JALT Teaching Children Special Interest Group Founder

Aleda Krause

10:00 am - 11:00 am
Exploring New and Timeless Techniques in EFL for Children
Presenter: Aleda Krause

What's your favorite language teaching technique? Why do you like it? What technique is your students' most and least favorite? Why do we use the techniques we use anyway? As language teachers, our techniques are our tools. They help us create our lessons, erect an English frame in our students' minds, build up their language base, and forge new pathways and connections in their brains.
In this presentation, we will find out where our language techniques come from and how many of them are derived from language teaching methods developed in the past. These include methods like Grammar Translation, The Silent Way, the Audio-Lingual Method, and Total Physical Response. Each method has much we can still use.

Aleda Krause is the founding coordinator of the JALT Teaching Children Special Interest Group and co-author of SuperKids, SuperTots, and the Longman Children's Picture Dictionary. She has been teaching children for more than 20 years, since her daughter was old enough to have friends who wanted to learn English, also teaches university courses for future teachers of children, and has done teacher training workshops all over the world.

Chiba University Professor

Mitsue Allen-Tamei

11:20 - 12:20
Tasks and Activities - The Story-Based Curriculum
Presenter: Mitsue Allen-Tamai

This seminar will start with a brief introduction of content-based approach and activity-based approach, which emphasize the importance of providing meaningful contexts to young learners for their language acquisition. The lecturer will explain her idea of using stories as the core of a curriculum based on those approaches.  Participants will learn several techniques to use stories in a classroom and create their own classroom activities using the stories they choose.

Mitsue Allen-Tamai (Ed.D) is a professor at Chiba University and an adjunct professor at Temple University in Japan. She has been teaching courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels to train students to become English teachers of young children. Her main research interest is literacy development among young EFL learners.

Miyagi Gakuin Women's University Associate Professor

John Wilshire

13:30 - 14:30
Lesson Planning - 4 Key Concepts
Presenter: John Wiltshier

If we see great teachers teach the classes always run so smoothly. The teacher enjoys teaching and children enjoy learning. Such classes are created at the lesson planning stage. Great teachers invariably have clear lesson plans which guide them through their lesson. This presentation will highlight 4 key concepts that should be considered when lesson planning. Concepts that will help turn your good classes into great ones.

John Wiltshier has been a teacher for 19 years. He majored in primary school education and his TESOL Masters degree had a special focus on teaching English to young learners. Currently John is an associate professor at Miyagi University but also designs and teaches courses for teachers of English to children at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University. He is also known as a co-author of the new edition of English Firsthand Access and English Firsthand Success.

Anaheim University Founding Dean, Graduate School of Education 

Dr. David Nunan

14:50 - 15:50
[Webcast session] Classroom-based assessment
Presenter: David Nunan

In this presentation, I would like to look at classroom-based assessment, that is assessment as a tool for learning. In the presentation, I will explore the following questions and issues.

• What is assessment? How is it related to evaluation?
• Why do we assess?
• Who should be responsible for assessment?
• What is direct assessment? What are the pros and cons of direct versus indirect assessment? Why has direct assessment become an issue with the development of Task-based Language Teaching?
• What is the difference between criterion- and norm-referenced testing?
• What techniques are available for assessing students?

Dr. David Nunan, Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Anaheim University, is the founding Dean of the Anaheim University Graduate School of Education and served as President of Anaheim University from 2006 to 2008. Dr. Nunan also developed and oversees the Online TESOL Certificate program offered through the Anaheim University David Nunan Institute for Language Education.  Dr. Nunan is a world-renowned linguist and the world's leading textbook author with worldwide sales exceeding 1,000,000,000 texts.  He has been involved in the teaching of graduate programs for such prestigious institutions as Columbia University, the University of Hawaii, Monterey Institute for International Studies, the University of Hong Kong and many more.

Pearson Longman