Gwangju-Jeonnam KOTESOL June Chapter Meeting

Gwangju-Jeonnam KOTESOL June Meeting

Time:  Saturday, June 8, 2013, 1:30 p.m.
Place:  Chosun University (Gwangju), Main Building (본관), Room 5210.
Directions: http://koreatesol.org/content/chapter-meeting-venue-getting-chosun-unive...

Schedule
1:30 pm: Sign-in and Meet-and-Greet
(Admission: No charge. Future membership encouraged.)

2:00 pm: PRESENTATION  1
Using Storybooks to Create an English-Friendly EFL Environment
Eul Soon Lee (Gwangju Dongun Elem. School)

2:45 pm: Refreshment Break

3:00 pm: PRESENTATION  2
Injecting Interest into Intensive Reading Activities
Henry Gerlits (Jeonnam Ed. Training Institute)

4:00 pm: Swap-Shop Session
Share your Teaching Ideas, Classroom Activities, and Language Games.
(Open to All Attendees. Handouts welcomed.)

4:30 pm: Announcements / Drawing for Prizes / Closing

The Chapter Newsletter, Gwangju Communicator, attached at bottom of page.

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Presentation Summaries and Presenter Biographical Sketches

Using Storybooks to Create an English-Friendly EFL Environment
Eul Soon Lee (Gwangju Dongun Elementary School)

The Presentation

Authentic picture story books as teaching materials seem to provide a learning environment that might be meaningful to young learners. According to Jayne Cameron (2001), stories represent holistic approaches to language teaching and learning that place a high premium on children's involvement with rich, authentic uses of the foreign language.

This presentation will show why it is advantageous to use storybooks for teaching English in the elementary school setting and suggest effective pre-activities, while-activities, and post-activities for using with storybooks. She will also share her teaching experiences using storybooks for elementary school students.

The Presenter

Eul Soon Lee has been teaching for thirteen years as an elementary school teacher. She is now working at Dong-un Elementary School. She graduated from Gwangju National University of Education in 2001 and received her master’s degree from GNUE in Elementary English Education. Now she is in the doctorate program at Chonnam National University. Her main academic interest is in using storybooks in elementary English education.

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Injecting Interest into Intensive Reading Activities
Henry Gerlits (Jeonnam Educational Training Institute)

If TESOL topics were kids in high school, Extensive Reading would be one of the prettiest, most popular girls in your class. But let's not forget that her misunderstood, seemingly dry-as-toast older sister, Intensive Reading, also has a lot to offer. Let’s face it, when our supervisors ask us to teach a class on reading, more often than not, they mean reading of the intensive variety. So, what can we do to keep students interested, motivated, and connected to the material? In this presentation, I'd like to share some of the activities that worked well in my course on Intensive Reading strategies that I was assigned to teach this past semester.

I'll talk about warm-ups to activate your students' background knowledge, and we'll discuss alternatives to traditional vocabulary translations and matching reviews. We'll discuss the ways paraphrasing can help integrate the other three skills into an intensive reading classroom. We'll get into my favorite aspect of reading (timed challenges!) and the many ways you can use the stopwatch to push your students to read and achieve more efficiently in the intensive reading classroom. We'll also explore ways to adapt Tim Ferriss' speed reading techniques for English language learners. Focusing on line pacing and utilizing peripheral vision, we'll do a few exercises ourselves.  

Finally, we'll talk about student attitude and awareness when approaching a text. We'll consider the importance of continually asking questions on the text to maintain active reading habits, not only to aid in comprehension, but also in order to foster a healthy skepticism in young readers. Though the students in my classroom are adults, we'll discuss ways to adapt these activities to students of all ages.  

Join me as we give intensive reading the credit she's due!

The Presenter

Henry Gerlits (MA in Applied Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Boston) is presently a teacher trainer at the Jeonnam Educational Training Institute. He has been teaching since 2005 and has lived and worked in Korea, Japan, and his native Boston. His research interests include language acquisition, classroom management, and materials design. Email: henry.gerlits@gmail.com