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.
Joy Egbert was in Kyoto, Japan for the 2010 JALTCALL conference and gave the keynote speech on student engagement. In this interview we talked about that, teacher training, creating ‘flow’ and ‘micro-flow’ situations, and working in limited technology contexts. Joy has a book coming out this year on the last topic, which I am very much looking forward to reading.
I had read a little about flow and the name Csikszentmihhalyi (which Joy can not only pronounce, but spell without reference to notes) but it was good to hear about the relationship between flow and teaching from someone who has been working in that area. Check google scholar to find Joy’s articles. But in the meantime, watch Tina Weymouth playing bass in this clip… that’s flow, I think ; D
The Japan Association of Language Teaching is over thirty years old now, and currently numbers around three-thousand members. One of it’s larger special interest groups is the CALL sig with an internationally peer-reviewed journal, and last weekend I attended it’s annual conference. Paul Lewis, one of the co-chairs and someone with a longstanding involvement with the sig, details the history of the conference here.
As well as making two presentations of my own, I did a few interviews, went to plenty of great presentations and plenaries, and met a lot of very nice people. Like most conferences, this one had a theme, and I thought it would be interesting to reflect on it as I walked around the campus. The question is “What’s your motivation?”, and like most conference themes it is open to interpretation.
