4-Corners Tour Kansai (In Osaka)

Presented by Osaka JALT

Date and Time: 

     Sunday, 4 December 2016 - 1:30pm - 5:00pm

Speaker: 

     Debbie West & Dorothy Zemach

Skilling up for academic success special

Speaking in a learned language is a big challenge. This presentation will share some different kinds of presentations and presenters styles and connect those skills to an appropriate age group or style. The workshop will consist of exploring different styles, different activities and techniques to using the basics, basic drama techniques, voice techniques, visual presentation techniques and delivery techniques. Discover the different ways you can help your students enhance their self-expression through having more liberty in the idea of speaking in front of others. Incorporating skills from drama for voice projection and using technology as a prompt can help us in our presenting.

Debbie West is this year's Kevin Cleary invited speaker for JALT2016. She is a UC Berkeley grad and immediate past-president of TESOL France, was brought up in a military family and has done almost everything from teaching French to being International Student Advisor in the US to now teaching English to all levels and ages in France. An educator at heart, she sees education as broader than in a classroom and is definitely not very traditional in her methods. With a love for developing programs and an ever-present bank of ideas, there never seems to be enough time, energy and money to do everything. She is a Representative for the International Business Program at UC Berkeley Extension, and is trying to develop a Total Summer Immersion English Program (in August). She can be reached via her website: westlanguage.com.

Dorothy Zemach - Academic Writing Special: Scaffolding the Writing Process

Do your students (or you!) regard “process writing” as a remedial technique designed for struggling writers or low-level language students? This workshop takes participants through all stages of the writing process: brainstorming, organizing, drafting, editing, and rewriting, to demonstrate its usefulness and efficiency for any level of young adult or adult writer (including native speakers). We’ll try out a variety of practical and enjoyable classroom activities for each stage. Participants will look at activities that teach students to brainstorm creatively, make outlining easier for visually oriented learners, and set up a peer reviewing process that actually works.

Dorothy Zemach is one of the plenary speakers at JALT2016, has an MA in TESL from the School for International Training in Vermont, USA, and has been teaching English for 30 years. Since turning to materials writing, she has penned everything from the Teddy Bear's Magic Music teacher's book to the lowest and highest levels of Macmillan's flagship course Open Mind to the groundbreaking English for Scammers (self-published).

This event is co-sponsored by the four Kansai area chapters of JALT: Kobe, Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka.

There will be a dinner party afterward for those interested.

This event is co-sponsored by the four Kansai area chapters of JALT: Kobe, Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka.

Location: 

Lifelong Learning Center in Umeda 総合生涯学習センター 梅田, Eki-mae Dai-2 Building, 5F

Fee for JALT members: 

Free

Fee for one-day members: 

1,000 yen

Contact or Queries

Dinner party with JALT2016 Balsamo Asian Scholar

Date and Time: 

Thursday, 1 December 2016 - 6:00pm - 9:00pm

Speaker:
Kalyan Chattopadhyay

Kalyan Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor and Director of the English Language Centre at Bankim Sardar College, Calcutta University, and this year's Bill Balsamo Asian Scholar at JALT2016. A University of Leeds and Hornby Trust alumnus, he has spoken and published on language skills development and the use of new technologies in language teaching. He is an IELTS research awardee and Cambridge University Press author, the outgoing Coordinator of IATEFL YLTSIG (UK), and the current Vice President of AsiaCALL.

Come join us for casual conversation over dinner and drinks starting from 6:00 at the Blarney Stone Irish pub. Join us whenever you can make it for as long as you like. All are very welcome.

Location:
The Blarney Stone Irish Pub - Umeda, 6F Sonezaki Center Building

Fee for JALT members:
Free

Fee for one-day members:
Free

Osaka JALT Chapter Officer Nominations -- deadline November 18

Osaka JALT Chapter Officer Nominations -- deadline November 18
 
It’s almost that time of year again when we are required to hold chapter officer elections. Officers serve from the end of one national JALT conference to the next, so we plan to hold elections just before JALT2016 begining on November 19-24. Our current officers would like to cordially invite you to throw your hat into the ring as a way of actively participating in running the chapter.
 
We’re required to have at least four but preferably five members fill the positions of Chapter President, Treasurer, Program Chair, Membership Chair, and Publicity Chair. (According to JALT rules it’s possible for one person to fill two of these positions, except that the President and Treasurer must be different people who are unrelated.) The past several years we have also had several Officers at Large that help in various ways, and it’s also possible to have other specific officers, such as Web-editor, Facilities Chair, Recording Secretary, Disaster Relief Chair, and so on. The possibilities are fairly limitless.

Duties of the required “Executive” Officers ideally are roughly as follows:
 
The Chapter President coordinates and oversees the running of the chapter, recruits and liaises with and assists other officers as necessary, represents the Chapter at JALT’s 3 annual national Executive Board meetings and in ongoing online JALT-wide discussions, and submits an annual report to the Executive Board.

The Treasurer manages the chapter’s money and maintains and submits monthly and annual financial reports.
 
The Program Chair oversees the organizing of our events, in collaboration with other officers and volunteers.
 
The Membership Chair focuses on our regular members by signing up and welcoming new members, sending reminders to those whose membership dues are coming or have come due, and maintains our membership records.

The Publicity Chair primarily focuses on spreading the word about what we’re doing to non-JALT members via our email list, facebook group, and any other way that is deemed appropriate.
 
I hope you’ll consider volunteering as an officer in the coming year, though of course you don’t need to be an officer to be actively involved.
 
Please let us know by Sunday, November 18, if you’d like to nominate or be an officer in the coming year.

Temple Distinguished Lecture Series, November 12th

Second Language Pragmatics: Learning, Teaching and Testing

Professor:

     Dr. Carsten Roever (The University of Melbourne, Australia)

Schedule:

     Saturday, November 12, 14:00 - 21:00

     Sunday, November 13, 10:00 - 17:00

This seminar will provide an overview of research on development of second language (L2) pragmatics, and more in-depth coverage of teaching and testing of L2 pragmatics.

Second language pragmatic development has been investigated from a variety of theoretical and content perspective, describing learning of speech acts, implicature, routine formulae, extended discourse, and other areas such as humor, address terms, or specific interactional practices. Some developmental trajectories have been identified, and the influence of individual difference factors has been investigated. Participants will acquire a broad understanding of research findings, approaches and issues in L2 pragmatic development research.

Less research has occurred on teaching of L2 pragmatics, most of which has focused on effects-of-instruction studies comparing implicit and explicit approaches to L2 pragmatics teaching. While more explicit teaching approaches tend to show stronger effect than implicit ones, the latter are not ineffectual and under certain conditions can be superior. Systematic teaching of L2 pragmatics as part of a coherent curriculum is still in its infancy but the possibility of such curricular integration will be explored in this seminar together with a range of teaching approaches.

Testing of learners’ L2 pragmatic ability has developed strongly in the last two decades and a variety of testing instruments exist for assessing learners’ ability. Providing adequate coverage of a complex construct like L2 pragmatics has been challenging, however, and the context sensitivity of pragmatic performance has led to tension between the need for broad construct coverage and practicality. Assessment instruments for L2 pragmatics will be critically examined in the seminar.

Students taking this seminar for credit should read Chapter 5 and 8 of Second Language Pragmatics before the seminar. A PDF copy of the reading will be provided to those registered credit students from the Office before the seminar.

Required Reading:

• Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (in press). Second Language Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Temple Distinguished Lecture Series, November 5th

Learner Corpus Research

Professor:

     Dr. Yukio Tono (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan)

Schedule:

     Saturday, November 5, 14:00 - 21:00

     Sunday, November 6, 10:00 - 17:00

The primary purpose of this seminar is to explore how corpus linguistics as a methodology can contribute to SLA research and foreign language learning/teaching. The seminar will begin with a brief introduction to fundamental concepts in corpus linguistics, types of available corpora, and how corpora are used in different fields of applied linguistics. The lecture is then focused on learner corpus research and a discussion of various approaches, such as contrastive interlanguage analysis, that are used to explore learner corpora in SLA and ELT research.

The second day of the seminar will be dedicated to hands-on data processing using concordancers such as AntConc (for PC/Mac), CasualConc (for Mac), and KH-Coder (for PC). Participants will learn word analysis techniques in corpus linguistics, such as wordlists, keywords, collocations, n-grams, and P-frames. Participants will also explore the results of corpus search using multivariate analyses for data summarization and data modeling and discuss the merits and demerits of using corpora as a methodology to answer research questions. No previous familiarity with concordancers is necessary, but some prior knowledge of statistics is helpful.

Recommended Textbook:

• McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book. London, UK: Routledge. (Buy on Amazon.co.jp)
• Granger, S., Gilquin, G., & Meunier, F. (Eds.) (2015). The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Buy on Amazon.co.jp)