Lightning Presentations Night
various presenters
In "The Ups and Downs of Student Presentations" Malcolm Swanson outlined his rationale for these projects, noting the usual reasons for errors as being top-heavy on media and difficult to understand due to lack of speaking practice. Walking students through step by step is how he overcomes these problems, giving them exercises with broken presentations they have to repair and directing them towards the plethora of online apps available to help them.
Ai Murphy told us about "Brain Food: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". After telling us why we eat, she connected Nutrition and Education—explaining how and why what we eat when affects our ability to study and learn.
Connecting "Neurons and Good Teaching", Robert Murphy explained how cognition occurs due to our networks of a quadrillion connections in a superdynamic context of top-down versus bottom-up learning driven by emotion.
"The Strategic Role of L1 in L2 Learning Environments" was explained by Michael Phillips, who pointed out that language teachers often find it unavoidable to switch between the two, finding the first language necessary for smooth task instruction, metalinguistic explanation, class management, discipline and creating a rapport with students. Some stress the importance of one over the other; neither strategy indicates a lack of knowledge per se.
Judith Rennels told us about setting up a Self-Access Learning Center and the challenges of translating a teacher-centered into a learner-friendly environment—sometimes making SALC activities a mandatory part of courses is the only way to ensure it gets used. She noted how some aspects of the SALC were popular and resulted in spontaneous English usage.
Charles Ashley described his experience of "Teaching Pronunciation" in Japan where, in many classroom, the 44 English phonemes are crunched into 21 katakana ones, intonation and rhythm notwithstanding. Considering the history of English pronunciation, he questions whether katakana is an acceptable accent.
Margaret Orleans pointed out that Japanese students are not taught English punctuation because their teachers are not comfortable with it and this hinders their reading comprehension in the language. She gave examples of how punctuation may be graphically illustrated to illuminate English for students.
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