Newsletter
This Month's Newsletter
Dear friends and colleagues,
Hope you are having a brilliant summer holiday. We have major but exciting in Tokyo JALT with incoming and outgoing officers.
Tokyo JALT Officers (2023-2024)
We're excited to announce our new and re-elected chairpersons!
President: Heather Woodward
Treasurer: Andrew Warrick
Programs Chair: Adelaide Vambe
Webmaster: Marisa Lucian
Teaching Young Learners Co-Chairs: Gaby Benthien and Ruth Iida
Publications Co-Chairs: Robert Lowe and Jesse Reed
JET/ALT Coordinator: Marie Claudette Escabusa
They join our current chairpersons -
Membership Chair: Scott McLellan
Teaching Young Learners Co-Chair: Yitzha Sarwano Boon
Social Events Chair: Sophie Otsuru
Public Relations Chair: Liling Kurakane
Ed Tech Chair: Sarah Deutchman
A Note from Outgoing Officers
Welcome to all our new officers. As we leave Tokyo JALT, we just wanted to say thank you to all the members and officers of the Tokyo JALT for giving us the opportunity to be a part of and run this chapter. We have learned so much through this journey and hope you have all benefitted from the events our entire team worked hard to put together for all of you.
Have a great summer and we know you will all be well taken care of by our new team.
Charu Gupta, Jackie Talken, Kazue Suzuki, Zi Ning Wee
Upcoming Events
Check out the JALT National calendar, which has a full list of events around Japan. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, many if not all JALT events are open to our members, so be sure to check this calendar regularly. For full details on our Tokyo Chapter events, visit our calendar HERE.
Tokyo State of the Chapter event with featured speakers Judit Kormos & Shungo Suzuki (Postponed)
Speakers: Judit Kormos and Shungo Suzuki
Due to unavoidable circumstances we have had to postpone the presentation by Dr. Kormos and Dr. Suzuki. As soon as we have a new date and time, we will post the details on our website and relay the information on our newsletter. Our sincere apologies.
As part of our annual State of the Chapter event, we are very happy to welcome Judit Kormos and Shungo Suzuki as our featured speakers. Following a brief chapter meeting, during which we will announce officer election results, Dr. Kormos and Dr. Suzuki will speak about Investigating second language fluency among Japanese university students: Predictors of performance and task-related variability. We hope you can join us!
Investigating second language fluency among Japanese university students: Predictors of performance and task-related variability
In the context of the learning and teaching of second language (L2) speaking skills, oral fluency is commonly regarded as one of the major learning goals, due to its important role in real-world communication. A certain level of fluency is necessary to maintain the interlocuter’s attention in oral communication and to be able to save speakers’ own face (Lennon, 2000), and oral fluency is also a significant factor in the comprehensibility of L2 speech (Suzuki & Kormos, 2020). Fluency constitutes an important aspect of the assessment of speaking skills in a variety of high-stakes oral proficiency tests and is also a robust indicator of L2 proficiency (Tavakoli et al., 2020). Therefore, it is essential to better understand L2 oral fluency as a construct particularly in the Japanese higher education context where learners need to develop spoken language proficiency for use in future workplace contexts.
In this presentation, we report two studies forming part of a larger project that has investigated predictors and variability in L2 oral fluency among 128 Japanese university students. In the first study, we examined the relationship between the utterance and cognitive fluency, and in the second study we analysed variations in temporal features of fluency across tasks. Our findings yield insights into what L2 skills and knowledge areas learners need to develop to become fluent L2 speakers and how cognitive demands of different types of task can exert an impact on the fluency of students’ performance. The findings can assist in syllabus and curriculum design for university-level language teaching as well as inform the assessment of Japanese university students’ oral communication skills.
For full abstracts and speaker bios, visit our Tokyo JALT webpage.
Call for Presentation Proposals
LD30: Learning for Change and Action, Making a Difference for the Future
Deadline for Proposals: Monday, August 7th 2023
Date of Event: October 21st and 22nd, 2023
Location: Gakushuin University, Mejiro Campus
Proposal Submission Link (Teachers): https://ld30.edzil.la/pages/531
Proposal Submission Link (Students): https://ld30.edzil.la/pages/533
Website: https://ld30.edzil.la//
LD SIG is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a conference held in collaboration with the Teacher Development SIG and the Global Issues in Language Education SIG on the 21st and 22nd of October.
As it is held at Gakushuin University, Mejiro Campus, in the centre of Tokyo, it will be an excellent opportunity to participate or present. The conference theme is “Learning for Change and Action, Making a Difference for the Future.”
Both students and teachers are warmly invited to participate by actively engaging in presentations, workshops, and discussions exploring innovative approaches to learner development, teacher development, and global issues in language education.
There will be a diverse range of plenary speakers presenting on a wide range of topics: Phil Benson (Learner Autonomy and Language Teaching Development), Stacey Vye & Chiyuki Yanase (Teacher Well-Being), Taichi Watanabe (SDGs and Becoming a social entrepreneur).
To find out more about the conference, please go to the conference website: https://ld30.edzil.la/.
For further information on events, visit our Tokyo JALT webpage.
In case you missed one of our recent events...
See Past Events for details or check out a video on our YouTube channel.
Job Listings
Tokyo JALT Job Listings: https://sites.google.com/view/tokyojalt/about-us/jobs
National JALT Job Listings: https://jalt-publications.org/tlt/departments/career-development-corner/jobs
If you have any questions or are interested in sharing job information, please contact us at tokyo.jalt.publicity@gmail.com.
Stay safe and we look forward to seeing you at our events!
Charu Gupta
Tokyo JALT President
tokyo.jalt.president@gmail.com
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Newsletter Submissions
If you have a job opening or an event announcement you would like included in the newsletter, please email our Publications Chair at tokyo.jalt.president@gmail.com.
Tokyo JALT believes that applicants for teaching positions should be judged solely on their qualifications; therefore, Tokyo JALT will not post job listings that discriminate based on age, gender, sexuality, race, nativeness, religion, country of origin, etc. Please take this into account when sending your job postings.