West Tokyo JALT:

The 5th JALT Joint Tokyo Conference 2010

Date: Sunday, October 31st, 2010 Time: 9:45 AM - 5:30 PM

Speaker: Yusa Koizumi, Steven Kirk, Alastair Graham-Marr, Kip Cates, Brenda Bushell, and Setsu Tsuji

Description:
The 5th JALT Joint Tokyo Conference

09.45-10.15: Registration

10.15-11.00 Yusa Koizumi - Collaborative writing: What happens when students write together
Theorists argue that collaborative writing could promote second language acquisition because it provides learners opportunities to attend to linguistic form and notice the gap between the target language and their interlanguage. The presentation first reviews Storch (2005), which offered evidence for such a claim by investigating student interaction in a pair writing task and analyzed the compositions they produced. The presentation then provides examples of collaborative writing activities using student interactional data and written products and concludes with a discussion of the benefits and difficulties of implementing these activities in actual classrooms.

Bio: Yusa Koizumi is a lecturer at Rikkyo University and teaches a variety of EFL courses. She is also engaged in doctoral studies at Temple University. Her research interests include second language writing, learner interaction, and focus on form.

11.15-12.00 Steven Kirk - Revisiting memorization and repetition in the language classroom
This presentation will look at the problems of developing what Pawley and Syder famously called "nativelike fluency" and "nativelike selection". This entails revisiting memorization and repetition-based techniques that have generally been rejected by Communicative Language Teaching. The presenter will also show how a rich and realistic text can be used to create activities that help to build both fluency and accuracy, and discuss how to do this within a CLT framework.

Bio: Steven Kirk is a lecturer in the English Communication Department of Toyo University, as well as a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham. He has been teaching in Japan since 1996, and currently lives in Chiba.

12.00-13.15 Lunch

13.15-14.00 Alastair Graham-Marr - Language output: It ought to be more obvious
A paper that has strongly influenced my work is Izumi et al's 1999 paper, "Testing the output hypothesis: Effects of output on noticing and second language acquisition". The researchers failed to find an empirical effect for output, yet maintained that their hypothesis was nonetheless correct. I totally agreed and loved the chutzpah. This difficulty in finding empirical evidence for something so seemingly obvious has spurred me on to research this aspect of language acquisition.

Bio: Alastair Graham-Marr has been teaching in Japan for twenty one years. He is an Associate Professor at the Tokyo University of Science. His research interests include language output, explicit teaching, communication strategies and listening. He has run teacher training workshops in many countries around the world including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Brazil, the U.A.E., the U.S and Canada.

14.15-15.00 Kip Cates - Global education: Inspiration for the classroom
Global education aims at enabling students to effectively acquire a foreign language while promoting socially responsible citizenship in a multicultural world. Research in the field ranges from global awareness surveys to content analyses of global themes in EFL textbooks. My involvement in this area has been inspired by the work of key global educators such as Kniep (1985) and Pike and Selby (1988). Join me to discuss how "global ed" can help to promote international understanding!

Bio: Kip A. Cates is a professor at Tottori University and coordinator of JALT's "Global Issues" Special Interest Group. He publishes a quarterly "Global Issues in Language Education Newsletter" and is a founder of the "Asian Youth Forum".

15.15-16.00 Brenda Bushell - Teaching reflective research practices in the writing classroom to avoid information wipeouts
Research by Bagnole and Miller (TESOL, 2003) shows how blending information literacy instruction into English composition classes can help students negotiate research tasks in their quest to -- identify, locate, evaluate and use sources effectively. Extracting key findings from this research, the presenter will discuss how teachers can support the literacy capabilities of Japanese university students, based on her own classroom research. Included will be examples of support materials used in classes through Moodle.

Bio: Brenda Bushell, associate professor at the University of the Sacred Heart has co-authored five textbooks, including the two-book series Global Outlook, which focuses on academic reading skills (McGraw-Hill, 2004). Her research interests include the writing process and curriculum development.

16.15-17.00 Setsu Tsuji - EBP: Business functions and genre for determining course content
The massive expansion of international business has led to a huge growth in the area of English for Business Purposes (Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998). This is well exemplified by the fact that in-house internationalization, or uchinaru kokusaika (Yoshihara et al., 2001) has been advancing in many Japanese companies. However, when it comes to EBP at Japanese universities, it is often hard to define the target discourse communities, making it difficult to narrow down what to teach. The presenter will review former research and look into how to design Business English curriculum using critical business functions and genre.

Bio: Setsu Tsuji currently teaches English courses at Meiji Gakuin University and Jiyugaoka Sanno College, and corporate BE classes. She has a Master's Degree in Conference Interpreting and Translation from the University of Queensland. Her present research interest is English for Specific Purposes in the business context.

17.00-17.30 Coffee with the presenters Registration:

To pre-register, please email Andy Boon (andrew.boon@tyg.jp) with "5th JALT Joint Tokyo conference" in the title line. Please include your name, school name, and JALT membership number. Website: http://jalt.org/tokyo/joint_conference/

Organization: West Tokyo Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (West Tokyo JALT)

Cost: JALT Members: (Pre-registered 1,500 yen / Non-registered 2,000 yen)
Non-members: Pre-registered 2,500 yen / Non-registered 3,000 yen)

Venue: Toyo Gakuen University, Phoenix Hall, Building One, Hongo campus, Tokyo

Location: Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolis, Japan

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