A trip to Nagano
I spent this weekend in Nagano City, attending a conference organised by The Japan Society of English Language Education, a two-day event featuring over two-hundred presentations given by language professionals from across Japan.
Hayase-sensei, who was giving a presentation himself, accompanied me on the trip, and it was agreed that I was going to use his portable computer to project a couple of PowerPoint slides during my talk. Arriving at the hotel, I discovered that the slides I prepared didn’t behave the way I wanted them to behave, so I spent a fair bit of time tweaking them on Saturday afternoon.
Later that day, before the evening’s banquet, I paid a quick visit to the imposing Zenkoji temple, Nagano’s main landmark. The temple is located about half an hour’s walk from the downtown area, and the straight road leading up to it was cordoned off for a festival which drew large crowds at sunset, all moving up to the temple. Most people arrived in groups and dressed in yukata, a light kimono, that identified them as members of their group. One particularly large group consisted of middle-aged to elderly ladies in nicely designed yukata: walking slowly in double files, they performed bon odoru, a measured, meditative dance to plaintive music that poured from bullhorns mounted along the road.
I should have taken pictures, but I suffered from an attack of photographer’s block, probably because I couldn’t get my mind off the presentation I was to deliver the next day. Among the crowd, I also spotted a group of very cute pre-school children dressed in sailor suits made from white fabric and the British and the American flag, respectively. I doubt their outfit had anything to do with the conference, but I could still kick myself for not taking any photos because the Japanese kids dressed in Star-spangled Banners and Union Jacks would have made a perfect illustration for this post.
On Sunday I gave my talk on Tawawa. A big chunk of the presentation was devoted to weblogs in general; advisedly so, since few educators in Japan have heard of weblogs, let alone read any, or have thought of using them as an educational tool. While putting the presentation together, I was casting around trying to find a peg to hang it on; eventually I fell back on a long-standing grievance of mine, the apparent fact that Japanese schools don’t teach English as a means of communication. So I pitched Tawawa as an environment in which students get to use English in real, honest-to-goodness, authentic communication. The slides behaved nicely and the talk went over quite well, I felt.
Among the presentations I attended, I enjoyed Emiko Horton’s Developing Vocabulary and Listening Comprehension with Visual Materials the most. Horton-sensei uses flash cards with images to teach vocabulary to primary school children — using English! Here at the university I’ve been going around for a while imploring teachers to teach their English classes in English rather than Japanese, and the usual reply I get is that it would be too hard on the students, who wouldn’t be able to follow. Yet here’s this teacher who teaches English in English to primary school kids, and she had a video clip that shows a class of very genki (as in: happy and active) third graders having a whale of a time in an English-language English lesson. Compare and contrast this with the Japanese-only, interaction-free zone of the English classes that aim to prepare students for university entrance exams. Amazing.
On the way back home I was traveling with Hayase-sensei and Wakamatsu-sensei. Somewhere between Nagano and Nagoya our train stopped dead for about two hours because of a very heavy rain which, I guess, threatened the safety of the rail tracks a bit further ahead. Because of the incident we missed the last train going from Nagoya to Tsu. We picked up a refund on the Limited Express surcharge, took the last train to Yokkaichi, and hopped on a taxi from there.
Oh, and — ironically for somebody pushing the use of weblogs — I didn’t have Internet access for the whole weekend. I think I’ll have to get myself one of those portable things with a modem.
Comments
At Saturday’s banquet I compared notes about academic writing classes with Mochizuki-sensei of Tsukuba University, which was interesting since here at the Department we’re about to streamline the composition classes. I also managed to get him interested in the APA templates I cribbed together to take the pain out of formatting papers.
Next, I was stalking Urano-sensei of Hokkai-Gakuen University, an organiser of the conference and an educator who’s been experimenting with weblogs in education himself. Just as I was closing in on him and got ready to pounce, the gentleman standing next to him, another organiser, turned around, handed me a 1.8 litre bottle of sake and asked me to take it since they had too many of those. With my attention momentarily deflected by this unexpected advance, Urano-sensei managed to escape. I’m far too easily defeated.
But you meant the discussion of my talk. Well, there were over two-hundred presentations spread over two days and some sixteen rooms. The organisers stipulated that a presentation had to be over within, count ‘em, twenty-five minutes — including the discussion. I got through my talk in twenty-three minutes, which left two minutes for Question and Answer. A gentleman asked if my students were writing in the classroom, and I said, “No.”
By the time I had shut down the computer and disconnected it from the projector, everybody had hurried on to another presentation.
At the end of the talk I projected my e-mail address, however, and invited everyone to contact me if they were trying to implement something similar — maybe the “challenging questions” are yet to appear via e-mail.
Ruedi, nice to hear about your trip to Nagano. “High Five” for you and everybody at the Tawawa’s family. Did you hear some other presentations like Tawawa’s work? What sore of presentations did you attend to? Any general comment about the conference?
There were a few other tech-related presentations, but none about weblogs, which, it seems, haven’t quite appeared on the radar yet. There’s Andrew Johnson’s brand-new Creating a Writing Course Utilizing Class and Student Blogs (cf. Aaron Campbell’s take on the article, with thich I agree), there was a presentation on Blogs: A Humane Approach to Interactive Learning at a recent JALT conference, and there are other things brewing, but most of them seem to involve password-protected closet blogging.
General comment? It was well organised and busy. Very busy =)
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Sounds like a action packed weekend. It’s good to hear that your presentation went well. I wonder what kind of questions you received…anything interesting or particularly challenging?