jalt29

AKITA JALT meetings in 2004
picture album page 5 of 2004

July

Guest speaker: Michiko Sugita
Date: Saturday, July 24th (2004)
Title: Viva! Japanese teachers of English!
Theme: Monolingual classes vs Multilingual classes; Native speaker teachers vs Non-native speaker teachers

18 people attended the meeting.

Chapter Report
(to be printed in The Language Teacher)
Guest speaker: Michiko Sugita

AKITA - July 2004 - Viva! Japanese teachers of English! Theme: Monolingual classes vs Multilingual classes; Native speaker teachers vs Non-native speaker teachers -Michiko Sugita. As a Japanese teacher of English for a high school, Sugita-san has come to the conclusion that Japanese teachers are better at managing English classes in high school. She posits that the classroom in Japan is quite unique, given that they have monolingual classes and quite a large class size. Japanese teachers also spend most of the time with their own students as homeroom teachers. She videotaped some classes and showed these videos as a starter for her speech, then talked about her day-to-day work, and analyzed some classes. Sugita-san gave a detailed PowerPoint presentation outlining the pros and cons of native versus non-native teachers. Given the unique setting of Japanese high schools and the lack of proper teacher's training that the majority of JET teachers possess, she quite rightly reaches the conclusion that properly trained Japanese English teachers will more often do a better job. This was succinctly illustrated with samples of the biweekly newspaper and the journals and school publications produced by her students. A lively question and answer discussion between Sugita-san and the audience, the majority of whom were Japanese English teachers, rounded off her presentation.

Reported by Stephen Shucart

September

Guest speaker: Christopher Hoskins
Date: Saturday, September 25th (2004)
Title: Using Short Texts for Integrated Skills Practice in Second Language Acquisition

19 people attended the meeting.

Chapter Report
(to be printed in The Language Teacher)
Guest speaker: Christopher Hoskins

Akita: September--Using Short Texts for Integrated Skills Practice in Language by Christopher Hoskins. Mr. Hoskins introduced 8 activities using a short text. He called it the Rummel Sequence. The texts were about 230 words in length at a Flesch-Kincaid Grade level 9. This sequence can be used with any level reading and for any group of students if adapted to the student's level. He introduced and explained the activities and then demonstrated them with the participants acting as students. The first 2 activities are listening based: Listening Scan: students have questions and must listen for the answers to them. Listening Cloze: This can be done in any cloze style preferred by the teacher. Reading Cloze follows with the same or different passage from the same reading. Dictation: a passage is read 3 times, once for understanding the main ideas and then sentence by sentence for dictation and then again to check. Dictagloss a variant of dictation is where students are asked to take notes on a short passage and then in pairs or groups asked to reconstruct the passage from their combined notes. At this point the full text is given to the students. Students do a Reading Scan: a group activity that uses the questions from the first activity. The final activity is Short Essay Answer Writing: the students provide short written answers. Mr. Hoskins led discussions of each activity after it was presented and the participants were able to give suggestions and ask and answer questions about how to improve the activities or suggest alternative activities. It was an informative interactive workshop that provided very useful information to the participants and also an opportunity to share insights and new ways of approaching teaching with short readings that can be applied at all levels of teaching.

Reported by Jarrett D. Ragan Jr.

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