ELT Calendar

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

The Use Of Student Evaluation Of Teaching Surveys In Higher Education: Is English Language Teaching A Disadvantaged Profession?
Time: 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Speaker: Peter Burden, Okayama Shoka University
Organization: Osaka Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching
Location: Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture
Short description: Little is known about the actual processes students follow when responding to end-of-semester student evaluation of teaching surveys (SETs). What do first year university students think about their English learning experiences, and do these experiences influence how they evaluate their university English classes? This presentation will explore these and other questions and share results of the presenter's study of 144 first year university students' beliefs about their English learning experiences and whether these beliefs have influenced how they evaluate.

Pragmatics and Communicative Competence
Time: 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Speaker: Megumi Kawate-Mierzejewska, Temple University Japan
Organization: Okayama Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching
Location: Okayama City, Okayama Prefecture
Short description: This presentation will help participants become aware of issues in inter-language pragmatics (nonnative speakers' comprehension and production of speech acts and how their English and/or Japanese language-related speech act knowledge is acquired), focusing on cross-cultural differences in the use of language, as well as teaching pragmatics through consciousness-raising tasks while attempting to increase students ' learning motivation.