Plenary Speakers

Anne Burns
Annamaria Pinter
JD Brown
Dorothy Zemach
Anne Burns
Transforming the Shape of the Way We Work
Sponsored by Soka University International Language Education: TESOL Master’s Program and the JALT Nagoya Chapter
Saturday, November 26, 9:45-10:45 AM
Transformation, the theme of this year’s JALT conference, is to do with ‘changing shape’. In language education, this implies changing the shape of what we do in several different ways. These include introducing changes and innovations in the way we think about what teaching means and what we believe about ourselves as teachers. It can also mean shaping our views of language learning in a new ways and thinking differently about our learners. Transformation also includes changing the ways we think about the contexts in which we work, and how our own teacher development within those contexts can be reshaped.
In this talk, I will consider what it meant by transformation and will introduce some ideas from recent research I have conducted with teachers who are in the process of transforming their practices, their identities as teachers, and the way they interact with their colleagues and learners. I will also touch on a major contextual issue that has emerged from this research – the important role of school leaders in the transformation process. In particular, I will refer to ways in which school leaders can more effectively recognise the work that teachers do to reshape their teaching and themselves as teachers for broader transformative purposes and better learning contexts within a teaching institution.Anne Burns is Professor of TESOL, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and Professor Emerita, Aston University, Birmgingham, UK. She publishes extensively on teacher education, action research, and teaching speaking. Her book, Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching (2010, Routledge), has been used by language teacher researchers worldwide.
Annamaria Pinter
Lessons Learnt: Teaching Young Language Learners
Sponsored by JALT
Saturday, November 26, 2:25-3:25 PM
In this plenary talk I will share some personal messages about teaching second and foreign languages to young learners. Even though every teacher will ultimately have to work out their own way of becoming ‘inspirational’ in their own classrooms, in this talk I would like to offer some ideas that have worked for me. These ideas are based on 15 years of researching and studying different aspects of child second language learning in different contexts, and also from working closely with English teachers from all over the world as part of my job at the University of Warwick. Much of the inspiration comes from children themselves that I have learnt from. The plenary talk will make links between current themes and concerns in research from an international perspective but it will also incorporate hands-on ideas that any teacher can try out in their classrooms tomorrow.Annamaria Pinter is an associate professor at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick. She has published widely in the area of teaching English to young learners. She is the author of Teaching Young Language Learners Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers, Oxford University Press (2006) and Children Learning Second Languages, Palgrave Macmillan (2011). She is also an editor of an e-book series entitled Teaching English to Young Learners. She has published extensively in ELT/Applied Linguistics journals and has given numerous plenary talks on subjects related to child second language learning and teacher development.
JD Brown
Using Classroom Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning
Sponsored by the JALT Testing and Evaluation SIG
Sunday, November 27, 10:25-11:25 AM
This speech begins by considering several preliminary questions that all teachers should contemplate in trying to link learning and assessment: What is learning? What is assessment? How are learning and assessment different and the same? And, how can they conceive of the relationships between assessment and teaching, assessment and materials, and assessment and classroom activities? The speech then turns to some of the key issues that teachers need to address in actually using their assessment practices to improve learning and teaching:
Am I assessing what I think I’m assessing?
Have I exploited enough types of assessments?
Have I written good quality assessments?
Have I used enough assessments?
Have I revised my assessments sufficiently?
Have I structured my assessments so they give my students useful feedback?
More specific questions include the following:
Have I used assessment options that match my teaching/learning outcomes (aka SLOs)?
Have I matched my assessments to the materials and activities in my course?
Will my students think my assessments match the materials and activities in the course (i.e., are fair)?
What are my students’ actuallanguage learning needs? How well do my course SLOs, materials, activities, teaching, and assessments meet those needs?
Have my assessments shown what my students are learning and how well?
Have I used my assessments to improvemy SLOs, materials, activities, teaching, and the assessments themselves?
How well are my assessments promotinglearning in my course?
James Dean (“JD”) Brown is Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has spoken and taught courses in places ranging from Australia to Yugoslavia and has published numerous articles and books on language testing, curriculum design, research methods, and connected speech.
Dorothy Zemach
Sausage and the Law: How Textbooks Are Made
Sponsored by BTB Press and Macmillan Education Japan
Sunday, November 27, 3:25-4:25 PM
“Those who love sausage and the law,” goes the saying, “should never watch either being made.” Given how influential textbooks are—they can shape a teacher’s activities, lesson plans, or entire course curriculum—it’s time to look at how textbooks are created. Who writes them? Who determines content? What factors influence pricing? What happens to print textbooks with “this whole digital thing”? How are publishers responding to new technology—and how should they be responding?
Having worked on everything from writing ancillary materials for most of the major ELT publishers to freelance and in-house editing to authoring coursebooks to running my own micropress, I’ll be sharing frank insights on materials creation from both the author’s side and the publisher’s side. After analyzing the transformation of the ELT publishing industry in the last half decade, I’ll offer recommendations for what teachers and administrators can do to help get the highest quality and most appropriate books for their classrooms.Dorothy Zemach holds an MA in TEFL and has been teaching English for 30 years. Since turning to materials writing, she has penned everything from the Teddy Bear’s Magic Musicteacher’s book to the lowest and highest levels of Macmillan’s flagship course Open Mind to the groundbreaking English for Scammers (self-published).
Additional speakers, abstracts, and further details will be available soon.
Each year JALT invites accomplished researchers, teachers, and experts to join us and share their knowledge, perspectives, and experience. We welcome a wide range of plenary speakers, so all participants should find something interesting and relevant no matter what your teaching context. Here are some of our recent keynote and plenary presenters.
2015: Jean-Marc Dewaele, Joan Kang Shin, Tomoko Yashima
2014: Claire Kramsch, Bill Harley, Thomas Farrell, Gerry Yokota
2013: Penny Ur, Caroline Linse, Kristin Sherman, Keith Folse
2012: Jeanette Littlemore, John Eyles, Suresh Canagarajah, Ozge Karaoglu, Alan Firth
And many more, including: Susan Barduhn, Jennifer Bassett, Phil Benson, Anne Burns, Yuko Goto Butler, Ron Carter, Christine Pearson Casanave, Dave Ellis, Donald Freeman, William Grabe, David Graddol, Simon Greenall, Nicky Hockly, Yasuko Kanno, Gabrielle Kaspar, Andrew Kirkpatrick, Stephen Krashen, James P. Lantolf, Alan Maley, Aya Matsuda, Mike McCarthy, Tim Murphey, Paul Nation, Marianne Nikolov, John Norris, Bonnie Norton, Jack Richards, Jane Sunderland, Merrill Swain, Scott Thornbury, Kumiko Torikae, Amy Tsui, Jane Willis, Ken Wilson, and Emiko Yukawa.
Updated 26 July 2016