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Volume 3, Issue 3 [December, 2007]
Two ideas to motivate lifelong learners
Kim Bradford-Watts
Kyoto Women’s University, Kyoto University
The Lifelong Learning SIG Forum at the 2007JALT National Conference was an excellent opportunity to gather with other lifelong learners and teachers and to share our thoughts about lifelong learning, our ideas, and our questions. I presented two ideas: student publishing and a foreign foods day in class. Although these ideas could, conceivably, also be used with learners as young as those of junior high school age, they are better suited to the maturity of older learners who are motivated to try new things.
Idea 1: Student publishing
Publishing student work can accomplish a number of things:
- It can involve learners in collecting a body of information about a shared interest
- It can make learners aware of the process of writing
- It can make learners aware of the process of publication
- It can encourage learners to read materials produced by other learners
- It can encourage learners to write for a specific audience (young learners of English in their communities, foreign visitors to their communities, a broader audience of international readers interested in Japanese history or historical figures, etc.) and medium (e.g., book, Internet).
- It can encourage learners to write for publication again.
This project takes time but is extremely rewarding to learners who are motivated to share their work with an audience. Older learners have more experience to share and may be just waiting for the chance to share these with others through a print medium. Copies can be lodged with local libraries, community centers, and local government offices. Some groups may choose to make a submission directly to a larger publisher who will also market their work. Other groups may choose to make their work available directly via the Internet.
Directions:
- Have students identify a group project that they would like to publish. Options may include short biographies of local figures, recipes, descriptions of local sites, or local stories.
- Students decide what they will write about, how long each contribution will be, and for how many contributions each writer will be responsible.
- For each contribution, hold a peer-editing session. In this session, learners read the contribution and offer suggestions and ask questions that occur to them while reading. This is not a proofreading session, so no mention should be made concerning punctuation or grammar unless they confound meaning.
- Writers revise their drafts based on the comments and suggestions they received during the peer-editing session.
- In the following session, conduct a peer-proofreading session. You will need to have a list of formatting guidelines that would be helpful to focus learners on both common formatting errors and formatting requirements to standardize contributions for publication.
- Writers revise their drafts based on the comments and suggestions they received during the peer-proofreading session.
- Writers submit their drafts to the project editor (the teacher), who makes further suggestions and comments and returns the contributions to the writer.
- Writers revise their drafts again.
- Writers submit their final drafts to the project editor for compilation and formatting for publication.
- Publication of volume.
- Everyone takes a copy of the published volume home to read and enjoy.
Idea 2: A foreign foods day
It is great sometimes to step outside the normal routine of your class. One way to do this is to use the senses. The following idea incorporates the use of the senses in experiencing a range of foods probably unfamiliar to the learners, discussing the results of the experience with the foods, investigating one of the foods, and presenting the findings to the class. The presentation may be oral and/or written. Given a large enough group, or a highly motivated individual, the written presentations could be published, as described in the previous activity.
Directions:
- Pre-teach vocabulary for describing color, smell, appearance, texture, and taste of food.
- Bring in (or have class members bring in) various foreign foods, e.g., Vegemite sandwiches (from Australia) in bite-size pieces.
- Students complete a chart inserting appropriate descriptors in each category as they taste them.
| Food name | Color | Smell | Appearance | Texture | Taste |
| Vegemite Sandwich |
|||||
| Tempeh | |||||
- Have a discussion about the foods, the student impressions of the foods, the reasons they liked/disliked them, etc..
- Students (or groups) each choose one food and investigate how it is made and possible recipes for using it. They present their findings to their classmates in a subsequent lesson.