Mid-Year Conference 2010
The 2010 Midyear Conference was from October 14th to 15th at the Akita Prefectural Education Center in Tenno.
Room to Read Tatami Party
Room to Read hosted their annual tatami party on the 14th from 18:30. Highlights of the night were the ABS broadcast of our wonderful conference presentations.
Presentations
Workshop 1: Problems and Solutions in Team Teaching
This workshop was small group discussion, so there are no files from it.
Workshop 2
Coaching for Speech Contest
Bess Anderson
This presentation will cover all of the essentials needed for preparing your students for a speech competition. The lecture will include helpful advice for: establishing an effective daily practice routine in preparation for the contest; ways in which to involve the ALT in the preparation and practice for the contest; understanding the differences in judging criteria between recitation and composition presentation; recognizing what the judges are looking for in presentations and what they expect from students who are awarded ‘excellent’ prizes; getting students interested in participating and getting them to participate; properly aiding the student in writing their compositions, choosing a proper composition topic, writing a coherent and well-supported composition and choosing their recitations for the competition; and much more!
Spanish : Get into your students' Shoes Raquel Ortiz & Alfonso Fraile
The aim of this workshop is to remind attendees how one can get lost very quickly when in a foreign language environment, to give them a taste of the feelings and difficulties that their own students can experience sometimes. Even though all of us have been in a foreign language class and have learned a second or third language, many of us have forgotten what it's like to go through the process since it has been a few years. If you already know Spanish, do not come to this workshop since it will be geared toward people with no knowledge of the language.
Elementary School Activities Michael Sammler & Tina Schoolman
As the focus on English education in Japan grows, ALTs and JTLs are teaching more often at elementary schools. This presentation has been designed to help give you a variety of activities that can help you and the homeroom elementary teacher navigate the new Eigo Note textbook. We will demonstrate a number of games and activities that can be tailored to suit a variety lessons in the 5th and 6th grade text.
Utilizing Video and Power Point in the Classroom
Renaud Davies
In an age of immense visual stimulation, language education has remained remarkably text-bound and can appear dull to students compared to their world outside the classroom. In this workshop you will be introduced to different power point video lessons delivered using a variety of teaching methods. Most lessons are geared toward the high school level, but almost all can be adjusted to suit junior high as well.
Special lecture: Cross-Script Literacy Acquisition Effects in EFL Learning
By Dr. Clay Williams, Akita International University.
Workshop 3
Phonics Paul Yoo & James Jones
It is sometimes difficult for native speakers to understand why students would write volleyball as "barebol," but in order to help them, we must first understand where they're coming from and empathize with their struggle. Phonics is often misunderstood as something we teach, but it is better understood as a method of teaching--educating students as to the relationship between what we say and how we write it down. In this presentation, we will take a look at some of the ways in which differences in the sound and writing systems of Japanese and English pose obstacles to English language acquisition, and some methods for helping overcome them. We will ask questions about whether perfect pronunciation really is an end goal; whether katakana is really the enemy or not; if so, how, and why; and even whether teaching phonics itself is really useful. It is important to ask these questions, and there are some meaningful answers awaiting that may help improve student retention and reduce teacher and student stress.
Elementary Activities Michael Sammler & Tina Schoolman
As above.
Junior High Activities Jessica Stubbs, Will Lentze & Peter McGowan
This presentation will focus on activities the ALT can use to work with the JHS English curriculum and become actively involved in classes. Our main focus will be on warming up activities, review games, and listening activities that the ALT can adapt to suit the topic of the lesson and the teaching style of the JTE. We hope to present a large selection of activities that ALTs can successfully use in their everyday classes.
Senior High Activities Austin Bell
High School ALTs are often overwhelmed with the responsibility of designing and delivering countless novel activities that take up entire classes. We are further requested to create activities that complement what the Japanese teacher is currently teaching. In brief, High School ALTs are required to be not only teachers but curriculum designers. Thus, this year’s presentation will give focal attention to curriculum design. Attention will also be given to activity sharing and JTL/ALT activity planning in an endeavor to inspire ALTs to view this overwhelming responsibility as not a burden, but rather, a creative opportunity to kindle within our students a genuine interest in learning English.
Workshop 4: Micro Teaching
South Block Melody Lynch-Kimery, Naoko Sato, Michael Culler & Asami Sato
Chuo and North Blocks Alicia Miller, Manami Sawafuji, Derek Lemieux & Naomi Sasaki
Senior High School Anna Shen, Setagawa Yoshihiko, Jeremia Grobler & Mononobe Tomoko
How do we team-teach? How do we incorporate new ideas into our lessons? With limited time in the English environment, it's understandable that we want each lesson to be meaningful and useful for our students. By participating in Micro Teaching lessons, we can learn different ways of team-teaching and learn exciting new ideas which can be applied in our own classrooms. The team teaching pairs will teach for twenty minutes and then there will be a ten minute discussion. Please attend the presentation you have been assigned.
Workshop 5
Listening & Speaking Activities
Kaydene Carty
As ALTs and JTEs, we have the opportunity to infuse life into the flat words of the textbook, by demonstrating that English is a tool for communicating. In this workshop, we will discuss effective ways of teaching English communicatively by highlighting a few of our most successful listening and speaking activities. These activities will help build not only your students English level in an enjoyable environment but also help us continue to improve Akita’s English Education.
Reading & Writing Activities
Amy Hubbard, Amanda Powers, & Raquel Ortiz
Reading activities should motivate students to read the content of the text rather than merely be an exercise to break down the text into grammatical parts. Students should have the self-motivation and a sense of curiosity to explore other simple English texts on their own. For example, having students try to interpret the lyric of a popular English pop song. Writing activities should enable students to move beyond writing in English as an exercise, to writing more about their feelings and expressing themselves freely. Students should be able to write simple diary entries and emails without having to worry about making mistakes. This workshop focuses on activities that build up students' proficiencies in these areas. Team-teaching lessons are often geared towards listening and speaking activities. We will show you the reading and writing activities that have worked for our team-teaching classes.
High School Classroom: Management and Teaching Tactics Michael Cullinane & Liyen Tang
This presentation will focus on methods the JTEs and ALTs can use to reach difficult, distracted, or disinterested students. We will role play techniques, and several useful activities will be distributed.
See also
| Skills Development Conference | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-Year Conference | 2008 • 2009 • 2010 | |||||||||
| Skills Development Conference | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | |
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |||||||
