Between a rock and a hard place: What are our students doing on Facebook and YouTube? Neil Millington To facilitate discussion on the current and potential use of social media in the language-learning classroom, Millington presented his research interspersed with opportunities to relate it to our own experience and situations....

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Love That Dog: Making a Difference with Multimedia Linda K. Kadota Kadota first asked how many of us taught poetry and used iPods or other technology. She said many teachers are afraid of poetry. Her classes begin with riddles, which is a good and fun way to get students thinking...

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TOEIC vocabulary teaching: applying CLIL Takashi Uemura TOEIC vocabulary seminar applying CLIL approach Kitakyushu JALT January 12, 2013 Uemura finds that the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach successfully combines cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) (Cummins, 1984) to transcend traditional methods and improve learner...

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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...

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Helping our students become multicompetent academic writers Carol Rinnert From a three-hour presentation delivered in half the time, we got an impression of what is involved in researching the development of English writing abilities among EFL students in Japan. In the U.S. Rinnert was teaching composition at Boise State University...

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Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. Fad or Future? Michael Phillips Phillips first posited the need for a new theory of education to cover 21st century changes in information processing and communication technologies. We all brainstormed together and watched a short film illustrating how fast things are changing...

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Connecting Neuroscience with EFL in Japan/Asia various presenters Creating bilingual brains in the classroom, from the neuroscience of lesson design through personal construct psychology, effects of music in the classroom, brain food, dyslexic students, infant phoneme acquisition, motivating learners with a Confucian heritage culture and the Zen of language acquisition,...

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Issues relating to independently run English language schools Mark Gibson, Gareth Steele, Lawrence Chivers Alternating between individual rotating presentations and discussion in small groups or collectively, these three school owners shared a lot of very useful information on starting up a new school or improving or expanding on an existing...

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Task complexity and second language development: tools to promote speaking Colin Thompson Thompson spoke on current trends in task based learning (TBL) and tools to promote speaking practice. He showed us several interactive speaking tasks and discussed advantages and disadvantages of using them to focus on communication and grammar. We...

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Task repetition and fluency development in the Japan classes: How much is enough? Craig Lambert From common notions of second language fluency to the basis for high-stakes decisions about it (recommendations for jobs or Phds.), Lambert walked us through some of the history of the various theories and methodologies that...

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