Review
2007 CUE Mini-Conference ReportUmidahon Ashurova
Nanzan University

The 2007 CUE Conference, held on the 23rd and 24th of June atSugiyama Jogakuen University, Nagoya, Aichi, offered attendees anexcellent opportunity to expand their knowledge of recent theoreticaland practical issues in the TEFL field. This two-day event lived up toits statement of “Promoting Lifelong Learning,” drawing a capacity
crowd of around 100 people with two invited speakers and nearly
forty participants delivering presentations. Based around key themes
such as “increasing learner motivation,” “promoting lifelong learning,”and “developing critical thinking,” the content of the conference
focused on topics that are highly relevant to the work of the majority ofcollege and university educators today. Due to the excellent program,attendees were able to attend presentations that met and stimulated
their interests. Also, Special Interest Groups (SIGS) such as LD, CUE,and GILE promoted their upcoming events and distributed recent
journals, while several publishers displayed a large number of theirlatest books and assisted book authors with their presentations.

Day 1
On both days, two to four 45-minute sessions ran concurrently, so it
was always difficult to decide which presentation to attend. John Spiri’s(Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology) presentation entitled“The World at Work” attracted my attention. To start off, the speaker93Ashurova

engaged the audience by asking them to brainstorm the difference inmeaning between the words vocation, job and occupation, and thenhe introduced his main argument that “most Japanese learners do not
see the connection between education and the reality of work.” To
overcome this problem he has developed several teaching materials,composed of readers – stories of different people from several countries
in Asia (Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and other Southeast Asian states)
talking about their “world at work,” – and also handouts to help
students prepare for job interviews, including suggestions for personal
appropriateness, tips for interviews, and self-evaluation sheets. With
comprehensible text at a conversational level and abundant information,
students are given confidence in finding the kind of job appropriate totheir personality. Through assignments that get students to interview
people, John believes in developing students’ communicative skills. Inaddition, this project helps learners to have big hopes for their futures,and to focus on their future professional careers.
The workshop entitled “First Steps Towards Lifelong Learning”
featured talks by Suzanne Bonn, Shannon Kiyokawa, and Donovan
Clarke from Sugiyama Jogakuen University. Talking about motivation,
Suzanne stated that it would be useful for university language programs
to consider motivating teachers in addition to motivating students.
To encourage both full-time and part-time instructors to work moreenthusiastically, Sugiyama has a policy of supporting new teachers,empowering them, recognizing and rewarding them, asking for theirinput, establishing a good network through professional dialogueand peer observations. While Shannon reported on her findings instimulating learning, Donovan shared a classroom experience on thedevelopment of critical thinking among his students. By conducting
constant self-evaluation and providing opportunities for peer
observation, Shannon’s teaching strategies definitely fill what formerly
was an unmet need. In his short talk, Donovan gave some practicaltips for getting students to interact in his class: restricting the usage of94

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long monologues was one of them. The variety of discussion topics
and in-class activities also serve as key factors. It was surprising forme to hear that government and environment are the least popular
discussion topics among university students.
The presentation by the invited speaker Professor Deryn Verity(Osaka Jogakuin College) was very informative and mainly focusedon “Neo-Vygotskian Psycholinguistics: Putting Theory into Practice.”
The focal points in her talk were the controversial questions of “whatlearners can do alone” and “what becomes feasible with others.” She
spoke about a common episode in language teaching, where “theteacher knows what the goal of an activity is and the student doesn’t.”Drawing on the scheme of teaching through interaction, Professor
Verity persuaded teachers to constantly dig into the existing knowledge
in their students’ brains. With this technique, learners can move from“no hope” towards “big hope” in accomplishing any language task.
Having the role of facilitator, teachers need to work to get students
to perform better in groups. Professor Verity highlighted that the goalof any learning process should be self-regulation, where the ultimate
result is the ability to act autonomously, in the process having beenchallenged countless times. Any portion of new information needs
to be repeated several times, until it becomes a part of the learner’s
automatic knowledge. She also spoke on the importance of training
our students to seek help, as this is one of the well-known learning
strategies. She concluded her speech by noting that “second language
acquisition is a second chance to symbolize the world.”
Mark Rebuck of Nagoya City University conveyed his thoughtsof “motivating by authentic materials” by presenting his idea of“LEAL (level excessive authentic listening) lesson.” In LEAL classes
the following are privileged: comprehension levels are constantly
checked; repeated playing is preferred; and students are given agood deal of time to reproduce the language they have heard. The
questionnaire response showed that students find the following the95

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most difficult aspects of authentic materials: fast speech; unknown
vocabulary; interruptions/stopping and omissions; and different
accents with muffled sounds. The presenter generally used listening
materials from accessible media, especially BBC Radio talks. He has
also highlighted that the use of the term authentic compared to theone of advanced generates a more neutral attitude among learners andtherefore, naming the course as he did builds students’ perceptions onwhat to expect from it. In their feedback, students have also pointed
to the usefulness of having a script and playing a recording several
times. However, making no script available can shape another way ofdealing with unexpected language. Bearing in mind the significanceof minimal pre-teaching, Mark has the objective of demonstrating tolearners the “achievement gap,” a journey from “unable to understandanything” to “able to understand everything.” He recommended thatteachers conduct LEAL lessons once or twice a semester in order toadd some tension to the general course.
Tetsuya Fukuda, from Dokkyo University, in his short talk “UniversityPresentation Class: Developing a Lifelong Skill”, described a recentshift at Japanese high schools and universities in the appreciation of thevalue of teaching presentation skills. Although the Joho (InformationStudies) class is not a part of entrance exams, lately around 50 books
have been released on Joho Japan. According to Tetsuya, it is a sadreality that only 40% of high school students actually take this course
and, moreover, they just learn how to make beautiful power-pointslides. Tetsuya’s teaching method is intended to improve this situation
by encouraging his students to talk clearly, to maintain eye contact, beable to use other types of visuals, and lastly, discouraging them frommemorizing notes during their presentations in his class. He inspires
learners to handle unexpected problems during staging.

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Day 2
On the second day of the conference, being responsible for theLD SIG table and also preparing for our own presentation, I could
only manage to listen to the presentation of the invited speaker, Heidi
Nachi Evans. Heidi addressed the topic of “Self-assessment and Learner
Development: Instrument Design and Implementation” in her talk. The
goals of the workshop were to discuss the challenges of self-assessment(SA) while analyzing its forms and model instruments, in addition toapplying certain frameworks to create these instruments, while at thesame time, considering the support that SA offers for lifelong learning.
The workshop kicked off with warm-up questions asking, “What kindof SA instruments do you use?” and “How does SA aid your instruction
and/or student learning?” Rather than throwing the audience directly
into the less-familiar world of terminology, Heidi prompted it to comeup with personal definitions for terms such as assessment, alternativeassessment, evaluation, non-referenced evaluation, reliability, rubric,and validity. Then the numerous purposes of using SA in academic
contexts were considered. As with any aspect of the teaching process,SA faces challenges and limitations: in groups we discussed theeffectiveness of SA and some shared their opinions on the challengesof designing their own SA instruments and /or using the guiding
principles. At the end, Heidi introduced a very constructive idea, thatof collaborative student-instructor SA style, and concluded her talkby highlighting the consequence of implementing SA in promoting
lifelong learning.

Overview
The event provided an informal environment for sharing ideas
and experiences. All the sessions were worthwhile attending, withspeakers ranging from good to great. At the close, participants wereinvited to join round-up sessions and reflect on the workshops. With97

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several coffee breaks and a lively pizza party, this gathering helped
newcomers like me get to know colleagues outside the work place andso build a sense of community.
A big round of applause should go to the organizers for theirthoughtfulness on scheduling the workshops only for the first half of thesecond day. This might have given a chance for the attendees to have arelaxing afternoon before the start of the regular working week.
I’m sure you have many more questions about the Conference!
Please look for answers in the up-coming “2007 CUE Conference
Proceedings.”

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