Chapter AGM / Lightning Sessions - Focus on Classroom Practice
This month's meeting will be divided into two parts. First, we will hold the chapter Annual General Meeting (AGM). Officer reports will be tabled, and we will elect our officers for 2024.
Following this this will be our Lightning Session presentations on the theme of Focus on Classroom Practices.
Hudson Murrell
Small Group Discussion on DIM (Digital Instructional Materials) Homework
Students are required to do as homework a listening activity of their choice. I have set up a blog with links to such sites as ELLLO, BreakingNewsEnglish, and Ted Talks. For the weekly homework activities, students need to access one of these sites, choose something to listen to, and then fill out a simple online journal to record what they worked on. Three times during the semester they are required to fill out a "My Top 5" sheet of homework they have done, and bring this to class. They discuss this in small groups. I will outline multiple ways in which this discussion is effective for the students' learning.
Hudson Murrell is a professor at Sanyo Onoda City University in Yamaguchi. His research interests are in gamification, increasing speaking output and extensive reading.
Markus Yong
An AI-based Extensive Reading Program
In the first semester of 2023, my students participated in a weekly extensive reading program whereby they created and read their own stories via ChatGPT. This presentation will provide preliminary results from this experimental program.
Markus Yong has been teaching English in Japan for 17 years, and currently works at Kyushu Kyouritsu University.
Each presenter will have 15 minutes to share their ideas.
After the presentations, there will be time for questions and discussion. Participants will also be encouraged to briefly share other ideas they may have related to classroom practices.