EVENT REPORT- AWSD 2nd Anniversary Event co-sponsored by CEGLOC and JALT Ibaraki Chapter (2024-01-31)   IBARAKI, January ―the Academic Writing Support Desk（AWSD） at Tsukuba University celebrated a second anniversary to inform their commitment to helping students enhance their academic writing skills at the Center for Education of Global Communication (CEGLOC). The presenters, organizing teams,…

IBARAKI, March ―”Materials evaluation in actual classroom use: A case study”by Anja Gonzalez. She is a Cuban English teacher, focused on evaluating the effectiveness of the “Learning World 1” coursebook package in English conversation classes for young learners aged 6-8. While highlighting the positive aspects of the materials, Gonzalez discussed the need for some…

IBARAKI: February— Talking about Death and Death Cafe by Masatoshi Shoji. In this presentation, Shoji introduced the activities at the Death Café he has launched in Sendai and proceeded with other foreign Death Cafes, becoming a global movement, with videos. Shoji was inspired by the idea of Death Café which Bernard Crettaz, a sociologist,…

IBARAKI/OLE SIG: On September 21, Naoko Ochiai gave an informative presentation entitled “Mediation to help hearing-impaired students learn German” to the Multilingual Cafe and Ibaraki JALT Chapter. Ochiai introduced the CEFR “Common European Framework of Reference for Languages” established in 2001 by the Council of Europe and the CEFR Companion Volume 2018/2020 as the…

IBARAKI/OLE SIG: July Persian Language and Culture, and the Relationship of Persian and English Languages by Abdollah Dodangeh. Dodangeh focused on the long history of Persian. He introduced the epic poem of the king, the greatest masterpiece of Persian literature, and explained Persian’s treasure of beautiful ancient culture and how the language could connect…

IBARAKI/OLE SIG: March Sign language—Why I Like It by Martin Pauly. Pauly reflected on his journey of learning sign language over the years. It all started when he began working at the Tsukuba University of Technology (TUT), which has a division for the hearing impaired and one for the visually impaired. Pauly vigorously attended…

An Ecological Jungle of Learning: Partnering Students with Invitations to Teach, Reach, & Publish by Tim Murphey Listening to Murphey, we participants soon realized that we needed to adopt a different approach to our pedagogical practice. Students are not whom we teach but our active partners. We don’t provide them with textbooks, but their…