Professional Development through Collaboration

I’m regularly asked “What’s the latest method?”, suggesting that the concept of method persists, despite recent attempts to bury it (“The method concept is dead!”).  I will review the history of methods, both to critique it, and to draw some lessons from past methods, arguing that (a) there is nothing new under the sun and (b) dogme is not a method!   

When conducting research by ourselves, it may be easy to become boxed in with our ideas and to be uncertain of how to proceed with our individual projects. And yet, if provided with opportunities to articulate our often chaotic thoughts and thus give them shape, clarity, and meaning in a supportive and non-judgmental environment to a fellow peer who is willing to listen and understand them, we may begin to see things more clearly, think more creatively, gain new perspectives on our research, and find our direction out of the particular box we are in. This presentation will describe how a number of teachers have made use of Instant Messenger Cooperative Development (IMCD) (Boon, 2005, 2007, 2009); an online tool which utilizes the Skype text chat function and Cooperative Development discourse framework for professional  development (Edge, 1992, 2002). It will explore the journeys IMCD participants have made in regular sessions in order to help each other gain new understandings on particular projects and be enabled to move forward with their research.

Bio: Andy Boon is associate professor at Toyo Gakuen University. He is also JALT West Tokyo program chair. He has published articles on action research, teacher development and motivation.

“Out of the slimy mud of words… there springs the perfect order of speech.” (Eliot). In this session we will look at how, with just a handful of words, you can get a bridgehead into the grammar of English, without ever having to mention grammar at all. We’ll see how the small words accrete other words, become big words, and then, given the right conditions, release their grammar “for free”. In so doing, I will report on developments in psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics that suggest that language is a complex system with emergent properties.

This presentation reports on research carried out in a content-based peace education course designed for third and fourth year university students in Japan. In order to fulfill part of the course requirements, students developed a storyline for a peace-themed graded reader and were responsible for cooperatively writing their own portion of the story. The stories were then reformulated by the teacher. Reformulations have been defined by Cohen (1983) as a technique which consists of a native speaker re-working a piece of student writing. The reformulation preserves the original ideas of the students but corrects surface errors and addresses concerns of “style and clarity of thought” (Cohen, 1982). Once they had read the reformulations at home, students then had the opportunity to discuss them in class. To facilitate their talk, students were provided with prompts directing them to look at the grammar, vocabulary, style and cohesion of the text. Students were required to orally work though the reformulations because previous studies have shown (DiCamilla and Anton, 1997) that peer dialogue is important in helping students to navigate feedback and co-construct new meanings from the reformulated text. Student discussions were recorded on tape to determine answers to the following questions: (1) What do students notice about their reformulated stories? (2) For what reasons do they accept or reject reformulations made by the teacher? This study is loosely based on the work done by Swain and Lapkin (2002) on reformulations made of stories written by French immersion students in Canada.

Bio: Jennifer Yphantides is a lecturer at Kanda University. She has been teaching since 1993 and has worked in North America, Europe, The Middle East and Asia. She has a BA in History from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, an MA in War Studies from King’s College, London and an MA in TESOL from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her current teaching and research interests include content based learning and instruction, peace education and extensive reading.

Classroom speaking is traditionally thought of either as a way of reinforcing newly learned language structures – that is, as accuracy practice – or as a means of developing the skill of speaking itself, i.e.as fluency practice. But it is now thought that speaking may also be a means, not just for practicing language, but for learning it. Having outlined some basic principles, I will attempt to show how they might be realised in classroom practice.

This talk borrows the metaphor of an ecology of learning (Brown, 2000; Richardson, 2002) in demonstrating the ways blended learning brings together established face-to-face teaching with technologically-enhanced instruction. It is hoped that those attending will gain new insights from the combining and associating of established ideas with cutting-edge pedagogical solutions. Establishing a learning ecology involves the creation of a learning environment, and a delivery mechanism for that environment, allowing students a diversity of learning options. Blended learning fits in by allowing for a range of learning styles to blossom under in-class directed learning with an instructor embedded in fully integrated materials available anytime, anywhere, via online labs. In order to meet the needs and expectations of a generation of learners brought up on technology, the diversity lying at the heart of the ecology demands that ICT be incorporated into education. Investigations of educational practices (Bonk & Graham, 2006) support these assertions, emphasizing the need for any blended courses to provide integrated instructional design and delivery. Some examples of materials developed by the presenter for online labs will be introduced, enabling those attending to enhance their ecologies of learning when returning to their own teaching contexts.

Bonk, C. & Graham, C. (2006). Handbook of blended learning: Global perspectives, local designs. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer Publishing.

Brown, J.S. (2000). Growing up digital: How the web changes work, education, and theways people learn. Change Magazine, March/April, pp. 11-20.

Richardson, A. (2002). An Ecology of Learning and the Role of eLearning in the Learning Environment: a Discussion Paper. Education AU Limited, Global Summit 2002, pp. 47-51

Bio: Roger Palmer was born and raised in the UK. He graduated from the University of London in history, before embarking on postgraduate work in education. Roger is on the full-time teaching faculty of the Hirao School of Management, Konan University. He has led professional development seminars and workshops in Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, and is the co-author (with Graeme Todd) of iZone, Longman Asia’s four-level blended print-digital course.

In this very practical session, I will workshop a number of grammar activities that, in my mind, embody the qualities of effective grammar teaching. At the same time I will attempt to draw links between these activities and the principles underlying a “dogme approach”.

Harmer states, “fluency is the success/failure divide for LL. My question is how come some Ss get it, others not. ” (Twitter, 2010). Perhaps students who “get it” are the ones who first understand some basic underlying theories of fluency. This new classroom action research project measures how students respond to a TOEFL-based, 18-month study abroad preparatory course in a Japanese university program that approaches raising TOEFL scores through intense fluency development. Focusing on all four skills with equal attention to four strands: meaning-based input and output, a focus on form and fluency practice (Nation, 2001), how will students respond? Can fluency training lead to either increased TOEFL scores or increased confidence or motivation?