George MacLean
University of the Ryukyus
George MacLean is a professor at the University of the Ryukyus. He has taught at primary-junior high and university levels in Japan and in the International School system. His research interests include SLA and ICT implementation. He is active in the Japan Association of Language Teachers (JALT) at a local and national level, and also serves on review boards for several conferences and journals. This presentation is made possible with support from JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP19K00809 & 20K00861 . 本研究はJSPS科研費 JP19K00809 & 20K00861の助成を受けたものです。
Sessions
Feedback on Student Performances During Difficult Times: ELT in ERT
Because of COVID-19, many ELT teachers have had to teach classes online as ERT (emergency remote teaching). Aside from technology, three major ERT problems are motivation, class cohesion, and feedback. This workshop will introduce a performance activity, Living Newspaper Readers Theatre (LNRT), that will address these three problems. It will first describe what LNRT is and then how to do it, with examples of performances and how they build motivation and class cohesion. The latter part of the workshop will concern how to effectively give online feedback about performances. Specifically, we will show examples of rubrics and discuss how they can be used for giving students feedback, training them about what to look for when giving each other feedback, and how to articulate such feedback to peers. The examples in this workshop were optimized for ERT but can be done face-to-face, and indeed have been for the last ten years.
Using Cloud Computing to Improve Feedback about EFL Oral Presentations
In this presentation, I will discuss my experiences fostering a reflective learning environment via (a) the delivery of near-immediate teacher and peer feedback and (b) subsequently requiring students to submit reflections about their learning experiences using cloud computing (G Suite for Education). Certain pedagogical tasks limit teachers’ abilities to provide immediate feedback, such as when students are giving presentations. I will explain how cloud computing can help to overcome such challenges, notably by videoing students, incorporating teacher feedback into the video such that students are receiving critical feedback about their language production and presentation skills, and making it available to them in the cloud. Thereafter, based on students’ comments and their reflective learning assignments, I will discuss (a) whether students were able to understand corrective feedback about use of the -s morpheme (plural -s, third person -s, possessive -s) and (b) whether better usage occurred thereafter (uptake).