Event Report, Iwate Chapter June 2018

The 5 th Annual Michinoku English Education Summit (MEES) was held on June 3 rd , 2018 at
Hachinohe Gakuin University campus. The conference theme, “Observations on Teaching
and Learning: Whatcha Doin’?” was kicked off with the plenary speaker, Gregory Sholdt
from Kobe University. His presentation titled, “Exploring Avenues of Insight into our
classrooms: Let’s Take a Look at the Numbers”, was a thoughful and convincing view on the
benefits of using quantitative analyses in our classroom research. This was followed by
Michael Smith from Aomori University of Health and Welfare who presented a lively,
Session 1 presentation on “Feedback for Success”. Session 2 was professionally presented
by two students and their teacher; Koki Hori, Kanako Miyashita and Mark DeBoer,
respectfully, from Akita International University. Their talk was titled, “Bilingual Code-
Switching in Student Collaboration in a CLIL Context”. After a wonderful bento lunch break,
Barry Grossman from Hachinohe Gakuin University closed with Session 3 entitled, “What is
a Corpus and What Can You do with it? A Very Hands-on Workshop”. This workshop was
held in one of the computer rooms of the university and was a practical guide for using free
online corpora for language interest, research and in-class source materials.