Gwangju-Jeonnam KOTESOL Meeting @ AILA / ALAK 2016

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Location: Honam University
417 Eodeung-daero (59-1 Seobong-dong) Gwangsan-gu
Gwangju Metropolitan City, 62399, South Korea
See map: Google Maps

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Gwangju-Jeonnam KOTESOL September Meeting @
The 3rd AILA East-Asia Symposium & 2016 ALAK-GETA Joint International Conference

 

Discounted Registration to ALL KOTESOL Members

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Pre-Registration Period: August 10-September 5 (Extended).

25,000 won - Pre-registration Fee (to KOTESOL members).
Includes Conference Program Book // Saturday Lunch // Snacks // Saturday Evening Reception with Traditional Entertainment.
Friday Pre-conference events FREE with pre-registration.

Pre-registration Web-Form Link: https://koreatesol.org/content/2016-aila-alak-geta-international-confere...

Conference Program Book available as PDF download at bottom of this page.

Gwangju-Jeonnam Chapter Newsletter available as PDF download at bottom of this page.

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DAY 1. Pre-Conference Events

— School Visits & Class Observations (One of various elementary & high school classes)
— Opening Ceremony
— Plenary Workshops (2)
— The 3rd AILA East-Asia Symposium:
— Connecting SLA Research to ELT Practice: Opportunities and Challenges

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DAY 2. Main Conference

—  Opening Ceremony
—  3 Plenary Sessions
—  Daniel Perrin — Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
—  Hyukseung Kwon — Seoul National University, Korea
—  Gabriele Kasper — University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA
— 7 Featured Sessions // 1 Roundtable Discussion
— 112 Concurrent Presentations // 12 Poster Presentations

Gwangju-Jeonnam Chapter KOTESOL Sessions

Lindsay Herron (Featured Session)
2:00 - 2:40 pm. Ten Tech Tools to Ease Teachers' Lives (Workshop)

Jocelyn Wright (Concurrent Session)
3:00 - 3:25 pm. Doing Reflective Practice: Awareness-Raising for Empowerment

Bryon Hale (Concurrent Session)
3:25 - 3:50 pm. Understanding Our Learners: Being Reflective and Intentional About How We Know Students

(Full conference schedule attached at bottom as PDF file.)

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DAY 3. Cultural Tour

— Gwangju City Tour
— The National Asian Culture Complex (국립아시아문화전당)

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Abstracts and Biographical Sketches

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Ten Tech Tools to Ease Teachers' Lives

Featured Session (Workshop)
Lindsay Herron

Teachers’ time is at a premium. Fortunately, technology can help! But too often, sites that purport to help teachers ultimately prove disappointing or expensive. This presentation cuts through the chaff to introduce tried-and-true online tools that are free, easy to use, and guaranteed to make an EFL teacher’s life easier, without any software installation.

Among the highlighted tools are those that can make class feedback more dynamic, such as Padlet, or make worksheets more interactive and multimodal, such as Wizer. Educators looking for easy ways to gather student information, create self-grading tests, distribute assignments, or conduct surveys will be gratified to discover the plethora of tools offered by Google. Voice Spice and Vocaroo will prove invaluable for teachers who wish to record their students or create their own listening exercises. And keeping up with online articles for professional development has never been easier, thanks to tools such as Feedly and Readability.

Attendees will leave the workshop with great ideas and new enthusiasm for effectively integrating tech tools into their teaching, helping to make their lives much easier.

^{NOTE: Attendees will have an opportunity to try out several tools for themselves; bringing a smartphone pre-loaded with a QR-reader app is encouraged.}

Biographical Sketch
  Lindsay Herron has been a visiting professor at Gwangju National University of Education since 2008. She has master’s degrees in language education and cinema studies, a CELTA, and a CELTA YL-Extension. She is currently the national president of Korea TESOL (KOTESOL) and Gwangju-Jeonnam Chapter officer.

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Doing Reflective Practice: Awareness-Raising for Empowerment

Jocelyn Wright

Reflective practice is a professional activity many teachers choose to engage in in an effort to improve learning- and teaching-related outcomes. They may have very different foci and adopt diverse approaches to meet their needs. Critical reflection, especially, involves questioning experiences. To do this effectively, teachers need to consider many areas in addition to curriculum, planning, teaching, learning, and assessment, such as social contexts, values and identities, communication, among others. Moreover, to feel empowered, they have to feel they have opportunities to excel in their duties or to make a difference. In this short workshop, teachers will be able to reflect on the degree of control they have over a number of areas and, through an interactive, mingling activity, dialogue about those that they wish to focus on, either because they are successful or because they pose problems that participants desire to understand better, so they can attempt to bring about positive change in the future.

Biographical Sketch
  Jocelyn Wright is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Mokpo National University. She has degrees in linguistics and education and holds a CELTA. She has been teaching in Korea at the university level for over seven years and has been actively involved in KOTESOL for just as long. She has also taught in French-Canada, the Dominican Republic, and France. Her many interests include professional development and critical pedagogy.

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Understanding Our Learners: Being Reflective and Intentional About How We Know Students

Bryan Hale

As teachers we often want to understand our students as much as we can - to understand not just their language level and learning experiences so far, but also their motivations, goals, anxieties, and hopes, their personalities, and the relationships among our students. But, much of the time, our relationships with our students are unavoidably limited, bureaucratic, and institutional. Even if we make relationship-building part what happens in our classrooms, we may wish we were doing more. In this short session, teachers will have a chance to reflect on their knowledge of their students, how they (really) built that knowledge, and the limitations of that knowledge. Participants will also discuss how we can be mindful and intentional about managing our understanding of our learners, even in limiting circumstances, and share ideas about how teachers might feel content or fulfilled in how they relate to learners in real teaching contexts.

Biographical Sketch
  Bryan Hale is a teacher from Australia who has been in Korea since 2011. Bryan currently teaches conversation and writing to elementary and middle school students at Sunkyung Academy in Gwangju. He has experience teaching students in Korea of all ages, from very young to adult. Email: bryan.english.teacher@gmail.com

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Honam University, Gwangsan Campus, Gwangsan-gu, Gwangju.