Early Spring Conference Sapporo
February 4-6, 2019
With support by the JALT Hokkaido Chapter
Performance-Assisted Learning
The conference will be held during the Snow Festival, and while it will be exciting, it will be crowded, so make plane and hotel reservations early.
CONFERENCE SITE
1-2 Kawazoe 4-jo, Minami-Ku, Sapporo, Sapporo, Japan, 005-0804
Complete the form below to submit a presentation proposal
DEADLINE JANUARY 4
Selected Presentations
1. Chhayankdhar Singh Rathore
Forum Theatre Workshop
The workshop will introduce Forum Theatre - one of the main components of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. The participants will first engage in creating a scene depicting some form of oppression. The scene would be performed a second time using the Forum Theatre approach of interrupted performance. Multiple ancillary drama activities will be introduced and used as a means of developing the story line
2. Emily Mindog
Digital Drama: Using Technology to Support Monologue Presentations
Giving monologues can be challenging especially to second language students. They have to allocate a lot of energy and focus on language production that it can be easy to forget the performance aspect of the monologue. Assessments can raise students’ awareness if they are lacking in the language or performance aspects of their monologues. Both self- and peer assessment can provide very beneficial feedback to performers. However, it is very challenging to critique one’s performance based on memory. Also, many students are reluctant to give honest feedback because their comments may be perceived as negative and they are afraid of offending their peers. This presentation will show how technology to use technology to facilitate effective self-assessments and anonymous peer-assessments that can lead to improvement in students’ performance.
3. Chhayankdhar Singh Rathore
Process Drama Workshop
This 2-day workshop would be divided into two parts - Process Drama Basic (Day 1) and Process Drama Intermediate (Day 2). Day 1 will introduce the participants to the basic aspects of Process Drama, its background, and its function as an element of Performance-Assisted Learning (PAL). The participants will engage in hands-on activities and discuss their application in the language classroom. Day 2 will build-upon Day 1 and the participants will engage with process drama at a deeper level. Suggestions and reflection sessions would be included to develop concrete ideas for incorporating process drama at different points of the syllabus timeline.
4. George MacLean
Enhanced Feedback Protocols for Oral Presentations Via Cloud Computing
This presentation will discuss my experiences fostering a reflective learning environment via (A) the delivery near-immediate teacher and peer feedback and (B) subsequently requiring students to submit reflections about their learning experiences using cloud computing (G Suite for Education). Certain pedagogical tasks limit teachers’ abilities to provide immediate feedback, such as when students are giving presentations. In this paper, I will explain how cloud computing can help to overcome such challenges, notably by videoing students and incorporating teacher feedback into the video such that students are receiving critical feedback about their language production and also their presentation skills. Thereafter, based on students’ comments and their reflective learning assignments, this presentation will discuss (1) whether students are able to understand the corrective feedback provided, and (2) whether they subsequently demonstrate correct knowledge of the linguistic form or presentational behaviour towards which the feedback was targeted (uptake).
5. Tara McIlroy
Teaching Presentations as Pedagogy
This presentation describes a teaching license course in which learners read a class novel over one semester and complete group micro-teaching assignment at the end of the course. Students were required to 'teach' the class as part of the course requirements, creating short lesson sequences for their peers. Drawing on sociocultural theory (Lantolf, Thorne & Poehner, 2015) and its application to collaborative engagement, the micro-teaching activity and student responses to it provide insight into the application of novels in a specific trainee teaching context. In this presentation I will first introduce the course design, choice of text, and teacher reflections on developing this course over the past three years. Next, I will talk about how to deal with mixed-level classes and some considerations for creating differentiated classroom tasks. Participants will be invited to participate in a sample classroom task at the end of the presentation.
6. David Kluge
Performance in Education: A Nation-wide Group Research Project
One problem with the use of presentation in the classroom is that there is very little quantitative research with the power to convince colleagues and administrators that performance activities are valuable academic tasks. This presentation proposes a large-scale evaluation based on Ellis' concept of Task-Based Learning and his system of task evaluation (1996) to be conducted by a group of teacher/researchers doing small-scale studies that in the aggregate will provide important information for proponents of performance in the classroom . This presentation will go through the steps of conducting a small task evaluation and how the group research project will be conducted.
7. Gordon Rees
Everyone Needs a PAL They Can Rely On: Making Reading Fun with Performance-Assisted Learning
Many EFL teachers are tasked with teaching compulsory reading courses. In some of these required courses, textbooks are chosen for instructors by a course coordinator and the curriculum is sometimes pre-determined. Textbooks adopted for courses like these can be full of facts, dry and uninteresting. Because of this, some students do not like reading and often come into a reading course with the notion that it will probably be boring. In addition to problems with stale materials, in required reading courses teachers also have to deal with unmotivated students. How can instructors make reading fun and motivate students in these types of situations? I will discuss how performance-assisted learning (PAL) was utilized in a second-year, compulsory reading course in an attempt to spice up the curriculum and encourage the use of expressive speech in student presentations.
8 .Vivian Bussinguer-Khavari
Improvise! It's no Compromise!
This workshop introduces the benefits of incorporating improvisation activities into the language classroom. It is a practical hands-on session, which allows participants to experience the excitement of a lesson that utilizes improvisation. Improvising is not compromising your agenda, your curriculum, or your teaching responsibilities. This workshop shows how to adapt ordinary textbook drills and unit themes into improvisation activities' prompts. Improvisation adds humor and excitement to the the language classroom and highly motivates learners. It contributes to the development of such skills as listening, speaking, critical thinking, and team-building, among others. It also helps learners to gain more confidence and become better communicators by requiring them to (1) listen carefully, (2) speak clearly, (3) contribute confidently, and (4) communicate nonverbally. After every improvisation activity learners feel stronger, more capable, more confident, more motivated, and more eager to learn! Adding improvisation activities to your language classroom will revolutionize and innovate it in an amazing way. You and your students will never be the same!Schedule
February 4
9:00-9:45 Registration
9:45-10:00 Opening Ceremony (Kluge, Rees, Zeff )
10:00-12:00 Workshops/Presentations (Rathore, “Process Drama Workshop, Part 1,” 55 min.; Rees, “Everyone Needs a PAL They Can Rely On: Making Reading Fun with Performance-Assisted Learning,” 25 min.)
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00-15:00 Workshops/Presentations (McIlroy, “Teaching Presentations as Pedagogy,” 55 min.; Mindog, ”Digital Drama: Using Technology to Support Monologue Presentations,” 25 mins.)
15:10-16:35 Presentations (MacLean, “Enhanced Feedback Protocols for Oral Presentations Via Cloud Computing,” 25 min.; Kluge, “National Survey Using Micro-evaluation of Performance in Education Tasks,” 25 min.; Mani Ram,”Technology Integration for Performance in Education,” 25 min.)
18:30-20:30 Networking Event (Hotel Restaurant Buffet)
February 5
9:30-9:55 Registration
10:00-12:00 Workshops/Presentations Bussinguer-Khavari “Improvise! It's no Compromise!” 55 min.); Rathore, “Process Drama Workshop, Part 2,” 55 min.)
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00-17:30 Workshops/Presentations (Hinkelman, “Feedback Technologies for Performances: Live and Recorded by Self, Peer and Teacher,” 55 min.; Rathore, “Forum Theatre Workshop” 85 min; Kluge, “How to Do a Readers Theatre Project,” 25 min.; Al Hindasi, “Teaching with Poetry,” 25 min.)
20:00- Cultural Event
February 6
9:00-10:00 Workshop (Kluge, “An Introduction to Living Newspaper Readers Theater” 25 min.; Bussinguer-Khavari 25 min.)
10:00-10:15 Closing Ceremony (Kluge, Rees)
10:15-12:00 Officers Meeting
Complete the form below to register for the conference, Networking Event, & Cultural Event (Snow Festival)
