JALT 2013 "Learning is a Lifelong Voyage" in Kobe

10/28/2013

This past weekend, I went to Kobe to present at and attend the 39th annual JALT conference. This was a great international conference hosted by the Japan Association of Language Teaching, and, as always, was a valuable learning and networking experience. For my presentation, I held a workshop on "tapping in to students' interests with comics," where I discussed the Advanced English II course I teach at KTC and shared activities from the course, in hopes that other teachers would find some useful and fun things to bring back with them to their own classrooms. I was lucky to have time slot right after the plenary speaker, Penny Ur, and more people attended my workshop than I expected. I had a knowledgable and enthusiastic crowd of participants and I hope everyone enjoyed it. Through the comic activity jigsaw participants completed in the workshop, lots of great ideas and resources were shared for using comics in various teaching contexts, and we didn't have time to fully discuss all the possibilities. This blog post will hopefully allow us to continue our discussion. Please feel free to post questions and ideas here for others to respond to. The PowerPoint and hand-out from the workshop are posted below.