Monthly Meetings

 Title: Once upon a time in an EFL classroom: Stories as a window to culture and language

Speaker: Renée Sawazaki

Date:  February 24, 2008
Time:  14:00-16:30
Place: Maebashi Kyoai Gakuen College, 1154-4 Koyahara-machi, Maebashi, Gunma

(tel: 027-266-7575)
Fee:  Members, free; One-day members, \1,000, students, \200
Info: Barry Keith, 027-263-2484,  womble@pearl.ocn.ne.jp

       Hisatake Jimbo, 0274-62-0376,  jimbo@waseda.jp
        Morijiro Shibayama, 027-263-8522, mshibaya@jcom.home.ne.jp

Description: This workshop will focus on practical techniques for encouraging students, even at the beginning level, to use stories in order to not only build language skills, but to gain insights into foreign cultures. The speaker will share her experiences of incorporating folk tales and stories in her courses for non-English majors. Participants will try out some of these practices and consider how they could adapt them to their own teaching situation. These techniques can be readily used for students in high school and up. Benefits for language development include vocabulary acquisition, contextualized input and guided output tasks for fluency skills development. The speaker will also share her unique model for cultural understanding and demonstrate how she encourages students to apply it when analyzing a culture based on a folk tale.

Renée Sawazaki has taught EFL in Japan for 16 years and has been happily involved in Gunma JALT for the past 12. She has a Masters in Teaching from the School for International Training in Vermont, is an associate professor of English at Surugadai University in Saitama, and coordinates Rainbow Families, a literacy-based study group for bilingual children. Her primary interests include EFL methodology and materials development, early childhood education, intercultural understanding and storytelling.