the lives of teachers

An Interview with Diane Hawley Nagatomo from darren elliott on Vimeo.

At the JALT National conference in Hamamatsu last month, I had a great time talking to Diane Hawley Nagatomo. Diane is a teacher, researcher and materials writer working in Japan. Some of her most recent research has been published by Multilingual Matters in the book “Exploring Japanese University English Teachers’ Professional Identity”, which we discussed in detail. We also talked about materials writing, gender in language education (Diane is currently co-coordinator for the JALT GALE SIG) and plenty more. If you want to read more several of Diane’s articles are available online and definitely worth looking at. Thanks for watching!

I very much enjoyed presenting a workshop at the JALT National conference in Hamamatsu at the weekend. Over the last couple of years I have been working more and more on video projects with students, and in this presentation I reported on what I have developed so far. We started by talking about the various options available to teachers – pocket video cameras, traditional camcorders, mobile devices, webcams and so on. You can see a short video with examples here.

A Field Guide to Digital Video from darren elliott on Vimeo.

This checklist covers some of the factors to consider when choosing a camera and planning a project, and a few questions to ask yourself.

We then looked at some samples my students have created. Unfortunately, I can’t share them publicly online. But I can outline the project cycles we have undertaken.

Transcription

This is the simplest activity. Student conversations, debates or presentations can be recorded for later analysis. This video transcription worksheet shows the kind of thing you can do. I usually change the questions each time depending on what we have been studying in class (and because familiarity breeds contempt!). One important point is to emphasise that students are not only looking for mistakes, but alternatives and improvements. Yes, I want them to use the third person -s accurately if possible, but I also want them to develop their communicative strategies.

How-To Videos

Taking the website videojug as our model, students create instructional videos. They start by watching videojug’s own video on how to make a video, and to .check the advice offered, then choose a video of their own for homework analysis.
Students then plan and shoot their own video. Some language input is obviously helpful.

Drama

As with the ‘How-to’ video’s, it is important to plan carefully. Using a Storyboard enables both you and the students to focus on your task clearly (and makes editing easier later). With drama activities, it is helpful for students to express their emotions. Method acting is interesting, but any activities about self expression, body language or emotion can be effective.

Screencasts

If you have a windows machine, you can use windows media software, and Macs have QuickTime. There are many other applications available. Jing works with both Macs and PCs, and is free to download and use.

One man who has done a lot of great work with screen capture software is Russell Stannard. His Teacher Training Videos website teaches teachers how to use technology for education.

Two ways in which I have used screencasts – to give feedback on student writing, and to have students teach each other how to use web based tools like prezi, google drive and so on.

Alphabet

Allow me the indulgence. You could do the same with your classes with lexical sets, of course.

fghijk from darren elliott on Vimeo.

Links

Vimeo, for uploading video to share (password protected) with students.

Lipdub for beginners

wevideo online editing application

My previous blog posts about making student video.

A is for Ankylosaurus

How-to student video making

Watch Yourself

I was fortunate to meet Junko Yamanaka at the 5th Annual Extensive Reading Seminar in Nagoya, Japan. She is a well known figure in extensive reading circles, especially in Nagoya, and I have used several of her textbooks very successfully. We talked about her experience as a teacher, teacher trainer and materials writer, about education in Japan, and many other things. It was great to finally meet her!

Thanks also to the JALT ER SIG for putting on such a great event and doing such great work all year round promoting Extensive Reading in Japan.

I was very pleased to spend some time with Dr. Stephen Krashen at the 5th Annual Extensive Reading Seminar in Nagoya, Japan. Dr. Krashen is a man so well known that even my wife was impressed when I set this one up. We talked about some of his hundreds of publications, about his groundbreaking hypotheses, and about learning to read in first and second languages.

If you would like to know more, Dr. Krashen makes plenty of his work available online. Scott Thornbury’s blog post ‘K is for Krashen’ is interesting as ever, but the comments (including those from Stephen Krashen himself) add value. Finally, thanks to the JALT ER SIG for putting on such a great event and doing such great work all year round promoting Extensive Reading in Japan.

I was fortunate to meet Dr. Stephen Bax at the JALTCALL conference in Nishinomiya, Japan recently. This is the third conference I have attended and, as usual, it was well worth the trip. Dr. Bax gave a keynote talk about ‘normalisation’ in educational technology, which was informative, engaging and relevant. We talked about his keynote as well as other work he has been involved in throughout his career. If you can, seek out his articles on ‘normalisation’ if you are at all interested in educational technology.

I met with Phil Benson at the JALT national conference in Tokyo, Japan at the end of November 2011. He had just given an excellent plenary entitled Autonomy in Language Teaching and Learning: How to Do it “Here”, ‘Here’ being wherever you are….acknowledging the commonly heard complaint levelled at promoters of Learner Autonomy – “Yes that sounds lovely, but it wouldn’t work here”

If you want to know more, I am currently working of a review of Phil’s second edition of Teaching and Researching: Autonomy, and it tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

I very much enjoyed meeting Keith Johnson at the JALT conference in Tokyo last week. We discussed a few aspects of what adds up to a very distinguished career in language teaching. More recently, Professor Johnson has focussed on expertise studies, wrestling with the difficult question of what makes an expert teacher…. and you might want to reconsider the pop-science of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. We also had time to discuss the groundbreaking book ‘The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching’, which he co-edited, and CLT’s impact on the profession as a whole. Many thanks to Keith Johnson for his well-considered replies to all my questions.

I was very happy to finally meet Ken Wilson, at the JALT conference in Tokyo last week. Ken gave several presentations, including a fantastic closing plenary. I’ve seen him speak before, and I can’t stress this enough – if you get a chance, get to one of his talks! His theme this time around was motivation, and I certainly left feeling refreshed and energised. That’s pretty much what I want from a plenary!

Straight afterwards, we sat down for a chat about materials writing, motivation and online community. Ken answered all my questions, even the slightly unfair ones, thoughtfully, honestly and expansively… so please enjoy.

(If you are interested in the Dick Allwright article we mention, in relation to the difference and deficiency views of textbooks, you can see it here)

Although I earn my money up at the university, my main job these days seems to be teaching of young learners. Two of them, boys, aged two and four. I’ve started sitting down with Ibuki everyday for ten or twenty minutes to do our ‘letters’, and both boys love being read to, but I wanted to try something a bit different for fun. So here is the first part of our family alphabet…. twenty one more letters to follow.

Step by Step

Find words for each letter of the alphabet. The boys need help with this, but older children should be able to do it. I asked them what they liked, what they play with, what they could see around the house and so on to prompt them.

It is preferable, I think, if you can keep some consistency with phonics…especially in the early stages of trying to read. But on the other hand I wanted to use words which they know and which have some meaning for them. With this in mind I was able to substitute giraffe (Satsuki’s favourite animal) for Gorillaz (Satsuki’s favourite band), but I stuck with ‘Ice Cream’ over ‘Ink’ or ‘Igloo’ just because it has more relevance for them.

I used an Edirol R-09HR digital voice recorder for the sounds, and a lo-fi video camera called a Digital Harinezumi (get one now if you can, because they will go out of production soon) for the visuals, but that’s just because I like the effects and I like playing with video. Once I had enough audio, I clipped together the parts I needed in Garageband, then trimmed the video to fit the length and edited them together in iMovie. I added the text at that stage too. I did one letter at a time, then stitched them all together and added a drum loop from Garageband to top it off. However, you could do something similar in far less time if you use a video camera with a built-in audio channel.

Applications

1. A class alphabet. You should check, but here in Japan I think just about every family has access to rudimentary video equipment, be it a mobile phone, smartphone, a feature of a point-and-shoot digital camera, or a full-on camcorder. If you are confident that your young learners have access to the technology, get the parents involved too. Give each student a letter or two for homework, and have them record a segment and email it in to you. You can quickly stitch them together for everyone to enjoy.
2. If you have flip video cameras or the equivalent, and your young learners are old enough, you could do the same thing in class time. Send each team out with a camera and have them look for a complete alphabet around the school. (You might want to plant a few items in preparation). If they do it sequentially, there is no editing required.
3. Other learners might benefit from recording lexical sets. Concrete nouns are obviously easier, but cataloguing abstract nouns, adjectives and verbs will force students to be creative.
4. Check out Barbara Sakamoto’s great use of voicethread to make class alphabet book online.

An Interview with Kaz Hagiwara from darren elliott on Vimeo.

Kaz Hagiwara is a teacher of Japanese working in Australia, and a leading exponent of (de) suggestopedia. It’s a method you have probably heard of, but in seeing Kaz’s presentations and spending some time talking to him I realised that there was more to it than I had imagined….

We may be living in a ‘post methods era’ but it is still worth looking at teaching theories developed in the past. I recommend a look at these links if you are interested in exploring further. Thanks to Kaz for giving up his time at the JALT conference 2010.