Seoul Chapter 2019 January Workshop

Welcome to 2019!

Seoul Chapter are celebrating the new year with new challenges!

Learn more about Second Language Learner Anxiety and how you can change your approach in the classroom to help your students overcome it with Richard Stahl, or how about challenging yourself to some Action Research with the help of Stewart Gray's informative workshop?

Come along on January 19th to our home base at Sookmyung Women's University Injaegwan and get ready to challenge yourself in 2019!

~~Timings:
 Registration and mingle: 14:30-15:00
 First session with Richard Stahl: 15:00 – 15:45
 Second session with Stewart Gray: 16:00 – 17:00
 Coffee and chat: 17:00 – onwards (at a nearby coffee shop)

Preregistration is available here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe0oXi7cNonrzS0A8huprt6BQ_B1MrHdBtiWkXbo54mgctElA/viewform?usp=sf_link

Understanding Second Language Anxiety: Compassion and Mindfulness in the Classroom by Richard Stahl

Faced with unprecedented levels of competition and pressure, students live in an increasingly anxious academic world. As social situations that often require real-time, online processing, language learning contexts are particularly prone to the debilitating effects of anxiety. The fear conjured up in such contexts, known as second language anxiety, has the potential to negatively impact student motivation, confidence, participation and overall success in the target language. Furthermore, studies have shown that East Asian learners are disproportionately affected by second language anxiety, thus making a working understanding of this ailment crucial for English educators in Korea. In this workshop, teachers will be given a comprehensive explanation of how anxiety negatively impacts the cognition of the language learner and some practical advice on how to reduce second language anxiety levels in the classroom. Teachers will also be given time to share and reflect on their own experiences with language anxiety in groups. The remaining time will be dedicated to a Q&A session with the presenter.

~Richard H. Stahl III is an English teacher at Tongjin Middle School in Gimpo and the Hospitality Officer at the Seoul Chapter of KOTESOL. Originally from Philadelphia, he earned an MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex in 2016, having specialized in second language acquisition, second language anxiety and psycholinguistics throughout his academic career. He is especially passionate about second language anxiety, and seeks to conduct more research on this topic in the future. Contact: richardh.stahl@gmail.com

Getting started with teacher research by Stewart Gray

These days, there is an increasing call for EFL teachers to do research as part of their professional development and empowerment. Moreover, research and publication have unhappily become a basic obligation in some professional contexts in Korea recently. For teachers hoping to research and publish (or obliged to do so), it can be difficult to know where to get started, how to keep things going, and how to publish work at the end of the process. This workshop is for teachers facing such uncertainties. Time in this workshop will be dedicated in part to a brief presentation by the presenter offering some practical advice to teacher-researchers at any stage of the research process. The remaining time will involve a Q&A/discussion with the presenter (a somewhat experienced teacher and researcher) and among groups participants in order to get insights and answers to support them in overcoming whatever research-related challenges they face.

~Stewart Gray is an English teacher at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and a Ph.D. student at the University of Leeds. He is the current president of the Yongin chapter of KOTESOL. He has taught English to students of all ages, trained teachers, presented at various conferences, organized yet other conferences, and published a modest body of research. Contact: ec_391@hotmail.com