Hokkaido Chapter

(Read the archived description for the Hokkaido Chapter)

Hokkaido Chapter Events in 2008

Events archive by year:
2008; 2007 [12]; 2006 [11]; 2005 [11]; 2004 [11]; 2003 [9]; 2002 [8]; 2001 [8];

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

1. Actually Teaching Listening 2. Teaching the Strategies of Speaking

Speaker: Hugh Graham-Marr
Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM (Sun., January 27th, 2008)
Fee (JALT members): free
Fee (One-Day members): free
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Hokkai Gakuen University - Subway Building 6, 3rd floor
Description: 1. This talk looks to examine how you can go beyond giving practice in listening and actually teach listening skills. Knowledge of script is something that can be taught that helps students with their top-down predictive skills. Teaching supra-segemental phonology helps students with their bottom-up decoding skills. 2. We all use strategies when we speak: to confirm or clarify what we're saying and what we're hearing, to show interest, to maintain and develop conversations, to help with fluency, to compensate for language we don't have. This talk will examine the whys of teaching strategies and at the sort of strategies that can be taught.

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Free and Open Source Tools for Teachers

Speaker: Peter Ruthven-Stuart
Time: 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM (Wed., March 26th, 2008)
Fee (JALT members):
Fee (One-Day members):
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Hokusei Gakuen University, Oyachi, Atsubetsu-ku, Sapporo
Description: There will be a number of teachers from around Hokkaido demonstrating how they use computers in relation to language teaching. They will also help you in a variety of ways to use computers so that your language teaching becomes easier to do and better. To prepare material specific to the attendees, we would like to get some feedback on how we can better assist you in preparing and administering your classes using computers. To this end, we'd like to get some information to help us help you. Could you please take 5 minutes to fill out this online survey?

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

Summer Camp: A Success or Just A Lot of Hard Work?

Speaker: Mary Virgil-Uchida
Time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (Sat., March 29th, 2008)
Fee (JALT members): free
Fee (One-Day members): 500 yen
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Minami-ku Kumin Center (5-min. walk from Makomanai Subway Station, next to Minami Ward Office, parking available)
Description: Summer is just around the corner and in Hokkaido, summers are a great time to be outside. Whether a class in the park, a yearly day trip or a summer camp, learning outside can be a rewarding experience if done right.

In recent years many English schools have been holding "Summer Camps". Are they a lot of hard work? Are they worth the effort? YES! YES! YES! Are summer camps just for children, NO!

Mary Virgil-Uchida, who has been taking her students outside to study English for 25 years, will facilitate this meeting so teachers who have run camps and those who are thinking about it can get together and share what works and what doesn't. This meeting is for teachers of students of all ages who are interested in doing something with their students in the great outdoors.

Mary's 'Niseko English Nature Camp' finally got off the ground in 2007 and in the first half of this meeting Mary will give a presentation about how she incorporated the learning of nature with the learning of English. In addition, she will discuss different ways to set up summer events as well as the problems that can come up.

The second half will be a "My Share" time so please bring an activity, craft project, song, menu idea or just anything that might make this next summer's camps a success for Hokkaido's children. Bring enough copies to share with everyone.

Bio: Mary Virgil-Uchida is a past president of Jalt Hokkaido. She has been teaching children in Sapporo for 26 years. She is owner of ABC House an English conversation school in Sapporo and Niseko English Nature Camp.

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

A Survey of Hokusei Gakuen University Students on Their Views Regarding English Firsthand Texts: Results, Analysis, and Application

Speaker: Jim Allison
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM (Wed., April 2nd, 2008)
Fee (JALT members): free
Fee (One-Day members): free
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Hokusei Gakuen University, Oyachi, Atsubetsu-ku, Sapporo
Description: Are you one of the many teachers using an English Firsthand text? If so, have you ever taken an objective look at what your students think of it? The teachers for non-English majors at

Hokusei Gakuen University recently asked their class members how interesting or boring, easy or difficult, and helpful or unhelpful they thought each section of each unit in their texts was. Jim Allison will present an overview of the students' responses to these survey questions on April 2 at Hokusei Gakuen University in CALL Room 3, the 2nd floor of the "A" Building, from 1:00 to 2:00 PM. All are welcome to attend this JALT-sponsored presentation. Hopefully it will be an opportunity to gain a clearer view of the particular plusses and minuses many students see in these texts, which in turn will allow us as teachers to utilize these teaching tools more effectively. For those not using English Firsthand, this presentation and discussion may nevertheless yield valuable hints as to which types of activities and topics students favor.

Sunday, April 13th, 2008

Perception, Interpretation, Confirmation: Tools for Learning, Communicating and Understanding

Speaker: Ken Fujioka, Keisen University
Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM (Sun., April 13th, 2008)
Fee (JALT members): free
Fee (One-Day members): 500 yen
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Hokkai Gakuen University - Subway Building 6, 3rd floor
Description: Tools for Learning, Communicating and Understanding

How do learners communicate in English class? When learners listen, how do they perceive and interpret information? Professor B. Aubrey Fisher's book, Interpersonal Communication: Pragmatics of Human Relationships, states that "knowledge gained from perception is only a reflection of reality and is therefore highly fallible and the knowledge gained from perception is vivid, personal and thus typically accepted as true, often uncritically". If knowledge gained from one's perception is "highly fallible", it is no wonder why we experience miscommunication and misunderstanding. So, how can language students communicate their ideas so that their peers interpret them more effectively?

The key for improving our communication is first, to be conscious how and what we say, and how this ultimately affects our peers' understanding. By becoming attentive to the words we use to explain our ideas, Fanselow says, "we can become more aware of the ways our personal view of reality limit and restrain us". An effective way to enhance our peers' understanding is by establishing context. Aubrey states that, "Interpreting meanings within their context is a major factor, perhaps the most important single factor, in understanding personal communication and social relationships." The final step to better overall communication is for listeners to confirm their understanding by asking relevant questions.

In this lecture and workshop, participants will be exposed to various forms of realities, which support and enhance such theories. The presenter will try to make this workshop as participatory as possible so that by the end, participants should have a better understanding of how to expand their perception and even their approach to teaching and learning.

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

Using a CALL Classroom to Teach English through Drama

Speaker: Hitoshi Eguchi, Hokusei Gakuen University
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:45 PM (Sun., May 25th, 2008)
Fee (JALT members): free
Fee (One-Day members): 500 yen
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Hokusei Gakuen University, Oyachi, Atsubetsu-ku, Sapporo
Description: The benefits of using drama in language teaching have been explored by many language teachers. The pragmatic aspects of language can be taught with relative ease by putting students in a realistic context for language use in the real world. However, using such teaching techniques with Japanese college students is challenging because of their shy character and because it's not likely to be a teaching style in which they have been taught before.

The first half of this presentation will focus on the underlying principles of using drama in language teaching. The presenter will demonstrate how he gets his students to think about the differences between an "oral" class and a "communicative" class.

The second half will show how the teaching techniques can be employed without losing the students' cooperation and motivation through the use of a CALL classroom and its functions. The results of a student questionnaire about these techniques as well as possible variations of the techniques as options in teaching English at the college level will be introduced.

Bio: Hitoshi Eguchi is an assistant professor in charge of the pre-service teacher training courses and TEFL related classes at Hokusei Gakuen University. He is also an assistant CALL teacher at Hokusei. He is exploring his teaching style, for example, by speaking only English to his students even though he is a native Japanese speaker. He taught English in Korea and at a number of colleges in Miyagi before coming to Sapporo and has experience teaching the skills of writing, speaking, listening and grammar. He speaks English for professional purposes and survival Korean.

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

JALT Hokkaido's SIG Special: JALT's Special Interest Groups

Speaker: Various speakers
Time: 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM (Sun., June 22nd, 2008)
Fee (JALT members): free
Fee (One-Day members): 500 yen
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Hokkaido International School; 1-55, 5-jo, 19-chome, Hiragishi (5 minute walk from Sumikawa Station)
Description: This is a one-day chapter event organized to educate Hokkaido teachers about JALT's Special Interest Groups. The schedule will include nine 45-minute presentation slots for SIGs to =introduce themselves to participants and hold a workshop/presentation connected to one of the SIG's areas of interest. If possible, similarly-themed workshops will not be scheduled at the same time.

Two one-hour featured speaker sessions are scheduled: the first, Mark Shrosbree, is sponsored by the GILE SIG. The second is speaker and author Lesley Ito, who has been invited by the Hokkaido JALT Teaching Children group.

For further information please contact JALT Hokkaido's SIG Liaisons Don Hinkelman (hinkel@sgu.ac.jp) or Mary Virgil-Uchida (maryvirgiluchida@mac.com), or Chapter President Wilma Luth (wilmaluth@gmail.com)

Detailed schedule available at www.jalthokkaido.net

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

When should we use Japanese? And when should we use English?

Speaker: Michael Critchley, Josai International University
Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM (Sun., July 13th, 2008)
Fee (JALT members): free
Fee (One-Day members): 500 yen
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Hokkai Gakuen University, Toyohira-ku, Sapporo
Description: This presentation will focus on issues of Japanese support in the English class. In the first part of the session, we will discuss the pros and cons of L1 support within the framework of recent research on student learning and motivation, as well as from the teacher�fs perspective of classroom management.

In the second session, we will look to minimize in-class Japanese talk by formulating the right balance of L1 support in ELT materials. I will use examples from textbooks to prompt group discussion about the role of L1 and/or English in objectives, focus on form, communicative activities, role plays and assessment.

Bio: Mike Critchley is from British Columbia Canada. As a language learner, he has taken classes in Italy, Germany, Japan and Thailand with mixed results (but all instructive). As a teacher, he has worked in Berlin at a Berlitz-type school, and then for the last 17 years at Josai International University in Chiba. After getting an MEd in TESOL, he has been trying to capture some of this experience in the form of materials and articles.

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

2008 CALL Workshop

Speaker: (see below)
Time: 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM (Sat., October 18th, 2008)
Fee (JALT members): 500 yen
Fee (One-Day members): 500 yen
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Sapporo Gakuin University in Ebetsu
Description: The seventh annual CALL Workshop, the largest conference on technology and language learning in northern Japan, will include practical demonstrations and workshops designed to help teachers use new technology wisely and appropriately. This year features blended learning rooms, which allow teachers to use regular desks and chairs along with an online network.

Main Speakers: Mr. Wichian Sunithan, Chiang Mai University, will demonstrate a national EFL listening curriculum, and how students use it in Thailand. Nicholas Gromick. Tohoku University, will lead training workshops on video editing for language teachers.

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

2008 JALT Hokkaido Language Teaching Conference; Theme: "Hokkaido Nabe �" Helping Students to Help Themselves"

Speaker: Main Speakers: Dr. Robert Courchene from the University of Ottawa, will speak on "Self-Access Learning and the Learner." Cynthia Keith, Vice President of JALT National, will present on teaching childr
Time: 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM (Sun., October 19th, 2008)
Fee (JALT members): free
Fee (One-Day members): 2000 yen (1000 yen if pre-registed)
Prefecture: Hokkaido
City: Sapporo
Venue: Hokkai Gakuen University, Toyohira-ku, Sapporo
Description: Presentations will cover a wide range of topics including teaching techniques or theory for pre-school, elementary, junior high school and high school, university, tertiary education, eikaiwa, older learners, test classes and computer-assisted language learning.

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