jalt69

AKITA JALT meetings in 2015
picture album page 1 - the 1st meeting of 2015

March

Guest speakers: Ben Shearon, Tohoku University
Date: Saturday, March 28, 2015
Topic: Running a 4-skills Extensive Reading Class
Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Place: Join-us (Floor 3, Room 6)

10 people attended

Chapter Report
(to be printed in The Language Teacher)
Guest speaker: Ben Shearon

AKITA – March 2015 - Running a 4-skills extensive reading class -- Ben Shearon, Tohoku University
The purpose of this presentation/workshop was to illustrate an effective method for helping students to both increase their motivation and to focus their English ability. In addition, they learned how to develop lifelong skills by using ER. The workshop started with the question “What is ER?”. Since most participants had never used ER in their teaching, they were eager to learn how ER is applied in the classroom at Tohoku University. The presenter provided an overview of a 4-skills extensive reading class he spent six years developing at his university, and he accomplished this by demonstrating the step-by-step method he used to connect ER to his classroom curriculum. The workshop participants thus were able to learn authentic ER activities that could be applied to their own classes, and the session concluded with a lively question and answer session.

Reported by Mamoru "Bobby" Takahashi

AKITA JALT meetings in 2015
picture album page 1 - the 2nd meeting of 2015

April

Guest speakers: Thomas E. Bieri
Date: Saturday, April 25, 2015
Topic: Activating Extensive Reading
Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Place: Join-us (Floor 3, Room 7)

6 people attended

Chapter Report
(to be printed in The Language Teacher)
Guest speaker: Ben Shearon

AKITA – April 2015 – Activating Extensive Reading - Thomas Bieri, Nanzan University. Extensive reading has recently become a well-known technique for language study and many programs and individual instructors have been incorporating it into their language teaching practice. However, many educators may not have confidence that they fully understand what ER is or how they can take advantage of the benefits. The presentation began with a definition of ER, and a general introduction to the principles of extensive reading, particularly as defined by Day and Bamford (1998, 2002). The presenter then demonstrated several classroom activities related to extensive reading and discussed several ways of managing and tracking student reading, most notably the MReader website run by Dr. Thomas Robb.

Reported by Stephen Shucart

AKITA JALT meetings in 2015
picture album page 1 - the 3rd meeting of 2015

May

Guest speakers: John Campbell-Larsen, Kyoto Women's University
Date: Saturday, May 30, 2015
Topic: Teaching the spoken language; Reported speech
Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Place: Join-us (Floor 3, Room 6)

6 people attended

Chapter Report
(to be printed in The Language Teacher)
Guest speaker: Ben Shearon

AKITA –May 2015 – John Campbell-Larsen, Kyoto Women's University. This presentation was divided into two parts. The first part introduced the central findings of Corpus Linguistics and Conversation Analysis concerning spoken English, focusing on such points as marking, reported speech and spoken narrative. The presenter described practical methods for teaching these items, illustrating his points with several videos of classroom interactions. The second part outlined the background, implementation and results of a project designed to increase a learners’ ability to use reported speech in English. The presentator looked at reported speech in ESL textbooks and in the academic literature, and provided a detailed schema on how to teach students this vital skill. Video recordings of the students were used to illustrate the development of their ability to use reported speech to recount the contents of their various interactions. A short Q & A session ended the presentation.

Reported by Stephen Shucart

"GENKI" English education homepage by Takeshi Suzuki

go back to "genki" homepage index