPOTLIGHT: Making the Most of One-shot ALT Visits
Peter J. Collins (Tokai University)
"So what game are you playing with my students today?" This seemingly simple question is underpinned by assumptions about the limited nature of ALT contributions to student learning. It's true that there are a number of obstacles to fully integrating one-shot ALT visits into a textbook-based curriculum, but it IS possible! A flexible universal lesson plan model will be shared for team-taught junior high classes that provides JTEs, ALTs, and students with meaningful classroom roles and involves relatively little preparation - promise!
Room 1: Extending Textbook Units with Communication Activities
Peter J. Collins (Tokai University)
This discussion is itself an extension of Peter J. Collin's April breakout room; he'll share activities that were designed and implemented by junior and senior high teams. These activities help meet teacher goals of deepening students' understanding of the reading content and giving them chances to recycle target language. They also provide students with chances to interact with and get responses from non-Japanese communities outside the classroom. Participants will be invited to share and/or brainstorm activities for their own textbook units.
Room 2: Being the best ALT you can be: what makes an ALT successful?
Chelanna White (Kyoto JET PA)
In my four years as an ALT and year as prefectural advisor, I have noticed several key traits that successful ALTs have. In this short talk, I will talk about these traits as well as things ALTs can do to cultivate them. In the discussion following the talk, I hope to provide an opportunity for attendees to discuss what they think makes them successful ALTs, or the areas they would like to improve in. Attendees will share their experiences and advice with each other.
Room 3: Exploring culture with students
Daniel Pearce (Kyoto Notre Dame University)
Learning about culture is an integral part of foreign language learning. As ALTs, we are often expected to share 'foreign' culture with our students, but as time goes on, talking about ourselves and our home countries can become wearing. In this session, I will discuss the broad concept of culture, and how we can explore learning about culture with our students, as well as introduce a useful repository of resources for culture-centered lessons. I also hope that we can share opinions and ideas about what we would like our students to learn about culture, and how we can better contribute to learning.
Room 4: Teaching Pronunciation and Phonics
Cheyenne Weaver (Yamagata Prefecture ALT)
What sounds do your students struggle to hear and say? How can we get our students to connect sounds to print? If you've ever had questions like these (or if you just like talking about speech sounds), then this is the breakout room for you. In this session, we'll exchange advice and effective activities so that we can build better phonological awareness in our students.
AFTER BREAKOUT ROOMS: SPECIAL GUEST: English Kamishibai
Kuniaki Sakai (英語紙芝居師 - English Kamishibai Artis)
Sakai-sensei's special presentation to close this month's event with a smile! He is going to show you his "Kamishibai", a traditional Japanese artwork. Definitely something you don't get to see everyday! Don't miss it!
To learn more about this month's presenters, please check our website, altagora.altto.net.
Organization: ALTTO (ALT Training Online)
Cost: free
Venue: Zoom (register here for Zoom)
Location: Online, Online Events, Online Event
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