Developing phonemic awareness: A follow-up on PIGATE's Special Summer Session, Sat. Aug. 14th

During PIGATE's online gathering on Saturday, Aug. 14, 2021, participants explained (showed, and told of) a number of their favorite resources and practical techniques for exploiting songs and stories with language learners. Participants' accounts related to various activities with preschool children and early school-aged (elementary and junior high school) English-as-an-additional language learners in particular.

To those inspiring accounts, which I hope you can review via Zoom meeting recordings,  chat transcripts, and other short reports about PIGATE's August gathering, I'd like to add a pointer to a separate webinar recording. That webinar, from the iDTi 2015 Summer Intensive for Teachers, is about ways of developing learners' phonemic awareness, "necessary prerequisites for studying and reading in English" (idDTi Videos, 2021.08.12, description, ¶2).

About 18 minutes into that webinar recording, Karen Frazier Tsai asserted:

"[W]e need to start first with making our children phonemically aware of the sounds in English, those sounds that are different from whatever their first language is." 

(auto-generated YouTube video transcript, 17:23–17:35)

She then asked and answered the questions: "[W]hat do we do; how do we start … to make them have that skill of really focusing in on the sounds" (transcript, 18:21–18:28, ff.). In sum, Tsai explained various ways of helping learners become aware of sounds, rhymes, and syllables by playing with words in a new language. Whether you're teaching pre-reading to young learners, or simply reading stories to children, I highly recommend watching the webinar recording from beginning to end!

Children Playing with Words

(iTDi Videos, 2021.08.12)

Reference

iTDi Videos. (2021.08.12). Children Playing with Words (Karen Frazier Tsai) [video recording]. https://youtu.be/Br10cHS-5Qk

Online activities and opportunities: Work in progress

The short (16 slide) presentation embedded in this blog post represents on-going endeavours mainly to recover from a massive setback in online resource curation. In a nutshell:

This presentation provides snapshots of an individual teacher's recent and ongoing professional development endeavours. It reflects problems of ICT use, mainly discontinuation of a free service for educators, and outlines strategies for addressing them with collaborative partners, tools, and venues of choice. It supplements a working paper submitted to PIGATE.

(Abstract, slide 2)

If you have comments or questions with regard either to the content of slides in that short presentation or the gist of the working paper (Beaufait, 2019) submitted to PIGATE prior to its Annual General Meeting last month (2019.09.14), please feel free to spell them out in threadable comments on this post.

Reference

Beaufait, P. (2019a). Reflection in action: An unavoidable IT transition. PIGATE eigo jugyou gaku kenkyuu-kai kiyou, 26 [English language teaching action research group working papers, issue 26], 32-42.

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Sneak preview of PIGATE's Special Summer Session

PIGATE's Special Summer Session (SSS)

Tentative schedule (as of 2019.07.05)

09:30 Preparation and sign-in (30 min.)
10:00 Opening remarks (10 min.): Paul Beaufait
10:10 IPS, Part 1 (45 min.): English pronunciation challenges for English teachers
10:55 Break (10 min.)
11:05 IPS, Part 2 (45 min): Tactics for teaching oral expression
11:50 Lunchtime (60 min.)
12:50 CPS, Part 1 (45 min.): Favorite picture books and stories to share
13:35 _Kitemiran_¹ and _shitemiran_² sharing time (15 min.)
13:50 CPS, Part 2 (45 min.): Experience and tips for learning and teaching with stories
14:35 Break (15 min.)
14:50 Working Papers (_kiyou_) workshop (45 min.):
Reflections, projections, & progress reports;
Preparation and collaboration time; &
Submission guidelines & deadlines.
15:35 Session summary: Mr. Nobuyuki Takaki (15 min.)
15:50 Closing remarks (10 min.)
Membership matters
Newsletter contributions
Other announcements:
Annual General Meeting (AGM), 2019.09.14
Other
16:00 Clean-up (10 min.)
16:10  Steering committee meeting (20 min.)
Presenters and PIGATE members are welcome to attend the committee meeting!

____________________

¹ Why don't you come and see this?

² Why don't you try this and see?

If you would like to take part in this month's session, or to join PIGATE, please fill out one of our short online info. collection forms (https://goo.gl/Hpe9pd). 

PIGATE gathering, 2019.06.08

PIGATE's June 2019 session

This month's highlights: Guest Speaker Series (GSS)

Active Learning from Theory to Practice

Dr. Fumi Takegami

Faculty of Letters

The Prefectural University of Kumamoto

Prof. Terry Laskowski

Faculty of Letters, Kumamoto University

Date & time

Saturday, June 8, 2019; 13:30–16:30

• Doors open at 13:00!

Venue

Seminar room 10, 5th floor, Faculty of Administrative Studies office wing; 
Prefectural University of Kumamoto (PUK)

• Please see PIGATE Meeting Locations (https://goo.gl/h5DgbP) for site details.

About the presenters and the program

Fumi Takegami has extensive teaching experience in schools ranging from elementary to secondary levels, mostly at high school. She is now teaching in the Faculty of Letters at the PUK. Terry Laskowski also has extensive teaching experience, in his case at university. He now teaches in the Faculty of Letters at Kumamoto University.

Together Terry and Fumi will talk about the relationship between theory and practice in teaching.  Linking theory to practice helps teachers to better understand why they do what they do in their classrooms. Having this knowledge will better inform teachers regarding their instructional practices. 

During their workshop session, Fumi and Terry will talk about learning theories going from behaviorism to social constructivism and complementary teaching methods. They will focus in particular on social constructivism and related teaching methods and techniques. 

Participants will take part in classroom activities. Through active involvement, i.e., active learning, participants will understand the purpose of the activities by experiencing them themselves. They can expect to take part in a jigsaw activity and a task-based problem solving activity.

Let us know you're coming!

If you would like to take part in this month's session, or to join PIGATE, please fill out one of our short online info. collection forms (https://goo.gl/Hpe9pd). 

• Thank you!

Yippee: A free continuing ed. cert. from edWeb.net!

You, too, can get a certificate like this from edWeb by watching and listening to the webinar recording: Error Correction: Tips and Techniques for Language Teachers.

Screenshot of PDF at ceu.edwebpd.net
(https://goo.gl/K19W66)

EdWeb is a free professional learning network. Its Browse and Search edWebinars pages listed 1564 webinars today (2019.03.06 [JST]) in, just a guess, hundreds of communities. 

Screenshot of Select Community menu

Please check it out, and leave comments on this post to let us know what you think.

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Introducing the EIGO app

Introducing the EIGO app

A guest post by Mr. Robert Hirschel*

From ElemEnglish.org

(https://elemenglish.org/login/index.php)

About the app.

The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has been promoting various English education initiatives to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. New English curricula will see 5th and 6th grade elementary school students nationwide studying English as a mandatory subject with double the previous number of allocated classroom hours. Third and 4th grade students nationwide will study English as an ungraded foreign language activity. To be sure, many school districts and individual schools have already made significant increases in the provision of English education for their students.

Alongside these reforms, however, there is concern that many current and future elementary school teachers may lack sufficient proficiency and/or confidence to most effectively lead students in English language activities. Our app (see: Project team members, below) is an attempt to help teachers learn, practice, and become confident in speaking very basic classroom English language.

As we were already using the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) at our institution, we decided to use this platform to create both a website and an app. We applied in 2014 for a MEXT grant and were awarded funds to begin our project in the following year. The process began with a needs analysis. We made observations at several elementary schools, recording and transcribing teachers’ use of Japanese and English. Based on analysis of this data and current teaching resources, we determined what language would be of greatest benefit to users of our app.

The next steps involved creating, piloting and revising content. Groups of teachers, administrators, and teachers-in training (PIGATE attendees included) provided us with valuable feedback that has influenced the final product. Several computer programmers have created and adapted plug-ins specifically for our app. There have been a lot of technical hurdles to overcome, too many to note here, but we are ultimately pleased with our product.

Some of the noteworthy features include animated videos with language in context, drag-and-drop interactive exercises, shadowing practice, and timed and recorded responses (see: Screen snapshots, below). Our greatest hope is that this app will be useful to teachers.

Screen snapshots

Animated videos

Drag-and-drop exercises

Shadowing practice

Timed and recorded responses

Project team members

Rob Hirschel

Jon Rowberry

Elton LaClare

About the author

Rob has had experience teaching English in elementary school, junior high school, university, and in specialized programs both in Japan and in the US. His research interests include computer-assisted language learning (CALL), vocabulary acquisition, and affective factors in the second language classroom.

Don't miss it!

Rob will be presenting the EIGO app. for elementary school English teachers at the PIGATE English language teacher development group's March Session:

• Date: Saturday, March 9th, 2019
• Starting at 13:30: Doors open at 13:00!
• Venue: Seminar room 10, 5th floor,
• Faculty of Administrative Studies office wing
• The Prefectural University of Kumamoto (PUK)

Please see PIGATE Meeting Locations (https://goo.gl/h5DgbP) for site details and the PIGATE Calendar of Events (https://goo.gl/yEbVvo) for program details.

____________________
*With editorial embellishments by The PIGATE Blog administrator, Paul Beaufait

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Humanizing screen time

Photo by Jabiz Raisdana, 2013.07.18, 
Some rights reserved (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In a recent post on The Principal of Change blog, George Couros highlighted recommendations for children's screen time (AAP, 2018.05.01), and posed three questions to frame thinking about ways to use technology both at home and at school:

When we look at how we are using technology, we have to ask:

1. Is the way we are using technology building connections or severing them?
2. Is this fostering deep learning as well as critical thought and creation, or promoting surface level thinking?
3. Are we modeling our learning, balance, and human connection through our use of technology so we can effectively guide our students?

(Using Technology to Humanize, 2018.11.20)

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David Ockert's slides on Self-Determination Theory (SDT)

Many thanks to David Ockert for visiting Kumamoto in September and leading a workshop on SDT for PIGATE! He granted permission to publish his slides not long after the PIGATE newsletter went to print. There are 16 plain vanilla slides (line by line builds) in the Google slideshow below.

If you have comments or questions about any of the topics in his slides, or reflections on any of the tasks that David presented last month, please feel free either to spell them out in comments on this post, or to voice them at the next monthly PIGATE gathering–this coming Saturday, 13 October, 2018.

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Coming soon: Self-determination theory—for young learners and the young at heart!

Creating and implementing interactive tasks based on self-determination theory—for young learners and the young at heart!

By David Ockert, Toyo University

David Ockert’s teaching interests are in critical thinking, reading comprehension, and academic writing. He does research on the influence of technology on affective variables (motivation, confidence, anxiety, and willingness to communicate). 

David also enjoys creative lesson planning for communicative purposes, using a task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach via the three pillars of self-determination theory [SDT]: competence (mastery), relatedness, and autonomy. 

For this presentation, David will focus on self-determination theory-based EFL motives interconnected with competence, relatedness, and autonomy. He will show how all three can be incorporated easily into any level of pedagogy, with a focus on the junior high school level in Japan.

[UPDATE, 2018.09.10: This presentation will be a participatory event with very little lecture. David will lead participants through hands-on tasks, with evaluation of each afterwards, to provide a real-world experience of how and why SDT-based lessons work.]

Date & time

Saturday, September 15, 2018; 13:30–16:30

Venue

Seminar room 10, Faculty of Administrative Studies office wing, Prefectural University of Kumamoto (PUK): Please see PIGATE Meeting Locations (https://goo.gl/h5DgbP) for details.

Attendance plans

Hoping or planning to attend? Please let us know by filling out an attendance form: 

• https://goo.gl/i4GvyN (select: 2018, September). 

If you'd also like to attend an informal networking event afterwards (tentatively 18:30–20:30), please ... add, "Post-function: Yes!" (without quotation marks) along with your email address as Additional info. at the end of the form [2018.09.13: ... ask Paul in person on Saturday whether a seat is still available].

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Personal and professional language development

This post displays Google slides [and references] from part two of the PIGATE gathering on March 10, 2018. The presenter's blurb for the program that day read:

In this workshop, participants will make, share, and refine self-assessments, then project and reflect on goals and resources for additional personal and professional language development.

(PIGATE meeting agendas, 2018.03.10)

To find out about what ensued, please ask one or more of the language teachers who took part, ...

... or post questions in comments on this post, where all of the participants can respond.

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TESOL Electronic Village Online workshop for teachers of young learners

This post is to point out a free, five-week long, online workshop for teachers of young learners—one of many such offerings in TESOL International's Electronic Village Online (EVO) program for 2018.

Teaching EFL to Young Learners
Participants of Teaching EFL to Young Learners TEFL2YL EVO18 will learn about and create activities for English to Young Learners and Teens from around the world using storytelling, board games, action songs, and limited resource classroom activities. ...

Registration starts on [Jan 8, and the _program_ starts] Jan 14, 2018. 

Source: http://evo2018proposals.pbworks.com/w/page/119830158/TEFL2YL, 2017.12.21

If you have a yen for online networking and distance learning, and will have a bit of time to spare between mid-January and February next year, I highly recommend looking into this and other upcoming EVO workshops. 

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ICT to-dos: Map and plans

The mind map in this post points out locations of online endeavours by and for members of a grassroots language teacher development group, for various language and professional development purposes. 

Though the map itself is far from comprehensive at present, it does include both links to venues and [plenty of] to-dos (tasks with or without checkboxes) planned or envisioned in order to consolidate, extend, and facilitate ICT use by group members. 

One such purpose involves collaborative creation and publication of information to promote face-to-face group events. Others reflect collective documentation of activities, maintenance of archives, and sharing and showcasing of professional development resources. 

Tasks may be one-off, on-going, or periodic (recurring monthly or annually). Green arrows indicate connections between various tasks and other tasks or venues.

PIGATE ICT to-dos ...

Source: Mindmeister.com

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Short report: A find-someone-who activity

In the morning on Aug. 12, at PIGATE's Special Summer Session (SSS), Mr. Nobuyuki Takaki led a find-someone-who activity, which he introduced with "instruction checking questions" (The PIGATE Blog, 2017.06.01), and 10 interaction prompts that he'd printed on a large envelope (snapshot below).

Find-someone-who interaction prompts for the SSS, 2017.08.12

Afterwards, when participants had shared their findings, and were reflecting on the activity in general, Mr. Takaki made a point of mentioning that it had been an integrated-skills activity, in which participants had listened, read, spoken, and written. When I feigned surprise that participants had used all four basic skills (listening, reading, speaking, and writing) during the activity, Mr. Takaki reiterated the point, so I'm quite certain that participants got it.

Paul Beaufait, The Prefectural University of Kumamoto

ボーフェ ポール, 公立大学法人熊本県立大学

PIGATE's Special Summer Session (2017.08.12)

This post provides a preview of slides in the works for Saturday's big event. It also includes a Tweet feed display for the Twitter hashtag #higopigateSSS.

Tweet about it: #higopigateSSS

Relevant comments and questions are more than welcome!

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Play space necessary

Image source: https://pixabay.com/en/play-stone-network-networked-1237457

"The most powerful learning experiences often happen when children are simply given the space to work things out on their own — to come up with their unique way to occupy [their time]" (Gallup, 2017, p. 1).

Reference

Gallup, Inc. (2017). Time to play: A study on children’s free time: How it is spent, prioritized and valued [PDF]. Available from http://www.gallup.com/reports/214766/gallup-melissa-doug-time-to-play-report-2017.aspx

Classroom practice: Using instruction checking questions (ICQs)

This post showcases a presentation that Taishi Kaneko (KU, Fac. of Educ., M2) used for a demonstration and discussion of instruction checking questions (ICQs) at the PIGATE gathering earlier this month (2017.05.13). Taishi began to develop his interest in ICQs while studying overseas last year.

If you have comments or questions regarding ICQs and their use or potential, please feel free to spell them out in comments on this post. Suggestions of and pointers to related resources also are welcome.

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My Club Activity by Ms. M. Kamioka (KGU, Engl., 4th yr.)

This post showcases a presentation that Misaki Kamioka, a 4th-year student in the English department at KGU, delivered to the PIGATE gathering in the KGU Learning Commons earlier this month (2017.05.13).

It is a pleasure to be able to share Misaki's slides for viewing by PIGATE members who were unable to attend her presentation in person. It also will be a pleasure to have her, her classmates, and her peers take part in future PIGATE gatherings.

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Skidamarink: Super Simple Songs & Wee Sing YouTube videos

Skidamarink is one of the songs for young learners that Mr. Takaki introduced during the PIGATE gathering on ... [May] 13. Here are a couple videos of the song from the Super Simple Songs and Wee Sing YouTube channels.

Source: https://youtu.be/ug1pI-Ephns

Source: https://youtu.be/vG9HM-1R7sk

If you use songs and gestures like that with young children or older learners, please shout out in comments on this post to let us know what your favorites are and how you use them.

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An Online Teacher Summit and SNSs

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During an Online Teacher Summit (https://onlineteachersummit.com, April 2nd through 9th, Central Time in the U.S.) that I attended to the extent possible given the time difference and a busy beginning of semester here in Kumamoto, I took a couple of small steps to broaden my online base; I added Instagram and Pinterest to my repertoire:

• https://www.instagram.com/pabeaufait
• https://jp.pinterest.com/pabeaufait

Though I've begun networking with Instagram, it isn't immediately clear what extra-social (i.e., educational) purposes it may serve. Yet with Pinterest I have created a few boards with help from suggestions that Pinterest sends, via email and notifications, of related pins to consider for new boards such as:

• Conversation Clues (4 pins at present), &
• Grammar Goodies (5 pins now:-).

While most of the networking and sharing for the Online Teacher Summit took place via Facebook, various online meeting spaces, and video playback sites, my LinkedIn and Twitter networks have been growing simultaneously.

Joint PIGATE–NanKyu JALT Event: Marc Helgesen on DIY Neuro-ELT

Tweet about it! #higopigate20160709

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