Getting the Most From the First Few Weeks of Classes and From the First Few Months of JALT
April 24, 1999 (Saturday), 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
David McMurray, Fukui Prefectural University.

Start planning now for your new classes. Learn how to design an efficient syllabus that will continue to work throughout the course. Explore effective ways to group students for team work. Understand organizational behavior. This workshop will introduce ways to introduce yourself, to get to know your students, and to discover their preferred learning strategies in the first few weeks of classes. The second half of the workshop follows the same framework for getting to know JALT. Informal social gathering afterwards.

Graphic Organizers for Active Learning
May 23, 1999 (Sunday), 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Keith Lane and Jeff Maggard, Miyazaki International College.

Graphic organizers are visual aids that can help students recognize information, organize it, and express it in their own words. The presenter will introduce a number of graphic organizers, discuss their merits, and give advice about using them in classes. The participants will also have an opportunity to develop mind-maps and explain them to the group.

Speaker Charles LeBeau Professional Trainer, Author of "Speaking of Speech"
Speech & Debate; High Schools & Universities
June 5 - June 12, 1999
	A highly practical workshop, covering both the content and the techniques of teaching speech and debate to low-level learners.

DATE: June 12, 1999 (Saturday)

TIME: 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

PLACE:
Kagoshima University, Faculty of Education Building, room 101, Address: Kagoshima City, Korimoto 1-chome, 20-6

INFO:
Sophia Shang, tel: 0995-42-1732 (h), 0995-43-1111 (work)
fax: 0995-43-1114 (work), e-mail: shang@kwc-u.ac.jp

http://www.kyushuelt.com/jalt/lebeau.html

Using Concordances from Small Corpora: Video Transcripts and Newspapers
June 26, 1999 (Saturday), 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Bill Pellowe, Aso Foreign Language Travel College.
NOTE LOCATION: Shigakukan Univ. Language Lab.

This hands-on workshop will introduce participants to CONC, a freeware concordancing program for Macintosh. Practical applications of this software will concentrate on its ability to provide comprehensive, interactive "indexes" of all the words in any particular text. Specifically, for teachers using videos, the presenter will argue that this function is of great use in selecting and preparing lesson materials. Further applications will be demonstrated using newspaper files to illustrate how concordancing software can help teachers with courses focusing on writing, grammar/lexis, and English for Specific Purposes. Equipment permitting, each participant will have plenty of opportunities to learn how to use CONC, and to use it on various texts provided by the speaker. Because the user agreement of CONC allows it to be distributed freely, each participant can take a copy of the software home.

Bill Pellowe has been teaching in Japan since 1990. He received his MA in TELF with distinction from the University of Birmingham

Teaching Students to give Interesting Speeches
July 25, 1999 (Sunday), 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Dennis Woolbright, Seinan Jo Gakuin Jr. College.

Preparing students for English recitation and speech contests is a part of many an English teacher's job. Helping the students to get ideas and to know how to present these ideas in an interesting style is a challenge to both the Native speaker and their Japanese counterparts. This will be a very practical workshop with useful suggestions on how to motivate students to begin their speeches in an interesting way, present their ideas and research and finally finish off with a conclusion that will stay with their listeners.

CE, RO, AC, AE: Which learning style are you?
September 12, 1999 (Sunday), 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Jane Hoelker

The perfect lesson plan maximizes participation in the learning activity, and minimizes resistance to the learning experience. An understanding of learner differences based on the detailed, researched theory of the Experiential Learning Cycle as applied to the classroom enables the teacher to design this perfect lesson plan. First, workshop participants solve a problem in small groups, and discover which learning style they are: CE the intuitive learner; RO the reflective learner; AC the logical learner; or AE the active learner. Each of the 4 types will analyze their special strengths and their weaknesses. Next, the audience apply the theory to the classroom and design the perfect lesson plan. Discussion follows on how the perfect lesson plan leads all learners through all four steps of the learning cycle, so that all can practice their strengths and improve weaknesses. Finally, participants will explore practical implementation in the classroom and, time permitting, cross-cultural application.

Motivating Japanese Children to be active learners
October 24, 1999 (Sunday), 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
David Paul, David English House

Japanese students generally begin learning English with enthusiasm and curiosity but often become passive learners who wait to receive know- ledge from their teachers and who find it difficult to produce English spontaneously. In this presentation, the presenter will examine how this tendency can be avoided. He will suggest that by nurturing and strengthening elementary school children's natural curiosity and presenting structures through student-initiated activities, we can train children to be active learners who are interested in finding out about English for themselves, and who are capable of speaking, reading and writing English at a high level. The presentation will be full of ideas for games and songs which work with Japanese children and include an introduction to learning reading and writing through a simplified approach to phonics.

Home-Grown Texts
November 27, 1999 (Saturday), 3:00 - 5:00 p.m., followed by Bonenkai
Malcolm Swanson
An interactive event on organizing and producing your own textbook or teaching materials.