JALT National

One interesting presentation at this year's JALT National conference in Shizuoka was by Joachim Castellano who had brought a NY web designers perspective to university English classes in Japan and came up with some insights into design. To paraphrase, Moodle is mediocre, Blogs are a bind, Twitter is great for getting people to tweet a lot, but Facebook was best for generating conversation. The best thing about facebook was that it kept together all the conversations in the same place, instead of putting them up chronologically.

The problems his students faced were account fatigue, and he made a point of telling them the dangers of using their own names. In fact, he has two facebook accounts, one for his friends and one for students. I wasn't sure what to make of that as I think part of being a teacher is being authentic, and when you see people with 1,500 "friends" adding a few hundred students into your life shouldn't be too bad, or should it?

This did get me thinking about the design of moodle, and if when you log on, instead of saying "you're in this class" and "here's your homework" it was more like "hana-chan sent you a message" or "today is Taro's birthday" or "Megumi is online now" then it might be a bit more popular. In other words, I suppose people-based rather than activity or content based. That would be especially powerful for language teaching as we can get them all to do it in the target language, but probably for any other kind of learning too as it all has a social component.

That led to another session where Malcolm Swanson was talking about Elgg (at elgg.org) which is a social networking application. He was talking about digitising the curriculum and one thing he did, which sounds like a good idea, was to only tell his students homework by email, and not in class. His results, compared with a control class, showed an interesting mirror (in line with the conference title) that more students who didn't have online homework said they wanted it, while more students who did have it said they didn't want it.

There was another talk about blended learning by some folks from Kanda University who have a Blended Learning Classroom, which is basically a normal classroom with a big stash of laptops that can be used when needed and put away when needed. Great idea. Not exactly sure why it took a whole presentation when I could put it in one sentence, but there you go! Also there seemed to be a lack in the audience of anyone who might be able to furnish their institution with a room full of thirty lap tops.

They mentioned the speech accent archive at George Mason University, which was quite interesting, having recordings of people from all over the world reading out a passage. One problem with it, of course, is that the passage is written in American English, and that anyone reading it is going to be reading it to try to sound correct, rather than speaking in their natural words and pronunciation of casual speech. Interesting none the less.

Another impressive technical talk was about a vocab site that gave students four new words each time they logged on, and repeated them in several different styles of question after increasingly long gaps. One nice feature was that getting the wrong answer still allowed you another chance to get it right, but increased the number of questions you had to do in that session. Their system would work on a mobile platform, but a drag and drop item would be difficult there.

As far as plenaries went, I caught the second half of Jim Lantolf talking about some fairly heavy Vygotskian dialectic. (Not sure exactly what "dialectic" means, but it sounds good!) I do intrinsically feel that Vygostsky was right about most things even though I don't fully understand what he said. One point that really rang true was that giving visual images is better than words, because words can simply be memorised wheras images have to be worked out and thought through. This is where Vygotsky comes in, saying that meaning and knowledge are created.

Merrill Swain had noisy two-page stapled A3 handouts that she got everyone to turn over at the same time making a noise like the leaves of an early autumn tree in a heavy wind. I wasn't sure what to make of her as she seems a bitter enemy of Krashen who also seems to make a lot of sense. She carried on the Vygotskian torch talking calling for a new word "languaging" to be adopted. For a start, I think we have quite enough words already, and there are plenty of natural ways in which new words are formed without linguists, who should know better, trying to invent more, so I shall not be using that word. The point she made, that did seem completely reasonable, was that we have words for speaking, reading, listening and writing, but no action word to cover all these activities. "Thought finds its reality in language" was his quote, I think, although I can't read exactly what I wrote. Maybe it's "meaning" not reality.

Swain also mentioned a tranlsation problem from the Russian to the English where he has a single word to refer to both teaching and learning, while the Americans translate it into "teaching" and the Russians translate it into "learning". Actually that may have been Lantolf. Anyway, that's a bit like Praxis, which is the combination of theory and practice. The bit where they meet. The bit where everything happens. Food for thought. Or should that be thought for food?

The highlight of the conference was probably Paul Nation, who spoke with no slides, just an A4 handout covering 10 vocabulary activities. The main things I came away with were resounding justification for not teaching vocabulary in class as it is a massive waste of time, the realisation that learning vocabulary explicitly can help learn it implicitly, so Krashen does not apply to vocab and in fact it's OK for students to use bilingual flash cards and probably even to write Japanese glosses next to English words that they come across. Perhaps I should stop telling students off when they do that...

Another highlight was Nobuyuki Hino, who is widely published in Japanese as an advocate of World Englishes and coined the expression "Yakudoku" to describe the way English is taught here.