Story-Based Approach - Chiyuki Yanase

Shinshu JALT were able to hold yet another successful event, this time at Matsumoto M-Wing on March 6, thanks to the fantastic and ever so charismatic presenter  Chiyuki Yanase, who made the trip up from Tokyo! There was plenty to take away from Chiyuki's co-constructive presentation (read: lots of teacher/student interaction. Yes, I was paying attention!)  'Story-Based Approach' for young learners, from theory to demonstrations, additional resources plus book recommendations.

Story time

It was very much a 'hands on' workshop, where we took part in many pre, while and post reading activities, usually working in small groups to build and collect ideas.  The activities catered for a broad range of language ability while simultaneously being adjustable to suit the interests and needs of the students. 

It was tremendous fun taking part in these activities, especially as it allowed an outlet for my competitive side! The entire room was gripped with each activity from start to finish. It also provided me with an insight into how to reproduce the same effects in my own classroom, and I feel as though I am now equipped with the means to generate the same buzz and excitement when we open our reading books at Luna.

Many thanks to Chiyuki Yanase especially, and to all participants for making this such a memorable event.

Shinshu JALT presents - Mayuka Habbick on Chants & Picture Books

Last Saturday I had a very busy day catching up with my old friends Mayuka & Rob Habbick. Rob presented for us a couple of months ago, but this occassion was all about Mayuka and her really interesting ideas for using chants, and making your own (which I have never seriously thought about - actually not so hard!)

Unfortunately, overnight, something mysterious had happened; her iPhone had been 'wiped' clean - i.e. there was nothing in it...and that included her presentation material. PANIC!

We spent most of the afternoon at the Apple Store in Minami Matsumoto, but no joy, so we had to come up with some clever Rob workarounds. Lots of wires, coffee and trying to remember passwords = solutions delivered & a seamless pair of workshops! As you can see, well worth all the effort. Everyone is welcome at Shinshu JALT events - you don't have to be a member or even a teacher.



Why not come along next time, Oct 27th and tag along to the Hallowe'en Parade after?

Nanako's dad & KET Certificates

This is a slideshow of an event Jim organised with Shinshu JALT last Saturday evening. One of Luna's dads was a speaker...and he was also one of our ex-student's surgeons, which is why this promise to present was made about six years ago!




Among the audience was the current National JALT President - I think the first time that this has ever happened...so while he was here, Jim asked him to present Yanissa with her Cambridge ESOL Certificate for K.E.T. (she passed "with Merit") and we are all very proud of her achievement. Unfortunately, Hokuto & Tomoro had other plans and were unable to attend the short ceremony. We gave them their certificates last week, and as you can see they also look very pleased - well done boys!

Shinshu JALT and apps for the classroom

 As Programme Chair for Shinshu JALT, I had asked Cambridge

University Press to sponsor an evening

of professional development for our chapter on Saturday evening.

You can find a full description of that presentation by Asia Senior Sales

Manager Rob Habbick right here. As I have personally known Rob for

over 15 years, it was a pleasure to finally get him up to

Matsumoto again in his professional capacity and to share his wealth of knowledge & catalogue of
online tools with us (Rob & Ritsuko Nakata presented our very first Cambridge YLE certicates to
our children back in 2000 - a very good friend of Luna's!). Rob gave everyone plenty to think about, as
well as codes to access some online tools for free over the next fortnight.

The second half of our evening was given over to mini-presentations. I had intended this to be a mostly

local effort from new speakers; few answered the call despite Tonya Kneff's best efforts to rally the ALT

crowd. However, we had interest form further afield - Andy Boon came all the way from Tokyo to tell us

about Facebook...as he explains:

 

"As a global phenomenon, Facebook has established itself as the

de facto Social Networking Site. With its various utilities to connect
people via the Internet to  post messages and comments, start
discussion threads, upload photographs and videos, and chat

via IM or video, the pedagogic potential of this tool to encourage
and facilitate language learner  use of the L2 outside of the
classroom setting is being realized by educators worldwide. In this 

short presentation, we will provide an overview of how setting up a Facebook group with a 

2nd-year intermediate university class in Japan has enabled group members to interact with one 

anther by posting and responding to comments to work on course assignments or just to say hello 

to classmates in English. Data from the Facebook group will be provided to highlight activities 

that may be of use to other educators wishing to set up Facebook groups with their own classes."

Mike Honywood teaches at Shindai in Ueda, and awed us all in 

presenting an app he developed to help second language learners. 

Obviously a labour of love and a lot of fun, Mike's presentation 

explained not only how his app works but how he got into making it, and

the technological changes that are making that challenge less 

complex/more exciting and accessible to non-programmers.

Our Chapter President Mark Brierley went retro with an egg timer app

and a quick round of "Just a Minute" - audience challenged to avoid
hesitation, deviation & repitition
on the topic Spain v Italy. Yours truly won, leaving a late challenge with 3 seconds left to talk about the

football tonight!

Fred Carruth (our Membership Chair) explained what an EBM

(Executive Board Meeting) is & what happened at the last one in
Tokyo,  last weekend. Fred is retiring as Chair of the Presidents' Liaison

group after 4 years, where he has helped keep Shinshu on the map.

Dave Callaghan demonstrated an app (SayHi) that claims to
automatically translate
between about 45 different languages. Given Dave's demonstration there is very little
chance that any of the participants will be using this or any other auto-translate app any
time soon.

Me? Of course I have loads of ideas of apps & iOS solutions for classroom hiccups! I
demonstrated two which I had to use earlier in the day. Snapguide and Sock Puppets. I used Snapguide for the first time earlier this morning, when a student asked me for assistance in preparing for a video conference call she was to be involved in next week. This is what we came up with.I think you will agree it is clear and simple? It was very easy to make, with the app on my iPhone following a simple template, with photos very easy to incorporate and annotate. The voice recorder is a cool tool if you are not hands free eg hands covered in chocolate or something! I love to use Sock Puppets to enliven dialogues - there's a 30 second time limit (on the free version) which is just fine...encourages students to hurry up & allows us to have to have another go! Students also tend to let go of their books to touch (activate)/move their character around the screen.  You have a choice of characters & backgrounds, props. I think it's great, and our students love using. Check out this sample - it has lost some lustre in rendition :(

Cultural Perpectives & Observations on Learners - Part 3: How are my students getting it right for themselves?

Akiko Seino owns her own school "Bright" in Matsumoto, and presented for Shinshu JALT on March 25th at Agata-no-Mori.

How are my students getting it right for themselves?

Akiko Seino is Matsumoto’s best kept cultural secret asset. She has lived in the same city and owned her own language school here(within a mile of mine) for 8 years. I have met her five times – three times in the last month. She is inspiringly passionate, disorganised, uncompetitive, and insightful. She is awesomely enthusiastic, daft, and focused. She is disarmingly honest, funny and honest.
Seino teaches 3-12 year olds and is a mum of two herself. She used to teach in Saitama/Tokyo “all listening & singing” – no reading or writing. She says she now finds it very hard to give her students “all they need”. Says she does not buy into ‘earlier the better’, but the love/power to learn (which also rewards her as a teacher – an important aside which less experienced teachers may not feel important).

Seino explained “Terakoya” style learning to be ‘temple school’ – and the concept of one step forward at a time. Kumon chain applies this principle in a singular style (so what does the teacher do?) whereas AS applies this to her (small) groups.

Seino asked participants if they taught mixed level classes –a lack of response basically indicated “an embarrassed yes”. Seino’s next question showed Longman had trained her well. “Do you treat every student the same?”

Seino explained that using English-only was far easier with younger learners, as older ones needed grammatical points explained in their mother tongue. Seino provided an explanation of how she multi-tasked as a teacher with mixed-level  & mixed-tasking students. Imagine a headless chicken? Students can and will perform together in song/dance.

Seino said she was learning with mums along the way. All good teachers will reflect and learn as they go, I think? You might consider this a lack of anticipation/planning? Some would agree, but Seino is amazingly honest with her mums (an advantage of L1 access to parents which I do not have) and spends an inordinate amount of personal time encouraging mums to be facilitators. I do not know any teachers who would want to demonstrate an end product at the end of every class – even if they had something! Me – I like to showcase students’ achievements of course ....but every lesson is essentially impossible (at least at Luna).

Seino asked participants to write down their top 7 tips/up the sleeve tools. Mentioned were:

• a bell
• Talking Tom app (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/talking-tom-cat/id377194688?mt=8)
• Youtube
• a blackboard
• 
  

Seino added her favourites as post-its, CD player, stickers book, mini white board, and correspondence books in which she maintains a dialogue with each learner & their parents – a very heavy demand on teacher time, and while this may well make a difference to learners’lives and involve parents, I am not sure this will help students become more autonomous. Educating the mums is an important thing to do of course, but micro-managing the dialogue (for me) would be an inordinately onerous task and especially immediately after the heat of class, not give me time to reflect & process what we did/need to do next time etc.

Seino highlighted the benefits of learning with friends, of learning to speak rather than to converse (oral reading), of showing and sharing, of giving students learning choices to make, personalizing learning & motivating themselves thus.

She pointed out that

• less teacher-led “presentation” time in class
• less students’ “practice” time in class
• laborious checking & marking (she even delivers work back to students’homes!)
• backlog of above causes stress

Seino asked for questions and suggestions.

Cultural Perspectives and Observations on Learners. 2: My personal "pi"spectives

On Sunday, March 25th Luna's student Atsuko Katanaga made her first ever presentation to English teachers, at a Shinshu JALT meeting in Agata-no-Mori. She presents all over the world, in English, in her field of mathematics. She is a leading expert in singularity (which I do not understand even a little bit) and teaches mathematics at Shinshu University. Her presentation was very interesting, and generated a lot of discussion. In my opinion, maths is a foreign language! Way to go Atsuko - you are inspiring!

Atsuko Katanaga presented her opinions on “The Cultural Differences in teaching” based on her experiences teaching π. Katanaga is a senior assistant professor of Mathematics at Shinshu University and not a language teacher; her audience was quickly assured that she was nevertheless a master of `foreign languages` - which maths seems to be to a lot of people (and I suggest especially English teachers!)

Katanaga’s first slide where she proceeded to define π had everyone shrinking back in their seats. She baffled everyone with a Japanese pnemonic which is supposed to assist memorising Pi and informed us that other languages do similarly. She also showed us her π pies, as promised – π Day is celebrated by mathematicians worldwide on March 14^th. Don’t get it?

On a weekend when the USA is trying to retain presidency of the World Bank, Katanaga showed the 2009 results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for 15 year olds. http://www.oecd.org/document/61/0,3746,en_32252351_32235731_46567613_1_1_1_1,00.html

Japanese concerns to be languishing in 9^th; UK & USA barely made the top 30.

Questions from the floor pointed provoked considerable interest:

·         Katanaga’s use of ≈ (a worldwide norm for approximation -and available in Word 2007) when Japanese schools teach another symbol which is neither.

·         Katanaga explained that A’ for mathematicians represents “A Prime”. Japanese students are taught to express this as “A dash” – but a dash is _ _ _!

·         Maths is not continually assessed in later life. Being unable to work out change in a shop does not induce the same ‘shame’ that manifests itself with an inability to communicate with a stray foreigner. How often do we hear people apologise “I can’t do maths”?

·         Japanese children are not taught to estimate i.e. have a rough idea of what the answer should be before actually doing the math. Witness some of the enormous ‘errors’ that were broadcast wrt radiation readings post Fukushima meltdowns.

‘Nittori education’ policy also came up with ingenious idea of making π ≈ 3. I hope there are no graduate engineers of that era building bridges or working in nuclear power stations... Reassuringly, π ≈ 3.14 again since 2011.

So much for ‘making things easier’ – struck me that using katakana achieves the same inappropriate non-result for English language learners.

Katanaga cited her experience observing a Montessori school in the USA, where children were engaged in self-reflecting learning at their own pace, uninterrupted. Children had to understand what they were doing. Students created their own agenda, chose and solved problems. Images of the classroom displayed children co-operatively engaged in informal ie tableless environment vs very predictable rigid & teacher at the front as giver of knowledge in a Japanese classroom.

Katanaga’s observations of a Scottish classroom of 14 year olds where learning  was to be collaborative, active and cognitive. The motto “No question is a silly question” rang true for the audience, lamenting that does not seem to be the case in Japan. In Scotland the following:

·         Self-confidence – I want to learn

·         Self-confidence – I can learn

·         Self-awareness – I know I can

·         Self-sufficient – I know how to

Self-assessment was also built in, with students using traffic light analogy whether they ‘got it’ (green), ‘a bit woolly’ (amber) or ‘didn`t go in’ (red)

Nakamura & Seino both then asked if π were being taught to early in Japan. Katanaga said ‘Yes and no’. You need the value of π ≈ 3.14 to calculate the area of a circle – it gets the job done. However, to have children exposed to abstract concepts such as irrational numbers at an early age is counter-productive, and should be left till later. It occurred to me that English teachers might want to replace irrational numbers with insanely hard grammar structures. Likewise, teaching a child to read (phonics) at an early age will give them the tools to get the job done at an early age – get all abstract and technical later (if you have to).

This is how she summarised her πspective:

	Japan	overseas
Teacher	Teach	Encourage
Students	Look, write, think	Listen, think, talk
class	Same age	Mixed/streamed

Disclaimer: Atsuko Katanaga is my student, but her presentation was entirely her own work & unpracticed.

Cultural Perspectives and Observations on Learners. 1: Enriching students lives

On Sunday March 25th, Mari Nakamura made an hour-long presentation for Shinshu JALT at Agata-no-Mori in Matsumoto. I organised the event as Programme Chair, and these are my notes (also posted on Shinshu JALT Facebook page & the JALT website.)

Mari Nakamura defines her Eikaiwa (English Square in Kanazawa, Ishikawa-ken) as ‘not a juku’.

Summarised her questionnaire results (of parents of children attending her school) to the question regarding “Attitudes to learning” as ‘quite negative as a whole through high Scholl and Center Examinations, and that students don’t know what to do with the English they have learned’.

Audience member (Japanese male with experience living overseas) said he had a ‘complex’ against learning English as a child, which other Japanese audience members agreed with. Our later  presenter Atsuko has never lived overseas but told us she needed English to get published and to present overseas. Asked if she thought people also have a complex about learning maths (and I think people generally do) she explained that maths is not tested/assessed later, and the audience realised that we are not generally required to ‘perform’ in it. It was noted that we rarely hear people exclaiming “Oh, I can’t do maths” as an admission of guilt when we do hear this viz. English all the time (in Japan). It was further suggested that maths quickly becomes abstract & concerned with how we think/do logical processing, and quickly moves away from simple calculation/arithmetic.

Mari suggested that children now know much more than she did as a school child, but that they are now also far more aware of their status in class, have more access to technology (iPads, internet) and that they are far more worried about their ‘mistakes’. Of the 25% who responded to her questionnaire, all were mums and most responded “massively” – two or three page replies (she suggested this was a ‘listen to me’ plea).

Mari quoted respondents wrt lifestyle of children as:

·         Too busy

·         Not safe to play outside

·         HS ss have too much free time

·         Children spend a lot of time alone with cell phones & PCs

The country’s “Nittori” education policy was accused of being “Slow and low” instead of the advertised “Slow & deep”, with MEXT (Ministry of Education & Science) now veering back to the opposite “cramming” extreme – schools in Ishikawa-ken adopting a sixth period in elementary schools + after school activities being accused of taking away free time, which ‘bugs’ all mums. Appropriate that children of that age being so busy they are having to learn time management skills?

Nakamura quoted respondents as having zero/near zero expectations of public school education, that school was all about going, not doing. Also, children have ‘too many choices’ of extra-curricular activities and are in a “keeping up with the Jones’s” mindset (audience comment that kids in the UK have too much free time with nothing to do).

Nakamura claimed that an holistic view of education is missing, and that education is being outsourced. Eg

·         For creative input – send kids to art class

·         For patience – send them to calligraphy class

·         For respectfulness – send them to martial arts class

·         For physical development – send them to swimming class

Nakamura closed by telling us she was being asked to teach phonics – which MEXT guidelines specifically prohibit being taught in elementary schools with the much-derided Eigo Noto textbook. (If mum knows best why don’t they vote?)

This left me wondering what the actual function of English classes was perceived as. Nakamura suggested English was now a pursuit outside of school because parents had fears about their children’s future job prospects, a pressure being felt from as young as three years old...’earlier the better’. 

Bilingualism as a goal based on fear rather than nurturing a very bad place for us to start from.

Portfolios in the classroom - John Gunning speaks in Iida

On Feb 25th our local Chapter of the Japan Association of Language Teachers held a meeting in Iida, which apparently is the first time ever to hold a workshop there. I am gald we finally corrected that oversight!

I had invited a relatively new friend of mine to present for us (I am supposed to organise an event every month or so, as 'Programme Chair'), John Gunning. I met John last year, when he joined a training session I ran in Nagoya to become an examiner for us (Cambridge ESOL). I had previously seen him around at National JALT Conferences looking very busy (yet calm) and smart - Conference Manager must be a very stressful job to take on!

Anyway, John put his hand up when I was looking for speakers this year, and Iida seemed relatively convenient to Gifu (until we looked at train schedules late in the day!). John wanted to share his experiences using Portfolios in the classroom, with a college class he had taught recently. I was very interested in this topic, as I have been trying to figure out how we at Luna can better collate the work our students are doing (for them - I do try hard to do the sharing from the teacher's end here & elsewhere online such as Facebook, twitter as @oyajimbo, flickr...). I am concerned that after years of study and hardwork, they will have lost all the scraps of paper, pictures, projects they have worked so hard on in class and at home.

My focus has been finding a digital/online solution, and I am still inclined that way personally, but I know a lot of our students & parents are steadfastly analogue. I had not considered using portfolios for assessment, in any shape or form, but very much enjoyed John's approach - get the students to agree on marking rubrics and to then assess each others' work accordingly. Students built up a week-on-week folder of class work and out of class assignments, which was very easy to look over and see the development (or lack thereof) language and presentation. Seeing other students work (as ongoing assessment) served to motivate the less achieving class members with what he called a "Yabai!" moment (Japanese exclamation of alarm/socks need pulling up). It also meant John was not the final arbiter on performance.

Now at Luna we will not be adopting portfolios for assessment, but I think parents could very easily reverse engineer the process and assess us. And I think that is a very good idea indeed. So, now I have a use for all the old ring binders clogging up our 'storeroom'!

Thank you John for the inspiration! (Next time we'll have a beer together instead of making you catch a train around the moon!)

* Why not come to Shinshu JALT's next meeting? It will be held from 12:30 in Agata-no-Mori, Matsumoto, on March 25th.

Atsuko Katanaga, Akiko Seino and Mari Nakamura will be talking about their perceptions of the job we are doing teaching English. Each presenter will talk for approx an hour, and there will be Q/A. Presentations will be in Japanese, but I am sure they can handle Japanese questions too. The meeting is open to non-members (Y500).

What I did at the weekend - Jim in Ueda

In my other job, organising presentations for Shinshu JALT, I get to invite some really cool people to make presentations on their work/research/books. As you can see from the slideshow, Sunday was really good fun. More info when I can find my notes (yes, we did go to the pub after!)

Shinshu JALT presents...

Today I helped organise an event for the local chapter of JALT (Japan Association of Language Teachers) wearing one of my others hats (Programme Chair) in association with the publishers Cengage, at a college in Nagano city. Our ambition is to reach out to teachers in other parts of the prefecture, not just Matsumoto (where the most active members currently live &/or work.

It was a long day, starting with a puncture en route to picking up one of our sponsors from the airport, and finishing with a quick enkai in a funky ethnic restaurant "Cho Bali Bali" in downtown Nagano, before legging it to catch the last train back.



Cengage's featured speaker was Curtis Kelly, and his presentations were about his thoughts on brain plasticity and the implications for language learning/acquisition. He also shared  ideas on the use of certain activities from a text book he co-authored with Chuck Sandy (Active). Cheryl Kirchhoff represented Shinshu JALT on stage, giving us feedback on the success of a homestay/working holiday programme.

As you can see from the slideshow, turnout was good and brains suitably taxed!

Thank you speakers & Cengage, and to everyone who made the journey.

Shinshu JALT presents - West Tokyo JALT

Chicken or fish?

Nothing like a free lunch to encourage people to turn up to a meeting. The good food of Baden Baden was only served after the Shinshu JALT Chapter's AGM had been concluded. Most posts were re-elected as proposed and seconded, with the exception of Program Chair which is likely to rotate around members able to make their connections work for one offs.

We were joined for lunch by a travelling quartet of West Tokyo JALTalites, who in the afternoon conducted three workshops as chicken or fish settled nicely.

Peter Ross asked for problems teachers face with writing classes, and soon had a board-full. If you have a writing class you'd probably come up with same/similar issues. Recognise any?

Visible topics - invisible writing: Peter Ross

His Y100 shop special Invisible Writing pack (when was the last time you came across carbon paper?) were distributed and attendees asked to write on any one of randomly suggested topics. Writing atop a plastic envelope, you do not see what you've written - the carbon paper below a top blank sheet instead imprints a bottom sheet. Then we were asked to do a 'seen' writing task for the same amount of time (ninety seconds), on a new topic, repeating the process for one more invisible and visible. A quick word count revealed for most that in both cases word count was up. Generally feeling that 'mistakes' were no longer something we could do much about & that fluency of production improved (albeit untidily). Point being that this is an excellent way to improve continuity, train of though - mentally and mechanically focusing the writer on the job ahead. Would you want to produce a final draft in this way? Unlikely. Will this get students to produce more rough work/brainstorm themselves into gear/larger first draft. Very likely.

Tadashi Ishida told us about his PEACE work (People's Educational and Cultural Exchange) and his various experiences enabling foreign visitors to Tokyo to try various aspects of Japanese culture (for free), such as Kimono, Shamisen, Tea Ceremony & Calligraphy.

Is this the ladies?

• http://senior-english.seesaa.net/
• http://www.jalt.org/groups/lifelong-learning
• http://peace2010.web.fc2.com/

David Boon and Eric Skier then managed not to clear the room of local participants, bringing home the reality of hosting next year's PAN-SIG conference in Matsumoto. Has Mark Brierley bitten off more than Shinshu can chew? There looked to be about four jobs per person present, all of which are going to take a lot of time and organising...watch this (and other) spaces.


Tana showed us a nice Thai restaurant near Parco which did not light the afterburners as Thai food often can, before seconds in El Sol and karaoke. So, a working Sunday. Thanks to the Tokyo team for caring & sharing; think their experience and guidance will be vital if next May's event is going to be as good as we want it to be...

Osaka Extensive Reading SIG

Over the last few weeks I have been visiting a number of teaching events and conferences up and down the country, meeting a lot of enthusiastic and knowledgeable people in the English language industry.

As I mentioned before here, I presented at the Hokkaido JALT conference in May. Last month I made it to three events. First, I attended a mini-conference in Niigata, where I was able to put on a display of materials for the examinations we promote and organise up & down the country. The disappointment of the day was listening to a famous professor announcing that his university was designing a new entrance test...not because I want people like that to see the value of Cambridge ESOL examinations, but because of the utter meaninglessness of moving the goalposts again. Schools and jukus etc will only teach to the test, not English to a better standard for the benefit of language learning and acquisition. Groan from me.

Shinshu JALT's meeting in Matsumoto I have previously posted on.

This weekend I was in Osaka holding down a table again, displaying Cambridge ESOL material as well as some support publications from Cambridge University Press - thank you John Letcher for your help. There I met a fellow Centre owner Malcolm and spent the day talking with teachers from the Kinki region, catching up with publisher reps, and seeing a very good presentation from the guru of extensive reading Rob Waring. The man talks an awful lot of sense and is inspirationally keen on extensive/graded reading.

I did not enjoy trying to negotiate the public transport system in Osaka; Umeda station was built by rabbits from Watership Down, it's a warren down there! A very good day out, if a little far. Highlight of the trip = seeing the British Lions win on Saturday night (even if there was a noisy cover band playing non-stop!). Low point? Kicking over my celebratory can of beer on the Shinkansen :(

Shinshu JALT presents...

Our very own local JALT had a day-long event in Matsumoto this weekend. For some reason, the adoption of Eigo Noto for elementary schools appears to have been accepted extremely casually; it's a crap concept and a woeful effort at producing a 'textbook'. No meaningful language learning accrues from its adoption, the use of which expressly forbids the teaching of phonics/reading…and even if there were any redeeming characteristics about it, very few teachers across the country who will have to use the book from next year have been given any useful direction in how to implement it.

The so-called expert delivery I saw at the conference was using technology unlikely to be available or easily mastered by your everyday class teacher; nor attract much lasting attention from students. It is gimmicky at best, peurile in truth. Another striking thing I noticed was how pathetic the teacher-ALT relationship usually is, as the lesson lost structure and the teacher turning to the ALT as the apparent source of all knowledge. I forget the actual question, but it arose from dumb artwork in the book/in the presentation and expecting the ALT to know what a particularly weird shape was called. Both looked under-prepared, which would loose them credibility in front of a class. In my 5 years at Fuzoku JHS as a part-time ALT and in other classrooms since, I have lost count of the number of times I have been put on the spot like that. It simply isn’t smart.

Good news out of the event was that Nagano ETJ and Shinshu JALT will both be involved in the event Jim is organizing at Luna for August 29^th, when Emily Percival is coming to the school to give a workshop on Early Learning and Language Acquisition. Emily teaches at the British School in Tokyo, where she is also responsible for assessing children’s language skills. Recently she successfully trained to become a Cambridge ESOL Oral Examiner for KET & PET. This will be a very interesting half-day workshop, it is free, and all teachers/parents are invited to attend.

I was also delighted to have the chance to talk to my very good friend Young Mi, for the first time in ages :)