Meeting Reports

Reports of our meetings. Click on a heading to see details.

  • Reports for meetings prior to July 2008 can be found in the JALT National meeting archives.
  • If you are looking for details of upcoming meetings, these are available on our schedule page.
  • Click on an event title to see the original meeting announcement for that event.

Promoting Sustainable Education: A Cross-Cultural Hybrid Framework for Japanese and Nepalese Younger Learners Namiko Tsuruta In this presentation Namiko described how she is harnessing the power of the internet to create an ongoing cultural and language exchange between students in Nepal and Japan. Namiko works at a consultancy called Global...

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Game Based Learning Stephen Case, Andrew Gallacher In today's presentation Andrew and Stephen showed us how they successfully developed and implemented a task-based English education curriculum requiring students to design and make their own games. To start their presentation they provided some context about their students and their teaching goals....

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Projects for Teaching Critical Thinking Skills Whitney Sarver, Tracy Koslowski In our May presentation, the presenters demonstrated the importance of critical thinking in the classroom and how activities encouraging such thinking have been incorporated as an integral part of lesson plans. The presentation started with the question of "what is...

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Tips for Teaching Presentation Skills Tim Thompson In this talk, Tim provided tips for planning a presentation, training activities, syllabus design, common mistakes, and both teacher and peer feedback on students' presentations. At the planning stage we need to think about if a presentation is either "informative" or "persuasive". For...

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Teaching Younger Learners: Ideas and Information Chelanna White, Mark Fennelly Our March meeting was in two parts, beginning with a My Share session from Chelanna White, an ALT at the senior high school level in Kyoto prefecture currently teaching 1st year students. Chelanna introduced two ideas for lessons that she...

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Building an Effective, Free Language Lab Erin Noxon In today's presentation Erin Noxon explained to us how she set up her Global Interaction class and how it facilitated the ability of the students to become more globally aware. Her goal was to improve their conversational abilities by providing authentic situations...

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An "input task output task framework" for TBLT in Japan Justin Harris In this month's presentation, Justin described Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT). The session was divided into five parts - a TBLT definition, why it is ideal for students in Japan, problems with TBLT, an Input Task Output Task...

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Labour Rights Education for Education Workers Chris Flynn In our February presentation, Chris Flynn covered a number of issues relevant to teachers working in Japan. During the talk we learned about labour standards for subcontractors/employees, insurance coverage at work, union formation rights and unlimited term contracts. Regarding the labour standards...

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A Call To Apps: Current Best Practices in Digital Pedagogy Rab Paterson For our January 2020 session, Rab Paterson gave an overview of various apps that can be used to help students in the classroom. He presented a wide variety of apps that are relevant for different teaching situations. Rab...

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My Share - Ideas That Work Charlie Bell, Paul Collett, Malcolm Swanson, Markus Yong, Andrew Zitzmann This session involved a number of presenters giving short (15-20 minute) introductions to activities or ideas they thought might be helpful for others. Conversation Modelling Charlie Bell Charlie gave a presentation discussing his preliminary...

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