CALL Newsletter - August 2023 (Plain Text Version)
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CONFERENCE REVIEW PANSIG2023 Heather Austin, Kansai Gaidai University, Osaka, Japan
PanSIG 2023: Looking Forward and Going Up The JALT PanSIG 2023 Conference, an annual conference sponsored and organized by many of Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT)’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs), took place from May 12-14, 2023 in Kyoto. With all its historical charm and contemporary allure, no other city in Japan offers visitors the chance to immerse themselves in both traditional and modern Japanese culture as much as Kyoto does. With attractions like the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, Nishiki Market, Fushimi Inari Shrine, the Kyoto Imperial Palace, the geisha district of Gion, Kiyomizu-dera Temple, and the Philosopher’s Path, it is rightfully referred to as the cultural capital of Japan. I suspect that once conference attendees arrived in Kyoto, they had to fight the urge to play hooky and explore the city! Although the JALT PanSIG 2023 Conference theme was “Looking Forward,” I would argue that the underlying theme was “Going Up!” To start with, the conference venue, Kyoto Sangyo University, is located in the northern (up!) part of Kyoto, which showcases the tranquility and expansive nature of the area. The campus is very modern and spacious, and I was impressed with its facilities, particularly the numerous escalators that facilitate easy access to the higher levels (up!) of the campus. What’s more, the university’s cutting-edge astronomical observatory was included in the PanSIG 2023 social events, with conference attendees being offered a private guided session in which they could literally look up into the night sky to gaze at the stars! The venue itself was not the only symbolic “up”; many of the sessions also followed this theme. I started the day on a high note with Hamish Smith’s session. Like many teachers, he was disappointed with students’ lack of interactional competence (Galaczi and Taylor, 2018). With the help of selected prompts from 99 Stories I Could Tell by Nathan Pyle, he asserted that the key to topic expansion and spontaneity in peer-to-peer speaking tasks is not going deeper down into the topic-rabbit-hole by asking more and more specific questions, but rather going up (!) and out of it through the strategic use of categorization (What are we really talking about?), personalization in the form of personal connections, observations, or facts (Do I have any stories or special knowledge about this topic?), and association (What does this make me think of?). This avenue is something I plan to exploit in my own speaking classes. Another useful presentation, by Dominique Vola Ambinintsoa Razafindratsimba and Phillip Bennett, was about positive psychology. They offered teachers five interventions that promote the components of PERMA (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment), which are the measurable elements that make up well-being (Seligman, 2011). The five activities they discussed, such as having students keep confidence-building diaries that document their English achievements, aim to increase (up!) students’ overall well-being in regards to their English studies. The benefits of such results cannot be overstated. The plenary session by Mitsuyo Sakamoto on the affordances of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) was also interesting. She outlined a COIL project in which her Japanese students interacted with American students via discussion posts on topics of students’ own choice with the aim of weakening raciolinguistic, native-speaker-as-paragon ideologies. From her students’ positive (up!) survey responses, I would say her project was successful and her students were fortunate to have participated. The last session of the day that I chose was given by Alexis Busso, who demonstrated what a Global Education (GE) framework looks like in practice by giving an overview of a Current Issues course she implemented. She integrated GE content areas – geography literacy, world themes, and global issues (Cates, 2022) – into classic activities like well-researched biweekly news reports, debates, video presentations, and discussion forums, putting on full display the ways in which a GE framework can raise (up!) multicultural awareness and improve (up again!) students’ problem-solving, critical thinking, and synthesizing skills. Thanks to this session, I have found inspiration and direction for the course I will soon start building as part of a new program that I am helping to develop, the English for Global Citizens Program. The 550+ registered participants could choose from 260 sessions over the course of two days, and I thought the way the PanSIG Committee organized the schedule was quite manageable. In fact, my only criticism of the schedule is that I wish there had been a bit more time (up!) between each session. Unfortunately, I missed some sessions that I was looking forward to by just a few minutes, albeit for justifiable reasons: free coffee and chatting with new and old colleagues in the corridors. Logistics was another factor of the conference that was handled well. Everything flowed smoothly, from clear signposting around campus and registration to session hopping and navigating the PanSIG 2023 companion app on Cvent. However, perhaps the logistical detail that surprised me the most was the free childcare. I have never encountered this at a conference before, and I know it made a difference for one serendipitous reason: reuniting with an old colleague who, as it happens, brought his children with him to the conference. He commented that the free childcare service was the only reason he was able to attend and present. The annual PanSIG conference is widely respected because it brings together like-minded professionals with a passion for exchanging ideas and sharing research, but by being inclusive in this way, the organizers ensured the expertise and contributions of those who have such personal responsibilities were not missed. This was my first PanSIG conference, and overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Each session clearly connected to one of the 30 SIGs that organized the conference, and the information and research presented was comprehensive. Additionally, there were many practical aspects that could be used by teachers in their classrooms the next day. The overarching goals of the conference were to consider how language classrooms will evolve and to prepare teachers to foster the kind of creativity and critical thinking within their students that really matters, and I contend the PanSIG 2023 conference achieved these goals. If the standard of what to expect from JALT conferences is always this high (up!), then I am definitely “Looking Forward” to the next one. References Cates, K. A. (2022). A Global Education Approach to ELT Materials. JACET Journal, 66, 1–19. Galaczi, E. & Taylor, L. (2018). Interactional Competence: Conceptualisations, Operationalisations, and Outstanding Questions. Language Assessment Quarterly, 15, 1-18. 10.1080/15434303.2018.1453816. Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Free Press.
Heather Austin (M.A. Applied Linguistics) is an Assistant Professor at a private university in Japan and also taught for a decade at the university level in Turkey. In addition to teaching, she has been actively involved in materials development, curriculum design, CALL, committee work, course coordination, and conducting research. Her professional and scholarly interests include sociolinguistics, materials development, extensive reading, fluency development, and educational technology. |
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