Matthew French
Mihara Board of Education (Japan)
Matthew French is an EFL teacher with 7 years’ experience teaching English in Japan. He has taught primarily junior high and elementary school students in Japan as an ALT on the JET Programme. In class he is always looking for new ways to incorporate technology and music, while his research interests lie in using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, particularly political and news discourse, to reveal the power of words. He has recently submitted his dissertation for his master’s in TESOL through the University of Birmingham. Matthew currently works at the Mihara Board of Education in Hiroshima, Japan.
Sessions
Mental Lexicons and Word Association: A Small-Scale Study
The question of how words are organized in language learners’ minds has become increasingly relevant as acknowledgement of the importance of vocabulary has increased. The concept of the mental lexicon attempts to model the connections between those words and to provide a map for how learners organize those associations. This presentation will look at common word relationships that comprise the mental lexicon using a small-scale word association task (WAT) as a method of graphing these connections in Japanese non-native speakers (NNSs) of English and native speakers. Also of interest to other graduate students, I will be discussing the process of preparing, conducting, coding and analyzing the WAT results and some pitfalls I hope to help you avoid, should you wish to run your own small-scale WAT. *** Part of the Graduate Student Showcase; this presentation, itself, is ~25 minutes long. ***
Graduate Student Showcase Presentations
This session will feature presentations by our cohort of graduate students: Matt French, "Mental Lexicons and Word Association: A Small-Scale Study" (sync) Nur Fitri Gebers, "Example of a Communicative Lesson for a Mixed-Ability Online English Literature Class" (sync) Gizem Genç & Antonina Nemtinova, "Identities of Turkish High School Students and Their Effects on Learners’ Perceptions of Lesson Theme" (sync) Ehean Kim, "Scratch Coding Workshop Through Design-Based Research" (sync) Kirsten Razzaq, "From SOS to Success: The Distance Learners’ Dissertation Toolkit" (sync) Charlotte Otto, "The Role That English Plays in the World Today" (async) Helmut Otto, "Language Planning: An Example from Africa" (async) Robin Maurice, "A Framework for Adapting and Exploiting Authentic Materials with Young English Learners" (async)
Graduate Student Showcase Roundtable
A roundtable discussion of issues and importance to current graduate students. Participants: Ehean Kim Matt French Fitri Gebers Gizem Genç Antonina Nemtinova Robin Maurice Charlotte Otto Otto Helmut Kirsten Razzaq Michael Berichon