JALT Presentation on the Immediate Method
A friend and I are giving a presentation this Sunday (July 19) about an EFL approach called The Immediate Method, developed in Japan by foreign-language instructors. Here are some of the documents I will use in my presentation: bperry1 (pdf) bperry2 (pdf) azraextra (pdf) Here’s the blurb from the JALT events website: The Immediate Method [...]
The Immediate Method Autumn seminar 2008
The other day, I took part in the 8th Immediate Method workshop at Kobe University. I gave a very brief report on how I’d been using IM in a couple of different university contexts. (A more detailed report was published in the Conversations in Class newsletter #3 (pdf), which can be downloaded from the Alma [...]
Where to set the bar for EFL classes at Japanese universities?
(Photo credit: Limbo – “How Low Can You Go?” by sidneysealine3 on Flickr) The other day, I met an acquaintance who, like me, teaches English at a Japanese university. We were attending a wokshop, and at lunch he asked me: is very basic EFL really suitable for university students? Isn’t the bar being set too [...]
Conversation by numbers
Two weeks ago, I attended a lecture by Prof. Michael McCarthy at Osaka Shoin Women’s University, and sponsored by Cambridge University Press. The title was “The Learner’s Turn”, meaning both “It’s the learner’s turn to say something” and “How learners take turns in conversation”. Michael McCarthy is a linguistics expert specialising in corpora, and has [...]
Guardian Weekly English-teaching resources
An email recently reminded me that the Guardian Weekly (British, online newspaper) has an EFL section, including lesson plans based on GW articles. The articles aren’t too exciting, but might be useful.
