Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Greetings And News Updates

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Greetings And News Updates
Cover Design: Copyright <@toraillustrates>

GREETINGS AND NEWS UPDATES | 挨拶と近況報告
In This Issue: Learning Learning, Volume 28, Issue 1 今号について….. Andy BarfieldCo-coordinators' Greetings for Spring 2021 2021年春
Furukawa

コーディネーター挨拶 ….. Koki Tomita & Tetsuko

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MINI-PROFILES: SHARING YOUR LEARNER DEVELOPMENT INTERESTS |ミニプロフィール：学習者ディベロップメントについての関心の共有
Mini-profiles ミニプロフィール …. Brennan Conaway, Naomi Fujishima, Ian Hurrell, Ken Ikeda,
Judith Kambara, Mike Kuziw, Tanya McCarthy, Rob Moreau, Yoshi Nakai, Namiko Sakoda, Akiko
Takagi, & Dominique Vola Ambinintsoa

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MEMBERS’ VOICES | メンバーの声
Creative collaboration - Kickstarting the 21st century classroom …. Tim Cleminson

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Writing classes and the next generation of translational software …. Jeffrey Stewart

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Experiencing presence in English …. Wan Jung (Amy) Lin

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LEARNERS' VOICES | 学習者の声
Stepping up to take action: Beach cleaning as a first step …. Mifu Yasukuni

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STORIES OF LEARNING AND TEACHING PRACTICES | 学習・教育実践の成功談・失敗談
Narratives of Filipino English Teachers in Japan: A reflective dialogic review of Stewart (2020) ….
Prumel Barbudo & Stephanie Keith Lim

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Dis/Connect – a virtual art exhibition by students of Miyazaki International College and Kyoto
University of the Arts … Will Hall & Eric Luong

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Silence, voice, and writing .… Leena Karlsson & Chika Hayashi

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LD SIG GRANT AWARDEE REPORTS | LD SIG 研究助成金受
Professional development through the pinhole of learner development …. Malik Amir Feroze

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RESEARCH & REVIEWS / 研究 & レビュー
Review of Language Teacher Recognition: Narratives of Filipino English Teachers in Japan(Stewart, 2020) … Michael Carroll
LOOKING BACK | 報告
A collage of reflections on the Learner Development (LD) Forum: “TLC from LD: Transformative
Learning Communities” …. Feroze Malik Amir, Andy Barfield, Phillip Alixe Bennett, Oana Cusen,
Dominic Edsall, Aya Hayasaki, Ellen Head, Ken Ikeda, Yuri Imamura, Riitta Kelly, Jackson Lee, Teh
Pei Ling, Riho Osaki, James Ronald, Alison Stewart, & Isra Wongsarnpigoon

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Learning from students: Applying the spirit of CCLT to a year of online learning ….
Cecilia Smith Fujishima
Our CCLT6 conference reflection …. Shiori Kishihara, Yuki Murakami, Chika Matsumoto, & Kristina
Reyes with Lorna Asami
CCLT6 Reflections: From face-to-face to armchair …. Patrick Kiernan

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Greetings And News Updates
Reflections on Dis/Connect: virtual art exhibition …. Will Hall
Reflection on CCLT6: Learners (and teachers) in the virtual moment …. Lee Arnold
Acknowledging the tiredness and appreciating the struggles …. Andy Barfield

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LOOKING FORWARD | 今後のイベント
Information on PanSIG 2021
Information on JALTCALL 2021

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SIG MATTERS | インフォメーション
Learner Development SIG financial report August 2020 to February 2021 …. Patrick Kiernan
Writing for Learning Learning『学習の学習』応募規定

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In this issue | 本号について
Welcome to Learning Learning 28(1)! We warmly thank everyone who has generously written for this issue, and wevery much hope that their contributions will enable readers to reach new and unexpected perspectives on learnerdevelopment.
The issue opens with Greetings and News Update from LD SIG co-coordinators Koki Tomita and Tetsuko Furukawa
who inform us of all the SIG’s activities and plans for 2021. Thank you, Koki and Tetsuko, for all your dedicatedcoordination work. In a newly revived feature of the newsletter, Mini-profiles: Sharing Your Learner Development
Interests, 12 members of the SIG (Brennan Conaway, Naomi Fujishima, Ian Hurrell, Ken Ikeda, Judith Kambara, Mike
Kuziw, Tanya McCarthy, Rob Moreau, Yoshi Nakai, Namiko Sakoda, Akiko Takagi, and Dominique Vola Ambinintsoa)
share personal vignettes about what interests, puzzles, and/or intrigues them about learner development. Please feel
free to contribute your own mini-profile for the Autumn issue of Learning Learning. Just write to<lleditorialteam@gmail.com>. Many thanks!
Next, three new members of the SIG—Tim Cleminson, Jeff Stewart, and Wan Jung Lin Amy—contribute toMembers’ Voices. Writing about how he values creativity and collaboration, Tim recounts his enthusiasm for using“creative play” in different projects with his learners. Creative play requires students to engage in active decisionmaking with other classmates. It also encourages them to improvise and take risks to resolve different problems such as“the egg-drop challenge.” Tim writes, “My university classrooms are often strewn with newspaper, straws, spaghetti,tape, hastily hashed-out plans, a fair sprinkling of wonky towers and broken eggs ....” Which not only begs the question
as to how we might say “wonky towers and broken eggs” in another language, but also leads us, albeit somewhat
indirectly, to Jeff Stewart’s reflections about the impacts of translational software on learners’ writing development.
Jeff asks: Should we as teachers condemn the use of software like DeepL by learners while we may ourselves benefit
from using it? More broadly, how might we start to enter into dialogues with our learners about making good use oftranslation tools for shared quality of life and learning? After considering a range of perspectives, Jeff ends on a note ofcautious optimism about the benefits of students using software like Deep L.
In the third Members’ Voices piece, Wan Jung Lin Amy takes us on an extended autobiographical journey ofdifferent identities and positioning as a “non-native speaker” of English where she can experience her presence inEnglish-using communities. “It was not an easy process, and it took many years of constant reflection, evaluation, selftalk, arguing, fighting, negotiation, and frustration to come to this transformation,” observes Amy in her criticalappraisal of the varied challenges she has faced. A hearty thank you to Amy, Jeff, and Tim for sharing such compellingstories. And, of course, all of you are also warmly invited to share your own Members’ Voices story or reflection to dowith learner development in a future issue of Learning Learning.
We are delighted to revive another feature of Learning Learning, Learners' Voices / 学習者の声, in which learners
share stories and reflections of their learning and/or report on a project or research that they are doing related tolearner development. In Stepping up to take action: Beach cleaning as a first step, Mifu Yasukuni, a third-year university

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Greetings And News Updates
student, writes in Japanese and English about her changing awareness and growing sense of responsibility to takeaction about pollution and climate change. Please do consider sharing your learners’ voices in future issues of Learning
Learning, too.
Stories of Learning and Teaching Practices follows with three contributions that each have a strong dialogic quality.
First, Prumel Barbudo and Stephanie Lim engage in a reflective collaborative review of a recent book by Alison Stewart
that explores the life stories of Filipino English teachers in Japan. Sharing close cultural identities with the teachers,
Prumel and Stephanie take up three themes that personally stand out for them in their stories: their teaching paths,
their experiences of discrimination, and the politics of ascribing and/or being ascribed simplistic binary identities suchas Native English Speaking Teachers (NESTs) and Non-native English Speaking Teacher (NNESTs). Later, in this same issue
in Research and Reviews, Michael Carroll provides a parallel review of Alison Stewart’s book in which he analyses thetheme of identity recognition in the different teachers’ stories. We are grateful to Michael, Prumel, and Stephanie for
their thought-provoking and mutually complementary reviews of Alison’s groundbreaking research.
Continuing with Stories of Learning and Teaching Practice, Will Hall and Eric Luong report on “Dis/Connect”, avirtual art exhibition which they organised with their students in the last academic year and which focused on
experiences and impacts of distance and isolation in the COVID-19 pandemic. Preparing for this outside of regular classtime and in the 2020 summer holiday period, Eric and Will’s students not only created impressive artworks but also
learnt how to use various digital tools. What’s more, the collaboration that such project work involves spurred thedevelopment of their students’ autonomous learning.
Expanding on some similar themes, Chika Hayashi and Leena Karlsson close Stories of Learning and Teaching
Practice by reflecting on their extended collaboration since 2018 when they gave a joint plenary at the Independent
Learning Association conference (ILA2018) in Kobe. Their prolonged dialogue starts from the final moment of theirplenary session where they were unexpectedly met with silence. What did this signify for them and for different
audience members? As Chika and Leena ponder this, they gradually shift their reflective gaze towards the challenges oflistening to learners’ inner voices and adapting to the disruptions of the physicality of learning that the COVID-19
pandemic has brought. In the final part of their elaborate reflection Chika and Leena contemplate what different
meanings writing about their shared learning and their learners has for them.
Chika: “... it’s always a chorus of voices in narrative inquiry that the readers will hear… .”Leena: “... the world of education needs experimental writings, texts emerging from experience; it needs narrativeand stories, memories and dreams, the use of imagination and creativity.”
We hope you will enjoy reading their inspiring reflection as much as we have. Thank you so much, Chika and Leena,
for sharing this with the readers of Learning Learning.
Following this, as a JALT2020 conference grant recipient, Malik Amir Feroze’s Grant Awardee Essay brings to us his
own teaching story and learner development interests, as well as what he especially valued from taking part in the LD
Forum, presenting, and participating in other sessions at JALT2020 Online. “I felt encouraged, socially as well as
professionally, to collaborate with like-minded people,” writes Malik as he looks forward to building on theseexperiences and collaborating with other SIG members in the future. Research and Reviews comes next, where, as
mentioned above, Michael Carroll shares with us his review of Alison Stewart’s book around the theme of identity
recognition in Filipino teachers’ lives in Japan. Michael starts: “It’s not often that the word “unputdownable” is heard in
relation to an academic book, but this book had me engrossed from the moment I picked it up.” We hope you will findsimilar thought-provoking enjoyment in reading this engaging review.
Next, Looking Back brings together a rich chorus of reflections from the JALT2020 Learner Development SIG Forumin November and the Creating Community: Learning Together 6 (CCLT6) mini-conference in December 2021. Bothevents were held online, with presenters and participants invited to share what they had experienced, learnt, andfound interesting. The collage of reflections on the JALT2020 LD forum includes responses by 17 individuals to thedifferent presentations about transformative learning communities. These reflections were written during the forum
itself in an online Google form, while the suite of CCLT6 reflections were composed in the weeks afterwards. These
include writing by Keisen University students Shiori Kishihara, Chika Matsumoto, Yuki Murakami, and Kristina Reyes,with their teacher Lorna Asami; by Cecilia Smith Fujishima, four of whose students (Rino Yoshida, Ayaka Muraishi,

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Greetings And News Updates
Remi Hayasaka, and Nagisa Sato) presented at CCLT6; by Patrick Kiernan of Ochanomizu University about thepresentations of four of his graduate students (Kimika Matsuyama, Saki Takei, Miho Meguro, Ngô Thị Tố Trinh; by Will
Hall of Miyazaki International College (MIC) about his collaboration with Eric Luong from Kyoto University of the Arts
with MIC students Aya Fukunaga, Masataka Ochiai, and Serina Yano; by Lee Arnold on “Learners (and Teachers) in the
Virtual Moment”; and, by Andy Barfield of Chuo University, who took part with three of his students (Mutsumi
Kobayashi, Wakana Taira, and Mifu Yasukuni). A humongous thank you to everyone for sharing reflections from thisgroundbreaking student-teacher conference!
In Looking Forward, we include news of the LD Forums at this year’s PanSIG conference in May and the JALTCALL
conference in early June. After this, in SIG Matters, comes the most recent financial report of the LD SIG so that you
may see where your membership fees go and what LD uses its funds for. Thank you to Patrick Kiernan, SIG treasurer, for
keeping us all updated here.
Once again, we would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to each contributor.
As we reach the end of this introduction, you will probably have noticed that a great number of writers havecontributed in many different genres to this first issue of Learning Learning for 2021. May we enthusiasticallyencourage you to write for the Autumn issue of Learning Learning: We would love to hear from you!
You can find full information about the kind of writing that Learning Learning aims to include here: http://ldsig.org/information-for-contributors/ The deadline for the Autumn issue is 28th August 2021. Please send your writing
to us at <lleditorialteam@gmail.com>. Many thanks in advance: We are really looking forward to hearing from you.
We also invite reviews of another important publication from 2020, “Whose Autonomy? Voice and Agency in Language
Learning” edited by Adelia Peña Clavel and Katherine Thornton and which is freely available as an e-book here. If you
are interested in reviewing this anthology of writing from the 2018 Independent Learning Conference in Kobe, please
let us know. Thank you.
Wishing you happy reading and learning,
Andy Barfield, lead editor for this issue, together with the Learning Learning Editorial Team: Lorna Asami, Ken
Ikeda, Mike Kuziw, Yoshio Nakai, Kento Nakachi, Hugh Nicoll, Koki Tomita, and James Underwood.
24th March 2021

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Greetings And News Updates

Co-coordinators' Greetings for Spring 2021 |コーディネーター挨拶
Welcome to another amazing issue of our SIG's
newsletter, Learning Learning, that many people havecontributed to, working hard with the editorial team to
put together this issue. I also would like to use these
Greetings to reflect upon the year 2020 and formally
begin our activities in 2021.
To start, I would like to share our gratitude forthe members of the community who joined ouractivities in 2020 and made them worthwhile.
Regardless of the difficulties and challenges
triggered by the pandemic, we were able to pull off
all of the major events as we had initially planned
because of the continuous contribution from eachone of you.
Since the last issue of LL, we held our SIG Forumwith the lead of our Program Chair, Blair Barr, at thefirst-ever online JALT International Conference inNovember 2020. At the forum on “TLC from LD:
Transformative Learning Communities,” Andy
Barfield, Oana Cusen, Yuri Imamura, Riitta Kelly,
Malik Amir Feroze, Aya Hayasaki, Ken Ikeda and Riho
Osaki, and Jim Ronald presented their researchfindings and community building experiences intheir workplaces during the pandemic. At the end of
the forum, we congratulated one of the forum
presenters, Amir Malik Feroze, as the LD SIG’s JALTInternational Conference Grant recipient. Good
work, everyone!
On the same note, we managed to hold thesignature event of the LD SIG, Creating Community:
Learning Together 6 (CCLT 6), in December 2020
through the tireless efforts of the CCLT Planning
Committee (Ellen Head, James Underwood, Ian
Hurrell, Ken Ikeda, and Lorna Asami) and Publicity
Team Illustrator (Rob Moreau). CCLT6 was held
online and drew a large audience. Personally, I
participated in the conference as part of theorganizing team. Since my task was to hostpresentations in a Zoom room, I had the chance tojoin several sessions. I was continually struck by thequality of the presentations. In particular, student
presenters did amazingly well in sharing original
insights from their learning and development in2020. We are hoping to upload the videos to the LD

website from the CCLT6 presentations with thepermission of the respective presenters. Pleasewatch out for further updates on LD News.
About the administrative report, I would like toshare the highlights of our Annual General Meeting(AGM) at the 2020 JALT International Conference.
For more detailed information regarding theCommittee Report and the minutes of the AGM,
please visit our website at <http://ld-sig.org/
welcome-to-the-jalt-ld-sig/annual-reports/>.
In the LD committee, Yoshio Nakai stepped
down from his role as Co-Coordinator, then Tetsuko
Fukawa, Membership Chair, stepped up. After
Tetsuko stepped down from Membership, Andy
Barfield started organizing membership emails for
SIG members. Switching focus now to theprogramme team, Robert Morel decided to leave
the Committee. Rob along with Blair Barr hadorganized a series of LD Forums at past PanSIG
Conferences over several years. Fumiko Murase isanother officer who stepped down from her longtime LL editorial team role in 2020. It has been mypleasure working with you in the team over the past
years. For the fresh start of 2021, I am happy toannounce that Kento Nakachi is joining the Japanesetranslation team from this issue of LL. We aredelighted to be working with you, Kento.
Touching upon the SIG publications, I think it isgood timing to bring up the Learner Development
Journal (LDJ), another platform for LD members toexperience professional development throughcollaborative writing opportunities. From the LDJ
Journal Steering Group (JSG), Alison Stewart,
another distinguished editor and longtime LD
committee member, decided to step down.
Replacing Alison, Tanya McCarthy has joined the JSG
and been working for the publication of issues 5 and
6 of the journal.
Finally, I would like to mention a change inwebmaster for the LDJ website. In 2017, Darren
Elliot kindly agreed to create and maintain the LDJ
website for an initial period. From my experience,creating and managing a website from scratch takes
much time and commitment. I really appreciate

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(2): Greetings And News Updates
Darren for taking care of the website for the past 4
years and keeping it running smoothly. From 2021,
Dominic Edsall will take over this role and work with
Hugh Nicoll and me to migrate both the main LD
website and LDJ websites to the JALT website. We
are looking at the summer for completing this.
Thank you so much, everyone for yourcontributions to the LD community. We are looking
forward to meeting and collaborating with newmembers to keep our activities dynamic withdifferent perspectives. If you are interested insupporting our activities, please contact us at<ld@jalt.org> or find the relevant person to contactfrom <http://ld-sig.org/about-us/>.
Another important part of the AGM was thetreasurer’s report. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I
regretfully inform you that the proposed budget for2020 was very difficult to follow. However, we wereable to save a substantial amount of money byholding our events and regular meetings online. The
silver lining of 2020 is that we can offer LD Grants to
support our members this year again. Please checkour webpage to get further information, especiallyabout how to apply for the grants. <http://ldsig.org/grants/>. March 31st is the deadline for grantapplications this year.
For LD program activities in 2021, I would like tomention that we will have forums at the three major
conferences as we normally do, and I hope that!"!#$%&'()*+(,(-.
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学習者ディベロプメント研究部会 <http://ld-sig.org>

many SIG members will take part. As for conference
sites, please note that PanSIG will be online, but JALTCALL and the International Conference will be held
as hybrid conferences for now. About our annual
conference, CCLT7, we have been planning to movethe conference to either February or March to avoid
the winter holidays and the end of the academicyear.
To close, I would like to announce that Tetsuko
and I are going to step down from the CoCoordinator’s position this year. I had a high hopefor Tetsuko to become a new Co-Coordinator in 2021
and take a lead in the SIG for a few years, but she
decided to step down from the role due to her
professional and personal reasons. For myself, it is a
bit of shame, but I noticed that I shared the same
“New Year’s” resolution in the spring issue of LL in
2020. After much contemplation since then, I had
decided to stay on to ensure a smooth transition of
our administrative duties to the next CoCoordinators. Having said that, Tetsuko and I arelooking forward to working with you the rest of theyear and having another exciting year as CoCoordinators. We both hope to see you in the future
and, most importantly, hope you will enjoy this issueof Learning Learning.
Koki Tomita & Tetsuko Fukawa (ld@jalt.org)
Learner Development SIG Co-Coordinators³´dµ¶1426µ122d·¸dJAlrst¹º(«Q@y›<pE]YG“TLC from LD: Transformative
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Newsletter of the JALT Learner Development SIG <http://ld-sig.org>

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(2): Greetings And News Updates*^lÏpjkA@lmE|Hl]YG.gAUV
IJg±²TkAl©?=EF@>kdÐ]7!"!"$d//d%IlîT<EAáâ]{]D$7€pjYWdÑÒÓ7ÔÕ]YDAq•BgT=E]YGvdÂÍlÂÍÍ2¾431ÈÍ2sdš›TjkdYWg>JBÖ]ÂÍlÂÍÍ2¾431ÈÍ2A]V×EØBAÎpE]YG
àE=>v$¸dÂÍlÂÍÍ2¾431ÈÍ2AH$¸d±=78R…<|VDY;:kAl>ÂÍlÂÍÍ2¾431ÈÍ2A]
Vdƒq7žmœDlDmYDADBkAlFG_…7JUVÂÍlÂÍÍ2¾431ÈÍ2A]Vd8-.gop<|VDY;mEFGH$¸©efg`®Dlmjk
A7Ù]îg]V`=EFGkdãdÚÎT´>H
Id//7`Ù]îDY;ipŠÛDlFG
@AL)*–°‹¯ab—rst6ÂÍlÂÍÍ2¾431ÈÍ2Ä6
Koki Tomita & Tetsuko Fukawa <ld@jalt.org>

Call for Contributions
Deadline for the Autumn 2021 issue:
August 31st, 2021
Learning Learning is your space for continuing to
make the connections that interest you. You arewarmly invited and encouraged to contribute to thenext issue of Learning Learning in either English and/or Japanese. In order to provide access andopportunities for Learner Development SIG members
to take part in the SIG’s activities, we welcome
writing in different formats and lengths about issues
connected with learner and teacher development.
『学習の学習』は会員の皆様に興味ある繋がりを築きつづけ るスペースです。次号の『学習の学習』への日本語（もしくは英語、及びニ言語で）の投稿を募集しています。メンバーの皆様にSIGの活動にご参加いただきたく、
形式や長さを問わず、学習者および教師の成長に関 する
以下のような原稿をお待ちしております。 ターで、年に２回（春と秋）オンライン出版されています（ISSN
1882-1103）。学習者の成長、学習者と教員の自律に関するアイディア、省察、経験や興味に関連したさまざま形
式の原稿を収録しています。SIGの多くのメンバーが『学習の学習』に寄稿し、共同体の意識を築き共に学習しています。どうぞ奮ってご投稿され、SIG内でのまたそれを超えた繋がりを築いてください

学習者ディベロプメント研究部会 <http://ld-sig.org>

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Mini Profiles

Mini-profiles: Sharing Your Learner Development Interests |ミニプロフィール：学習者ディベロップメントについての関心の共有… in which SIG members introduce themselves
briefly (just 50 to 100 words or more), and write
about what interests, puzzles, intrigues them about
learner development, and/or about a particularapproach or project, or research that they are doingor plan to do, or simply share a short reflection, todo with learner development ..
…kkl©>rstabc(d@AL)*–°‹¯ab—Ö×gÜ=ÝÞßv ATjC¦Mà]A
AJgáDý”"W\#""â(Pã¸Yäåæç7`hi]EFG?‹TO¯°(PM¯° bŒ—>Ô
èé€“dÖ×M¡dËü><\g©@AL)*–°‹¯ab—dÜ=ÝîgCFj^êT´>¡pÑ
pdqDMÎp@ë|\pVDEFG
Brennan Conaway
Email<brennan.conaway@temple.edu>
As an artist and educator, I havebeen studying how to use artwork in
the EFL classroom. I’m an instructor
at Tokyo University of the Arts andTokai University and, if all goes well, I will be awarded an
M.S.Ed. diploma from Temple University Japan thisspring.
Naomi Fujishima
Email <naomikfuji@gmail.com>
My name is Naomi Fujishima, and I’ve
been teaching English on and off inJapan since 1987. My first teachingexperience was in the JET (Japan
Exchange Teaching) Program as an
Assistant Language Teacher where I
taught at various junior high schools
around Hiroshima prefecture. I enjoyedteaching so much that I decided to get a master’s degreein TESOL and went back to California to attend graduate
school. After I received my degree, I was lucky enough to
get a job teaching at a Japanese university. Since it was a
short-term contract, I was only planning on being inJapan for 2 ½ years, but I’m still here today! Now I teachfull-time at a university in Okayama, but my home baseis Hiroshima.
I first got interested in the Learner Development SIG
when a Hiroshima member, Jim Ronald, invited any JALT
member who was interested to join a local LD SIG
meeting. A few of us would meet at a local coffee shop
and talk about issues related to our students or activities
we’ve used in the classroom. Sometimes Jim would
prepare something for us to discuss, but mostly it was afriendly gathering of like-minded teachers sharing
stories. Unfortunately, the meetings dwindled away(even before COVID-19 hit), so instead I try to check the
LD SIG and OTJ Facebook posts for helpful informationand ideas.
I am especially interested in how to maintainmotivation in students so that they can become lifelong
learners of English. At university now, I teach mostly
compulsory English classes, which means that many
students are in the class only to get enough credit for
graduation. I am always thinking of ways to show them
how interesting and beneficial it can be to learn English.
It has become a bigger challenge during this pandemic
and with classes going online, as many students seem tolose the motivation to study at all. It’s very useful for me
to talk and chat with fellow teachers because I can findout what others are doing in their classes. I am looking
forward to joining more LD SIG events to improve myteaching and learning skills!
Ian Hurrell
Email <taffstar2003@gmail.com>
I have been a member of the LD SIG
for the last 8 years and I’m currently
working as an Adjunct Lecturer at
Rikkyo University’s Foreign Language
Education and Research department.
My current research interest is focused on thedevelopment of world Englishes and learner expressionof cultural identity through a foreign language. However,I am still in the early stages of trying to understand thisconcept. I am also one of the organizers of the LD SIG’sregular get-togethers, so I would love to meet with othermembers to share ideas about this concept, as well as
any other learner development issues that you would.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Mini Profiles
like to discuss. I look forward to talking with you at oneof our meetings soon!
Ken Ikeda
Email <kodanuki@gmail.com>
After coming to Japan on the JET
Program in 1987, I entered theuniversity circuit after earning a
CELTA and later a MA.TESL with
Teachers College Tokyo in 1999. I
have been teaching full-time at Otsuma Women’s
University in Tokyo in the Department of English
Language and Literature since 2009. I became actively
involved with the LD SIG co-authoring a study on
language learning strategies. I have been on a number ofLD admin groups: the Tokyo (now online) Get-Togethers(2012-), CCLT (2014-) and the Learning Learning editorial
team since 2018. What keeps me involved in LD is aiding
its learner-focused vision and community-building,which stem from my regard of learners as languageusers. I am interested in thesis writing, values-based
active learning, teacher equity, and narrative inquiry. I
co-authored a study on language accent trauma which
was published last year in the LD Journal Issue 4.
Judy Kambara
Email: <judith_kambara@ad.okapu.ac.jp>
Okayama Prefectural University
My name is Judy Kambara. I
discovered that I loved teaching
while working as a high school
special education aide in the
United States. That love grew while teaching English
conversation to older adults in Okinawa. I am now a U.S.licensed teacher in 7th – 12th grade social studies andEnglish language arts, and I also hold an M.A. in applied
linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
I have taught social studies and language arts ininternational schools in Okinawa and Kyoto, and EFL at
Japanese universities in Niigata and Okayama. Thesevery different experiences have made my teaching
journey one of reinvention, discovery, and growth. Partof my research and classroom practice focuses on
weaving social studies-based issues, such as equity,
human rights, and intercultural understanding into EFL
courses. I also strongly believe that allowing students to

学習者ディベロプメント研究部会 <http://ld-sig.org>

pursue their interests and passions facilitates learning by
making the content that we study relevant to their
particular situations. I truly feel that my students aresome of my best teachers, and I hope to continuelearning with them for many years to come.
Mike Kuziw Email<mike.kuziw@gmail.com>
I have noticed a growing
implementation of child-centeredlearning during my more than 10
years of work in public schools
for Fukui City. Furthermore, since
starting my work as an ALT in elementary school 7 years
ago, I have developed an interest in the development of
the child as it relates to language learning. My
observations at the University of Fukui have mostly
occurred through action research, focused on inclassroom learning; however, I also have an interest in
why certain learners acquire language and others do
not. Motivation, self-efficacy, self-regulated learning andwell-being describe my focus, in addition to children’sbooks and storytelling. I’m curious to know more about
how communication through language learning
strengthens one’s identity. From April, I will begin a newposition as a lecturer at Jin Ai University, Fukui.

Tanya McCarthy
Email <mccarthytanya.m@gmail.com>
Hi everyone! My name is Tanya
McCarthy. I first joined the LD SIG in2008 when I had just begun working
as a learning advisor. At the time, I
was looking for a group to share myexperiences with. For years, I was
actively involved with meetings,
conferences, and publishing, andthen life got busy. Over the years, I have kept up withlearner development theories and changes in the field
through different LD SIG publications (Learning Learning,
various books, and The Learner Development Journal).
My research focus has changed from advising toteaching, but at the heart of it is still the idea of how tohelp learners become more involved with the learning
process. 2020 more than ever highlighted theimportance of learner autonomy. The question many are11

Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Mini Profiles
asking now is, “Is learner autonomy the way forward or
will things return as they were?” As I find myself once
more at the door of the LD SIG in 2021, I look forward tomeeting, sharing, and discussing the way forward withnewbies and oldies alike. Cheers!
Robert Moreau
Email <robertmoreaumandoman@gmail.com>
My introduction to the Learner
Development Special Interest
Group (LD SIG) took place when I
was still a graduate student at
Teachers College Columbia
University in Tokyo. As part of mycourse work there, I had
researched, and completed
projects involving learner autonomy, as well as selfreflective practices. I felt immediately that these were
useful tools for students to boost their motivation, andtake their learning beyond the classroom. I also
discovered that self-reflection for teachers could play animportant role in the ongoing process of improving
classroom practices. In the years following graduation, I
have integrated reflective practices into each of myclassrooms and have found that they can provide mewith excellent insights into the students’ learning.
As a member of the LD SIG, I have had theopportunity to publish articles in Learning Learning. I
have also enjoyed presenting on reflective practices,
including at the Realizing Autonomy conference in
Nagoya, hosted by the LD SIG. More recently, myinterest in reflective practices has been combined withresearch into genre-based instruction. Puzzles I have
explored include; scaffolding with regards to how andwhen to leave control of a project in the students’hands. Also, how to best incorporate peer review
activities into the classroom in order to let students
build their own proficiency and confidence in using
various genres independently of the teacher.
Outside of my research interests, I am happy to haveheld the position of Publicity Officer for the LD SIG. Since
then I have continued to provide various graphic design
solutions, including book covers, as well as the logo andsignage for the CCLT conference each year.

Yoshio Nakai
Email <uminchufunto@gmail.com>
I have been supporting learners ofJapanese as a second language formore than 20 years. First, I wasinterested in second language
writing, but after becoming familiar
with qualitative research, my research interest started tofocus on using a narrative approach to explore my own
situation of CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) as a cultural
minority. Now I’ve found the reason why I have been alanguage teacher who is aiming to support foreigners inthe same position in Japan. Recently, I have been
conducting research on minority agency and second
language education to promote DEI (Diversity, Equity
and Inclusion) in Japanese society.
第二言語としての日本語教育に携わってもう20年近
くになります。日本語教育に関わり始めた当初は作文教育に関心を持っていたのですが、質的研究を知ってからは、ナラティブを用いた研究を通して、自身の研究の関心がCODA（ろう者の親を持つ子ども）という文化的そマ
イノリティである自身の環境に向かっていくようになりました。今になってようやく、私が外国人と同じ立場に立ってサポートをする言語教師でいようとしてきた理由にたどりつくことができました。最近ではマイノリティの行為主体性に関する研究と日本社会にDEIが根付くような第二言語教育に取り組んでいます。

Sakoda Namiko 迫田 奈美子
Email <nm-sako@hue.ac.jp>
I have been teaching English for about
20 years at Hiroshima University of
Economics. My recent research has
focused on building, improving, andverifying the effectiveness of the cycle of English peer
tutoring. Such tutoring involves students teaching otherstudents outside of regular curricular activities. I aim tosupport the autonomous learning of English for both thetutee who needs remedial education, and the student
tutor who supports the tutee’s learning.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Mini Profiles
Akiko Takagi 髙木 亜希子
Email<atakagi@ephs.aoyama.ac.jp>
I have taught education-major
freshman and sophomore students
in a required English class at
Aoyama Gakuin University since 2010. I have long
wondered how I could develop low proficiency level
students’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC)so that it is fully integrated into the language classroom
using the target language. I had an opportunity toinvestigate this topic during my sabbatical year at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2020. I learned thatthe “NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements for Intercultural
Communication,”* published in 2017, can be applied in a
Japanese context. I am excited to introduce ICC tasks to
my classes and to conduct an action research case study
this year.
* NCSSFL = National Council of State Supervisors for
Languages; ACTFL = The American Council on the
Teaching of Foreign Languages

affective factors, self-evaluation, learning beyond theclassroom, identity, successes, and challenges related toeach language. In my own experience, those aspects canbe quite different from one language to another. I havestarted to do some self-reflection and gather some
information about these aspects in myself and would
like to investigate other multilingual learners and towrite a few case studies. I would love any ideas on
possible theoretical framework and any potential
collaboration on this project.
For the 2021 Autumn issue of Learning Learning
please send your mini-text or mini-profile (just 50 to
100 words or more!) to <lleditorialteam@gmail.com>
by 28th August. Many thanks.
Learning Learningの2021年秋号に向けて、みなさ
まの短いメッセージやミニプロフィール（50〜100語程度）を募集します。8月28日までに<lleditorialteam@gmail.com>宛にお送りください。よろしくお願いいたします。

Dominique Vola Ambinintsoa
Email<razafindratsimbad@kanda.kuis.ac.jp> or<dvolaamb@buffalo.edu>
I am from Madagascar, and I am nowa learning advisor at Kanda Universityof International Studies in Chiba, Japan. I hold a PhD inapplied linguistics, focusing on fostering learnerautonomy in a Malagasy EFL context (Victoria Universityof Wellington, New Zealand) and a Master of Educationin TESOL (State University of New York at Buffalo, US). I
taught English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in
Madagascar for 8 years, and English as a Second
Language (ESL) in the US and in New Zealand for 2 years.
I have a particular interest in language learnerautonomy, self-access language learning, advising inlanguage learning, and positive psychology in education.
I am part of The Learner Development Journal 6 (LDJ6)
editorial team, focusing on learning beyond theclassroom.
Having learned 4 languages apart from my first
language, I have also recently developed interest in
learner development in multilingualism, including goals,

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Members’ Voices

Members’ Voices | メンバーの声
Creative Collaboration - Kickstartingthe 21st Century Classroom
Tim Cleminson
Associate Professor, Kawasaki
University of Medical Welfare
Email: <tim@mw.kawasakim.ac.jp>

Intro
Hello everyone, I’m Tim.
My journey to Japan started
off in the UK, when I met and married a lovely Japaneselady in 2000. I came to Japan the following year to learn
more about her life and culture. We’d only planned tostay for a few years. But when the little ones camealong, time just seemed to fly by. I started off as an ALT.
Since then, I have worked in universities for 16 years
teaching English and cultural courses. Even after all thistime, I still feel like I am just starting to gain the culturalcompetency to do my job properly! I take that as apositive because it means there is still so much to
explore and keep me engaged. I am fascinated bycreativity and collaboration, and explore them in myteaching and with informal networks online. I thinkcreativity is a humanizing force that gives a sense ofplace and purpose in life. I am a photographer https://chapinthehat.com. I work with volunteer groups inOkayama and Fukushima. I like to run up hills. I like to
run far.

Research Interest: Creativity and the EFLClassroom
I guess Ken Robinson is one of my educational
heroes. I fell for Ken when I watched his hilarious
takedown of conventional education, ‘Do schools killcreativity?’ (Robinson, 2007). His deep belief in thecreative potential of others hit a chord with me, as did
his observation that education often lionized test
success in highbrow subjects and stigmatizednonacademic forms of creativity. At present, my eldest
daughter is battling through university entrance exams.
For her, English has become a purely academic exerciseof grammar-translation; a matter of ticking the right box.
This notion of English having a right answer can reduce
student autonomy and spontaneity. I believe thatcreative collaboration is a great way to help students

escape the 2D maze of grammar-translation and switch
on their communicative potential.
Creativity has been identified as the cornerstone ofapproaches to 21st Century Skill development (Scott,2015). People often conflate creativity with being
artistic; thinking ‘I’m not artistic, so creativity’s not forme.’ However, creativity is a new, surprising and valuable
contribution in any field of human endeavour (Boden,
2004). It’s just as ‘at home’ in the dark matter ofastrophysics as the Titanium white of Picasso’s Guernica.
We can think of it in terms of creative contributions (newproducts, painting, and ways of thinking); or as a set of
creative behaviours (divergent, convergent, imaginative
thinking) that lead to those contributions. How thesecontributions are valued is culturally dependent withsome cultures prioritizing conceptual novelty, whilst
others prioritize appropriateness (Niu & Sternberg,
2006). So, how does creativity relate to language
learning?
Imagination and creativity can aid learning andcommunication skills. Empathy and social-emotional
imagination allow us to visualize different times, peoples
and perspectives (Gottlieb et al., 2017) and gain adeeper understanding of the human condition (Chappell
et al., 2012). This understanding helps us interpret
others in everyday conversation and communicate
appropriately (Jones, 2016). In addition, language-play
results in memorable phrases that aid understanding
and information retention (Tagg, 2013). So, creative
thinking skills are a fundamental part of communication—creating a mindset that is open to new possibilities
and able to make and retain connections.
In my own practice, I have long focused oncollaborative group work and physical building tasks likethe egg-drop challenge. My university classrooms areoften strewn with newspaper, straws, spaghetti, tape,hastily hashed-out plans, a fair sprinkling of wonky
towers, and broken eggs—all joyful accidents as teams
try to outsmart and entertain each other. These
activities are all about creating spaces for creative play.
Creative play embodies an open mindset and spirit ofengagement. Creative play is an intrinsically motivated,autonomous and interactive process (Cleminson et al.,2019) that facilitates
1.Democratic participation and collaboration
2.Improvisation, risk-taking and emergence
3.Plurality of identity and possibility thinking. (Craft,2012)

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Members’ Voices
A sense of autonomy, a willingness to improvise andadapt to the situation are essential components of realworld communication. This requires both cognitive
flexibility and psychological resilience. Creative play
enables students to use English whilst collaborating,encountering problems, building solutions, andexperiencing failure and success. These experiences canhelp practice problem solving in English and build
resilience. The question for me then became: How can I
do this in a more structured and meaningful way in the
EFL classroom?

and refine their ideas. Increased student control oflearning promotes inter-learner engagement (Skehan,2003), scaffolded learning (Vygotsky, 1978) and positive
affective states (Sawyer, 2007). In these ways,
collaborative and creative project work provides amethod to practice improvisation and develop
communicative resilience and autonomy. Hence, DT, cancreate dynamic classroom environments that help
students learn language competencies for the globallyconnected and uncertain futures they face.
If any other people are interested in learning more,or share similar research interests, I’d love to chat.
Thanks for reading.

Design Thinking: Communicative and Collaborative
EFL Model

Figure 1. Design Thinking Model
Over the last few years, I have explored thesuitability of Design Thinking (DT) as a communicativeand collaborative model for EFL. Design thinking aims tocreate solutions that users value (IDEO U, 2020; Stanford
d.School, 2010). DT starts with empathetic interviews tounderstand problems from the users’ perspectives.
Design teams then ideate possible solutions in a freethinking and iterative process. Through discussion, thebest possible solution is chosen and a prototype isdeveloped and tested. Based on feedback, the solution
is redesigned and made fit for purpose. So, the DT
process requires collaborative risk taking and divergent
thinking to generate possible solutions and critical andconvergent thinking to make the solution fit for purpose.
When I have implemented courses based on DT, I
have found students to be highly engaged and animatedin their discussions (Cleminson & Cowie, 2019). They
have also come up with some incredibly imaginative
solutions. Empathetic interviews help to develop deeplistening skills and social-emotional imagination.
Iterative design tasks help to develop divergent andconvergent thinking. Collaborative problem solving
promotes communication as students present, discuss,

学習者ディベロプメント研究部会 <http://ld-sig.org>

References
Boden, M. (2004). The creative mind: Myths andmechanisms. Routledge.
Chappell, K., Craft, A. R., Rolfe, L., & Jobbins, V. (2012).
Humanizing creativity: Valuing our journeys of
becoming. International Journal of Education & theArts, 13(8), 1-35 Retrieved from http://
www.ijea.org/v13n8/
Cleminson, T., & Cowie, N. (2019). Design thinking andcreative group engagement in the EFL classroom. In
The Asian conference on language learning 2019:
Official conference proceedings (pp. 361-374).
Retrieved from https://papers.iafor.org/
submission51741/
Cleminson, T., Rennie, K., & Dalling, E. (2019). Defining
creative play: Literature review, part 2 of 3. The
British Council. https://www.britishcouncil.org/
programmes/creative-play/defining-creative-playliterature-review-part-2
Craft, A. (2012). Childhood in a digital age: Creative
challenges for educational futures. London Reviewof Education, 10(2), 173-190.
Gotlieb, R., Jahner, E., Immordino-Yang, M H., &Kaufman, S. B. (2017). How social-emotional
imagination facilitates deep learning and creativity
in the classroom. In R. Beghetto & J. Kaufman(Eds.), Nurturing creativity in the classroom (current
perspectives in social and behavioral sciences (pp.
308-336). Cambridge University Press.
IDEO U. (2020). Design thinking. IDEO U. Retrieved fromhttps://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking
Jones, R. (2016). Creativity and language. In R. Jones & J.
Richards (Eds.), Creativity in language teaching:
Perspectives from research and practice (pp.
16-31). Routledge.
Niu, W., & Sternberg, R. J. (2006). The philosophicalroots of western and eastern conceptions of15

Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Members’ Voices
creativity. Journal of Theoretical and PhilosophicalPsychology, 26(1-2), 18-38.
Robinson, K. (2007). Do schools kill creativity? [Video].
YouTube. https://youtu.be/iG9CE55wbtY
Sawyer, K. (2007). Group genius: The creative power ofcollaboration. Basic Books.
Scott, C. L. (2015). The futures of learning 2: What kindof learning for the 21st century? UNESCO Education
Research and Foresight, Paris. ERF Working Papers
Series, No. 14.
Skehan, P. (2003). Task based instruction. Language andTeaching, 36(1), 1-14.
Stanford d.School. (2010). An introduction to design
thinking: Process guide. Hasso Plattner Institute of
Design at Stanford University. Retrieved fromhttps://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/
MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf
Tagg, C. (2013). Scraping the barrel with a shower ofsocial misfits: Everyday creativity in text messaging.
Applied Linguistics, 34(4), 480–500.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The developmentof higher psychological processes. (M. Cole, V. JohnSteiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman, Eds.). Harvard
University Press.

Writing classes and thenext generation oftranslational software
Jeffrey Stewart
Tokyo University of Science
Email: <jeffjrstewart@gmail.com>
During a final interview for atenured associate professor position I was met with aquestion that caught me by surprise. The university isbest known for its strength in science and technology,
and this background gives faculty members aninteresting perspective toward the humanities. While I
don't recall the precise and more polite wording of thequestion, the gist of it was: "Given the great advances intranslation software in recent years, it will soon bepossible to automatically translate text and even speechwith great accuracy. If this is the case, why should wegive you a permanent position as an English teacher?”I apparently managed an answer that impressed theinterviewers sufficiently enough to continue with thehiring process, but the question has haunted me eversince, and even more so since I discovered DeepLTranslate (deepl.com), the AI software that translates
text with considerably more accuracy that Google
Translate. While DeepL isn't perfect, it handles many of
the issues that you thought translational software would
never be able to handle—politeness register, pronouns,
context—with surprisingly intuitive ease. Soon, I foundmyself using it to translate many of my work emails andreplies to said emails. Writing and reading suchmessages has been a key way I learn Japanese, but it ishard to keep the habit up when I know I can finish thetask at hand at the click of an icon. The writing appears
to be on the wall.
I wondered more about what effect DeepL would
have on language classes through 2020, when myclasses went online and became more dependent on
students' written work. I teach two Listening andSpeaking classes, one with an average TOEIC score ofabout 500 and the other with an average score of about
650. I have them do debates in teams while the rest of
the class watches and votes on what team was morepersuasive, but find this assignment works better if
students have ample time to prepare opinions that will
be of interest to the class and are sufficiently
controversial and arguable, and then to articulate theirthinking on these topics and formulate defensible
arguments to support their beliefs in advance.
First, I ask them to “tell me something you believethat many people your age do not believe”, and screen
the responses for answers that are either notcontroversial enough among their peers (e.g., “Japan’s
rapidly aging population poses challenges”) or are too
subjective or trivial to argue about in detail (e.g., “I don’t
think chocolate tastes good”). The students thencomplete a survey of their peers’ opinions, and indicate
which they agree or disagree with and how strongly. I
use this information to determine what topics each
student will argue for or against, and assign anargumentative essay for preparation following a basic
five-paragraph format: Introductory paragraph(introducing the opinion), three body paragraphs, eachlisting a different and distinct reason for the belief ineach paragraphs’ topic sentence (“The first/second/third
reason is because…”), explanation of the reason and acitation of facts or statistics that support each reason,and final a closing paragraph to summarize the position.
To prepare them for this, I introduced them to Toulmin’s
argumentation model, which breaks arguments into
individual components such as claims and warrants.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Members’ Voices
I asked students to write their answers in their own
words and not to rely on translational software, even if itmeant fumbling English grammar sometimes. But
clearly, not all of them were following those instructions.
Some transgressions were easy to catch; paragraphs
would begin in the prescribed format, but in the next
sentence the narrative would veer off onto strange,
logically mangled tangents that perfectly matched thetext of the essay's sources after passing those links
through Google Translate. As usual, that software's flaws
made it easy to spot. And even when there were few
mistakes, it was easy to see that the essays were apatchwork of original sentences and autotranslated
direct copying due to the sudden shifts in style and tone.
More worrying were the essays where the English
was grammatically perfect through and through. The
students in these classes were good, but not that good. I
don't know for a fact that any of my students used
DeepL to translate their essays to English straight from
all-Japanese drafts. But they could have, considering thequality of its translations. And even if they haven't yet,they likely will one day soon. Recently I got a letter in the
mail regarding some administrative issues from Waseda
University, where I teach a few part-time classes. The
reverse of the letter was a near-perfect English
translation. At the bottom was a note it had been
automatically translated using Deepl. If universities andbusinesses here are already using it, It won’t stay secretfrom students for very long.
Where does that leave us as language teachers? I
have had this debate with my colleagues over Slack for a
few months now. We have agreed that it would be
hypocritical for us to entirely condemn using the newsoftware when we find ourselves using it so often in ourown administrative work. But even if such software ispermitted in student work, there are still otherconsiderations students must make in order to write
English at an academic level. To write something one
must know what one needs to write, not just have thelanguage proficiency to write it. For this reason thesoftware doesn’t negate the value of genre analysis, forexample. And students still need to learn how to makeand support a logical argument if they need to write anargumentative essay. Essays written for this purpose inJapanese follow a markedly different and less culturally
appropriate structure that sticks out like a sore thumbno matter how good the literal translation is.
In the case of my own classes, I found that since theessays had so few grammatical errors that I wasn’t

学習者ディベロプメント研究部会 <http://ld-sig.org>

getting lost in the weeds of endless minor corrections,and could instead focus on the strengths andweaknesses of students’ individual arguments. My
comments were more often aimed toward things likeinconsistencies between arguments and the facts used
to support them, weaknesses in the quality of sources
and suggestions on how arguments could be improved.
Second drafts of essays were much better, and to mysurprise student evaluations showed that the essaywriting and the feedback they received were popular
aspects of the course, second only to the debates
themselves. Grading students’ writing is often an
unpopular task for teachers due to its time and laborintensive aspects. But once students’ written prose wasgood enough I could understand what they were trying
to say the first time I read it and was able to get pastendless corrections of the uses of “a” and “the”, I foundthe process quite smooth and enjoyable. I was able toengage with their ideas much more freely and directly
than I was able to in the past. In the year before thepandemic, teaching students how to analyze and pokeholes in arguments using the Toulmin model was an
uphill battle. This year, a greater proportion of students’cognitive load could be dedicated toward these key
conceptual aspects of formulating arguments andrebutting those of opponents.
Given this experience, I find myself more optimistic
about the effect of translation software on language
classes. Perhaps this software will become to foreign
language classes what calculators have been to mathclasses: a way to handle the more tedious aspects of thesubject quickly in order to devote more time to moreconceptual aspects of practice. While the shift will becontroversial and will likely inspire much debate in theyears to come, I suspect that in the future, EFL writingclasses will become more and more similar to non-EFL
English classes at the high school and college levels, withgreater emphasis on developing the higher-order skills
that separate good writers in a given language from poor
ones, regardless of how much vocabulary and how many
grammatical rules they have memorized prior to thestart of the class.
For more on the Toulmin model, see:https://courses.lumenlearning.com/
englishcomp2kscopexmaster/chapter/
toulmins-argument-model/

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Members’ Voices

Experiencing Presence inEnglishWan Jung (Amy) Lin
Nagoya University of Foreign Studies
Email: <amywan@nufs.ac.jp>
It is natural and common that
language educators reflect on how theyacquire a new language and apply the strategies andexperiences in their teaching. Ever since I started
teaching, I always recall my own experiences in learning
languages, whether or not they were successful. When I
plan my lessons, I very likely design activities that I wish I
could have done when I was a student.
Born and raised in Taiwan, I then migrated to theStates in my early 20s, and now I currently teach inJapan. I originally came to Japan as an ALT working with
the JET Program in 2013, teaching at kindergartens,
elementary schools and junior high schools for five
years. Before I started working at the university level, I
taught English part-time at a private high school forabout six months. As a non-native speaker in English, it
was a long journey (and still is) for me to empower
myself by repositioning from solely oppressed, minor,
nonnative or silenced to a position in which I canexperience my presence in English communities.
In Taiwan, even though my parents spoke Taiwanese
to each other, my mother would speak Mandarin to mysisters and me to make sure we could understandinstructions when we first started kindergarten. It wascommon in Taiwan that parents use their respective
languages at home but speak Mandarin to their children
because Mandarin was considered more importantmany years ago. Therefore, I grew up understanding
Taiwanese but regret not being able to speak Taiwaneseeven now. I started studying English in junior highschool. I enjoyed it and would spend my spare timereading English learning magazines. Majoring in English
in college in Taiwan, I felt in some way satisfied that I
was studying English. I did not picture how I would use it
in the future and what it meant to “use” English. I was“studying” English, and that was good enough. However,when I was in college, my parents suddenly announced
that our family “finally” had received Green Cards(permanent residency) -- apparently, they had applied
long ago without informing their young children and had
been waiting for the result for more than 10 years.
When I was told that we had received Green Cards, it
was quite a shock for me. I had never imagined living
overseas and speaking another language in daily life. I

was angry, anxious, and grievous. I did not want to moveat all.
When my sisters and I emigrated to the States, I was
initially quite confused. I could speak English wellenough, but I did not feel my presence there. I was
intelligent and had already got my BA in Taiwan, but in
the States, I found myself thinking that I could only dogrocery shopping, write emails, and have small talk. I
thought I was still an English learner there, a newcomer
and a foreigner to the country. Who am I standing there
speaking English when people did not want to listen to
me? Can I expect anyone to pay attention to me when I
speak? I felt I lost my power as a person in California, as
Zou would describe (1998). She explains that no matter
how intelligent, experienced, powerful, and competentimmigrants have been in their home country, without
language proficiency they lose their power in a new
country. Even in graduate school, to get my MS in TESOL,
I could not actively join class discussions (my classmates
could read one line and say ten lines, yet I could
understand an article without knowing what to say inclass). Outside of my studies, in my daily life in
California, I also experienced powerlessness when I
could not fight for myself in English. I remembered when
Bank of America charged me an extra transaction fee, I
couldn’t argue to get my money back. In other cases,
sometimes people would not listen to me because of myaccent and poor vocabulary. I felt I was dumb andpowerless.
After living in California for about two years, I finally
noticed that I needed to identify myself with somethingelse. I couldn’t just be an English learner. I needed
something powerful inside of me to cause people tobecome interested in me and listen to me when I talked.
I worked on my accent; I watched the news; I became
curious and critical about everything around me andreasoned more carefully. After a few years, I finallydeveloped my new identity as Taiwanese American; forme this identity explained why I was in America. I cameto realize that I am not solely Taiwanese; I did not think
the way Taiwanese people thought nor did things the
Taiwanese way. I was not entirely American (of course I
was not); I didn’t even know the cartoons that children
watch. It was not an easy process, and it took many
years of constant reflection, evaluation, self-talk,arguing, fighting, negotiation, and frustration to come tothis transformation.
It was ironic enough that when I moved to Japan, my
identities were questioned again. Japanese people
around me did not think I was American even though I
came as a US citizen to teach at public schools in Japan.
Some of my American ALT colleagues did not consider
me as American either. I felt I needed to put in more ofNewsletter of the JALT Learner Development SIG <http://ld-sig.org>

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Members’ Voices
the American social side of me to be more American. It
took me a few more years to struggle, to reflect, toargue, and to negotiate. All this helped me develop into
the person I am today. Because of these struggles, I
became more confident even when I speak the new
language, Japanese. I am convinced that my journey
would be more challenging, and I would be intimidated
if I did not have the skills to think critically, process,analyze, and evaluate. All those skills helped me
negotiate my identity in English, Japanese, Mandarin,
and Taiwanese. Over the years, I have become able toposition myself where I am in any language community. I
am not who people think I am, but rather who I think I
am, with my multicultural and multilingual backgrounds.
Drawing insights from my own story, when I am
teaching, even with different age groups, I always
wonder: will the lessons be relevant to the students?
Will they feel empowered when they communicate? Is
this activity going to help them connect with thelanguage? Will they develop a different identity as acommunity member when they contribute ideas inEnglish? What will help my students to be successful inthis new language?
Because of my experiences, when I teach, I decided
that I do not want to claim my expertise. I am not anexpert on any languages or cultures, but I can talk about
all of them. I hope to demonstrate to my students thatthey don’t have to sound or perform native-like to feel
confident when they speak. That expectation is too
unrealistic. My role in the classroom is more of a life
coach guiding students to contribute and think as acommunity member, and hopefully, through that, thestudents can feel their own presence when they
contribute in English.
I am currently teaching English-integrated skills
courses to freshman, sophomore, and junior students
learning a different foreign language rather than English.
We discuss health, judicial systems, fashion,environment, technology, economics, social issues, andmore. Through the discussions, I found some students
can be disconnected when they use the L2 even if they
are motivated. When they use the English language
inside or outside of class, they do not consider it aspractical or real, or even further, they lack emotions
when using the L2. I also observed that even if they canprocess information in their main language and form
their opinions, students rarely have the opportunity toobtain information in English, process it in English,
evaluate in English, and develop their opinions inEnglish. In my classes, students need to ask questions
and research respectively, and from what I have found,most students use Japanese sources and use Google
Translate. Some of them also share that they would

学習者ディベロプメント研究部会 <http://ld-sig.org>

translate their ideas from Japanese into English, even inconversations. With all observations above, even if
students are fluent English speakers, they sometimes
can lose their agency in English. Do they feel “a sense of[themselves]” (Davies, 2000, as cited in Vitanova, 2005,
p. 152) or “feel [their] own presence” (Morita, 2004, p.
592) in the L2 world?
My teaching philosophy, then, is to provide ways forlearners to develop skills to process information in
English, analyze it in English, reflect on it in English, andapply it to their lives in English. I hope that the skills canhelp them develop their new identity in the new L2
community. Of course, providing a safe environment for
students to exercise and practice the skills in is,therefore, teachers’ responsibility. In terms of classactivities, I have been developing different activities tocultivate students’ critical thinking skills to analyze andprocess the class materials and reflect and connect the
information to their own life stories. They are required
to continually ask questions when they read and listen
to presentations, research on their inquiries, role play,
and reflect on their own life. English is then moving fromthe linguistic level to the practical level, giving them thepower to speak. Encouraging student choice wherestudents choose activities to participate in and designing
student-centered activities is also a strategy to develop
learners’ responsibility in learning.
According to the survey I did last summer, many of
my students expressed the view that after learning how
to think critically in English, they felt more mature,
proud, motivated, educated, and confident. Whenlanguage educators recognize students as English users,
as members of the English-speaking community, rather
than English learners, their students will be empowered
and more responsible for their learning. They will
experience presence in English.
References
Morita, N. (2004). Negotiating participation and identity
in second language academic communities. TESOL
Quarterly, 38(4), 573-603.
Vitanova, G. (2005). Authoring the self in a non-native
language: A dialogic approach to agency andsubjectivity. In J. K. Hall, G. Vitanova, & L.
Marchenkova (Eds.), Dialogue with Bakhtin on
second and foreign language learning (pp. 1-8).
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Zou, Y. (1998). Rethinking empowerment: The
acquisition of cultural, linguistic, and academic
knowledge. TESOL Journal, 7(4), 4-9.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Learners’ Voices

Learners' Voices | 学習者の声
Stepping up to take action: Beach cleaning as a first step
Mifu Yasakuni
Chuo University, Faculty of Law, 3rd year student
I am going to be in the third year of university this spring. I belong to an international exchange club, Tokyo Best, andwe are going to recruit first-year students from April. Recently we held a Zoom meeting to plan our recruiting activities,
and I suggested holding a beach cleaning event with new students. The reason why I would like to organize a beachcleaning event is that I’m concerned about global climate change, and I believe that considering myself as directly
involved in the issue and responsible for taking action is important. Do you know what beach cleaning is for? It is for
dealing with plastic pollution. Too many people throw away plastic trash; this waste material gets washed into theocean where birds and marine animals eat them, which damages their health in many ways. But this issue is related not
only to pollution, but also to global climate change. That’s because plastics “generate heat-trapping gases at every stageof their life cycle” (Bauman, 2019). The production, transportation, consumption, and disposal of plastics createscarbon emissions from when they are made to when they are disposed of, so beach cleaning is one way for us to takeaction against this.
Let me share with you several experiences that made me interested in these issues. 私は、大学1年生の英語の授業で、人種問題、ジェンダー問題などの社会問題に対して、ソーシャルメディア上で抗議を行う活動、Internet Activism について調べた。すると、SNS上では、積極的に抗議活動に参加している海外の俳優やモデルが、多くみられた。私は、海外の映画やテレビ番組が好きだったので、海外の有名人が投稿している、抗議活動やその問題について、少し興味を持った。実際に、彼らが投稿する記事を読んで、社会問題について詳しく知るようになると、社会問題に対しての意識の変化がうまれた。参加している国際交流サークルのアメリカ人と、社会問題について話しあうことで、より社会問題を現実的に感じるようになった。Black Lives
Matterの抗議活動が特に盛んだった2020年は、日本に住む日本人とアメリカ人、アメリカに住む日系アメリカ人の三者で、差別について、話し合ったことが、最も興味深かった。さらに、そういった社会問題を提起する日本人の投稿をSNSで見つけて、より社会問題を自分が関わっている問題として、とらえるようになった。I found especially interesting
posts by Ms. Ito Natsumi (Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/
ntmj_ito/?hl=ja) about a variety of social issues. This has had a massive
influence on me. She also shares news stories to do with issues which themedia in Japan don't cover that much, for example the Pacific Ocean Garbage
Patch. This was really shocking for me to learn about and it drove me toconsider our future and current lives. From there I started to find what I can donow.
Another big influence on my awareness came through my seminar lastyear. 昨年、「日本と世界における多言語問題」に関するゼミの授業をとった。ゼミでは、問題の本当の姿をとらえるために、ひとつの問題をNewsletter of the JALT Learner Development SIG <http://ld-sig.org>

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Learners’ Voices
様々な観点からとらえる方法を学んだ。What I
learned was this: When people hear other people
speaking, they tend to judge their power based on
their words. This is because the way people use
language is strongly related to gender, race, social classor education. And speech by people with lower status
is more stigmatized by people with higher status. 言語
があまりに生活に密着したツールであるため、人種差別やジェンダー問題に比べて、注目を浴びることが少なく、言語と差別や偏見の間に、強いつながりがあることに対する認識が低いことが言語問題の大きな課題であった。Through this seminar, I
was surprised by the fact that there were so many
related issues that I hadn’t noticed before, and they were in my life. そしてこのゼミを通して、私たちの日々のくらしの中に潜む、問題の存在に気づくことの重要性を学んだ。
一度、社会の問題が自分の問題であると認識をすると、多くの疑問が浮かんだ。ビーガンになるってどういうことだろう？もっと包装を減らせるんじゃないかな？プラスチックはどこから来て、どこへ行くのか？さらに、これらの疑問について調べることで、世界をもっと多角的に見ることができるようになった。
そして、社会の問題は自分の問題であるからこそ、微力であっても、自分ができることをしたいと思うようになった。
私は、小笠原、沖縄、グアムやハワイを訪れたことがあり、美しい海が大好きだ。だから、私は美しい海をプ
ラスチックから守るために、汚染問題の解決と、地球温暖化問題解決への行動を起こす方法として、ビーチクリー二
ングを新入生歓迎のイベントとして提案した。他のメンバーは、このアイディアに激しく賛同をしてくれて、とても嬉しかった。ビーチクリーニングは、ソーシャルディス
タンスが取りやすいだけでなく、海をきれいにするという1つの目標に向かって、みんなで頑張ることで、新1年生も含めて、絆をより深められることを期待している。また、一人でビーチクリーニングをするのではなく、サークルのイベントとして行うことで、参加した人が地球温暖化問題に興味を持ち、汚染問題や地球温暖化問題などの世界の社会問題が、私たちの生活の中で起きている、身近な問題であるという認識が共有できることを望んでいる。
Reference
Bauman, B. (2019). How plastics contribute to climate change. Yale Climate Connections. Retrieved from https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/08/how-plastics-contribute-to-climate-change/

学習者ディベロプメント研究部会 <http://ld-sig.org>

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Stories Of Learning and Teaching Practices

Stories of Learning and Teaching Practices |学習・教育実践の成功談・失敗談
Narratives of Filipino English Teachers in Japan:
A Reflective Dialogic Review of Stewart (2020)
Prumel Barbudo
Yokohama City
University
Email:<pbarbudo@yokohamacu.ac.jp>

Stephanie Keith Lim
Miyazaki International
College
Email:<slim@sky.miyazakimic.ac.jp>

Stephanie: In her book, Narratives of Filipino English Teachers in Japan, Alison Stewart presents the stories of
Aurora, Lori, Elma, Sampaguita, Anna Marie, Shin, Katrina, Renata and Carmela as foreign English teachers working atdifferent levels of education in Japan. Through their accounts, Stewart delves into the notion of teacher identity andhow it is affected by the community in which they belong.
Prumel: I think that Stewart is bold in adopting an “identity politics perspective” (p. 26) to explain the central
theme of the book, language teacher recognition. Stewart suggests that recognition involves a very strong attachment
to the background the Filipino teachers were born into, as well as other attributes such as language identity, gender andsocial class that are both inscribed and ascribed to them. She effectively presents the stories of the interviewees toargue that feelings of prejudice and pride are fundamental to identity. I find her interviews successful in eliciting these
emotions from the interviewees. In her analysis, she portrays the organization Filipino English Teachers in Japan(henceforth FETJ) as a driving force for social activism that merits recognition and acceptance.
As Filipino teachers with shared cultural identity with the interviewees, Stephanie and I will include our emic view orinsider’s interpretation (Creswell, 2014) of the narratives which may be disparate from Stewart’s perspectives.
Stephanie: My name is Stephanie Lim. I have been working as a lecturer in Miyazaki, Japan for three years. I am
Filipino-Canadian—born and raised in the Philippines, but my family moved to Vancouver when I was a teen, so I feellike I grew up in the Philippines, and became an adult in Canada. I identify strongly with both national identities. I havefirm cultural roots in my birth country, and I have internalized values shaped by my Canadian experience.
Prumel: I am Prumel Barbudo, a lecturer at universities in Yokohama and Tokyo. Just like Stephanie, I was born andraised in the Philippines. I moved to Tokyo several years ago to do some research on teacher development under theJapanese Government Monbukagakusho (MEXT) Scholarship. Working as an English teacher abroad, I have always been
proud of my Filipino heritage. I grew up as a “probinsyano”(Filipino slang which loosely translates as “country boy”), so
my ex-urban, semi-conservative values are deeply shaped by my Ilokano regional ethnicity, which intersects with myprofessional and personal identities.
Stephanie: All the teachers interviewed presented diverse and compelling narratives of their respective teaching
journeys. Certainly, many of the stories shared and analyzed in the book resonated with us as fellow Filipino language
teachers in Japan. In this discussion, however, we would like to focus on three aspects that stood out to us from thestories: teaching path, discrimination, and Native English Speaking Teacher (NEST) and Non-native English Speaking
Teacher (NNEST) identities.

Teaching Path
Stephanie: Shin, Katrina and Carmela were clear that teaching in one form or another would be their profession. Shinstated that it was his childhood dream, while Katrina and Carmela expressly pursued a degree in education.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Stories Of Learning and Teaching Practices
Meanwhile, for Lori, Sampaguita and Anna, it appears that they arrived at teaching rather fortuitously as they studied
Medicine, Business and Computer Science at university. However, one point is consistent among everyone, and that is it
took a while, having had to overcome significant personal and professional obstacles, before they were able to establish
themselves as English educators in Japan. What was your teaching path like as you moved from the Philippines toJapan?
Prumel: My bachelor’s degree was in Secondary Education, major in English, and my master’s degree was in English
Education. In the Philippines, the English department in my university hired me after graduation and while doing this, I
passed the licensure exam for professional teachers. I decided to move to the public high school system after a year. I
had the privilege to be promoted to a position called “Master Teacher I,” which means I had more senior roles such as
conducting a mentoring program for other English teachers. When I moved to Japan, I worked at all levels of Japanese
education, teaching both adults and children in public and private institutions. It was a struggle for me to start all overagain in a foreign land but I worked my way through to become a university lecturer. I love the teaching profession. I
have been enjoying this for over 18 years and I could not see myself doing other work. What was yours?
Stephanie: I have been teaching for almost nine years, three of which here in Japan. Like Renata, I never thought I
would be in academia. Growing up, I did not like school, but when I was at university, I learned to appreciate it thanks
to some of my professors who I felt taught with great passion and kindness. That was when I began imagining myself asa Psychology teacher. For the most part, though, I was unconvinced that it could happen because, at that time, it
seemed like getting into graduate school was daunting and arduous. Also, I am quite introverted, and I did not think mypersonality would be suitable. However, a few months after completing my Bachelor’s, I enrolled in the Teaching English
as a Second Language (TESL) program as I was unsure about what to do with my Psychology and International Relations
degree. Fortunately, I was hired at a private language school in Vancouver not long after graduating from the program.
In my five years there, I realized how singular a profession English teaching is.Among other things, I found it remarkablethat people from all over the world, who have highly diverse backgrounds, could converge in our small classroom andconnect with each other. I do not think there are many fields which can facilitate this kind of rich cultural exchange. It
has allowed me to forge valuable friendships with some of my students, with whom I keep in touch with to this day, andI have really come to appreciate that aspect of this work. In my third year of teaching, I went back to school to get my
Master’s degree in Teaching English as an Additional Language (TEAL), which then led me to my current position at
Miyazaki International College.

Discrimination
Stephanie: In Chapter 4, Sampaguita said she “does not experience or sense any discrimination against her as a Filipino
in Japan” (p. 112). She received assistance from Japanese authorities when she needed it, and she stated that her
coworkers have been appreciative of her work (p. 112). Similarly, Elma said she is aware that there is discrimination, but
believs it can be overcome if you prove yourself to be better at your work than others (p. 93). As Stewart points out,
Elma achieved this by garnering distinctions that recognize her as one of the best teachers at her workplace (p. 93).
Have you ever experienced discrimination as a foreign English teacher here in Japan?
Prumel: I have not experienced overt discrimination directly from native English speakers or even Japaneseteachers and administrators. However, I believe it still exists in the workplace and in our discourses. In the language
teaching industry in Japan, we almost always equate the term discrimination to “negative discrimination,” which isbasically the poor treatment of a teacher because of his background, especially his mother tongue. However, “positive
discrimination” is evident in the Japanese workplace too and affects the lives of all English teachers here. It usuallyfavors teachers who come from Inner Circle countries (Kachru, 1992) where English is used as the primary language
such as the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. One specific example even until today is that the job
advertisements of English schools require candidates to be “native” English speakers from Inner Circle countries.
Upon deeper reflection, based on my recent experiences, discrimination often comes from fellow Filipinos, notfrom some explicit behavior or discourse from other nationalities. Having said this, I think it is also imperative toaddress discrimination with this specific Filipino organization in question. Having dealt personally with the interviewees
myself, I noticed firsthand that some teachers exhibit a Filipino socio-cultural trait called “kanya-kanya” or selfcenteredness. Specifically, when job opportunities come, some of them deliberately withhold information so only a few

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or only members of the organization know about it, hence, fewer competition. This is primarily a manifestation of“circles within circles” (Martin, 2014) and is a harmful practice in the language teaching community.
Stewart is right to interpret that FETJ primarily caters to the professional, social, and sometimes political concernsof Filipino teachers in Japan. While this maybe so, there needs to be a more truthful representation of who we are as acommunity. I somehow feel FETJ is a platform where there is a mirage of Filipino values and hard work being projected,
but it does not necessarily speak for other modern Filipino English teachers in Japan. Also, it has recently become abusiness enterprise whose programs are driven more by money-making activities than social activism. Therefore, there
is a dire need to represent other Filipino teachers in Japan and not just the already established ones. What about you?
What is your experience with discrimination, if any?
Stephanie: Like Sampaguita, I can say that I have not actually felt discriminated against because of my identities. I
do not think that it has set me back professionally. I do recognize that it is a reality many minority teachers face, notonly here in Japan. I also acknowledge that I inhabit this liminal space; my hyphenated national identity most probably
affords me certain privileges. Having said that, I do feel like I have to prove myself as a teacher. Citing Morgan (2004),
Stewart points out that, as language teachers, “our identities are ‘on show’ to learners and the people who hire us” (p.
192), so because I look a certain way, I feel there is an initial invisible barrier I need to overcome to get the fullconfidence of my employers and students. Whenever I enter a classroom for the first time, I feel like I am subjected tothis automatic evaluation. I am unsure if this stems from my own insecurities given my age and experience.
Nevertheless, that feeling does arise, but the good news is that I think I feel it less as I teach more.
With regards to the “kanya-kanya” mentality within FETJ, as I do not have first-hand experience with the group orother Filipino teachers in Japan in general, I cannot speak much about it specifically. In any case, I do understand thistrait you are referring to as I have witnessed some form of it at different points in my life. It truly can be detrimental to
everyone involved. As it pertains to us, however, if the larger goal is to elevate the image of the Filipino English teachersin Japan, then this issue within the community needs to be addressed directly and meaningfully. I do recognize that thisis definitely easier said than done as everyone would have to acknowledge and accept that it is a legitimate point ofcontention in the first place.

NEST/NNEST Identity
Stephanie: When asked about her identification as NEST or NNEST, Renata asserted that she “do[es]n’t want labels” (p.
168). I understand where she is coming from as these categorizations are not straightforward. In my case, for speaking, I
consider Cebuano as my native tongue. However, I cannot write formally in Cebuano or in Tagalog (Filipino languages),so if I were hard pressed to choose, I would say my first language for writing is English. As for reading and listening, I
feel English, Cebuano, and Tagalog are my “first languages.” I think this is true not only for me, but for many people whogrew up in the Philippines as the various Filipino languages are more often than not used simultaneously and/orinterchangeably with English. Overall, however, I do identify as NNEST, but perhaps part of the hesitation some teachers
may have when it comes to these labels arises as a result of this internal/personal, somewhat imprecise linguistic
distinctions, even within ourselves. What do you think about the NEST and NNEST distinction?
Prumel: This dichotomy is simplistic but I still believe that these terms should be considered in meaningful
discourse. This is not to say that I am complicit to perpetuating stereotypes about native and nonnative English
speakers. On the contrary, having a demarcation between the terms “native” and “nonnative” to identify the teachers isthe first step in recognizing that these all backgrounds matter. Misrecognition of these subjective terms alone may
further marginalize those who identify as such. What should be forsaken is what Stewart mentions in Chapter 1 and theIntroduction, which is native speakerism (Holliday, 2005, 2018) or the ideology that native speakers are better suited toteach English because they come from the Inner Circle countries. Another ideology that should be condemned islinguicism, or the preference for native English speakers (p. 24). There have been many attempts, even at recent
international teacher conferences, to use terms such as “multilingual teachers,” “intercultural teachers,” and the like.
Using these alternative terms achieves a superficial goal: It simply euphemizes the real problem that conflicts and formsof discrimination usually start in what we know, believe, and think or simply “cognition” (Borg, 2003) as manifested inour discourses and behaviors. Therefore, I do not see a huge problem in using the terms “native” and “nonnative,”
however subjective they are, as they can help expose the disbenefits of the ideologies behind them.

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Different types of World Englishes have now been intellectualized and as a result, we should have more tolerance todifferent varieties of the language. As a lingua franca, English is not anymore just owned by speakers from the Inner
Circle countries. As Professor Ryuko Kubota (2001) of the University of British Columbia once mentioned, we, as
nonnative speakers, also take ownership of the English language. However, in Japan, the misconception that the idealteacher of a language is a native speaker of that language is still pervasive. This labeling is deeply ingrained in our
professional communities, and we can start to change this by asserting ourselves and showing others that regardless ofbackground, first and foremost, we are all English teachers. All experiences are valid, and ethnicity, race, or color should
not be a factor in being an effective English teacher. Sure, nonnative speakers may have issues with their linguistic
confidence, but if you qualify and can deliver, then nobody should discriminate against you in any form.
Stephanie: Agreed. I would also like to include age, gender and sexuality to those dimensions you mentioned.
Indeed, it is wonderful that there are institutions like Renata’s workplace that value the various identities of teachersand see them as assets. Arguably, it would be better for students, teachers, and institutions as a whole to recognize thatdiversity in English language teaching, and in life in general, is an advantage.
References
Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know,
believe, and do. Language Teaching, 36(2), 81-109.
Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches (4th ed.). Sage.
Kachru, B. B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the outer circle. In R.
Quirk & H. G. Widdowson (Eds.), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures (pp.
11-30). Cambridge University Press.
Kubota, R. (2001). Teaching World Englishes to native speakers of English in the USA. World Englishes, 20(1), 47-64.
Martin, I. P. (2014). Philippine English Revisited. World Englishes, 33(1), 50-59.
Stewart, A. (2020). Language teacher recognition: Narratives of Filipino English teachers in Japan. Multilingual Matters.

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Dis/Connect – a virtual art exhibition by students ofMiyazaki International College and Kyoto University of the Arts
Will Hall
MiyazakiInternational
College
Email:<whall@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp>

Eric Luong
Kyoto Universityof the Arts
Email:<eluong@kua.kyo
to-art.ac.jp>

Dis/Connect: virtual art exhibition is an online project featuring the artworks of students from Miyazaki International
College (MIC) and Kyoto University of the Arts (KUA). The project was organized from August to September 2020, andthe works are currently available to view online. Featured artworks span a wide range of media, including photography,
illustration, graphic design and video. The theme of the exhibition was distance and isolation, as they relate to theongoing pandemic.

Motivations and Goals
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, which coincided with the beginning of the university school
year in Japan, many universities moved their classes online (MEXT, 2020). Students took classes in the form of live Zoom
sessions, Google Meets, or through on demand resources. However, with extra-curricular activities being cancelled, thismove to online teaching drastically changed university life and narrowed the breadth of student experience (Cohen,2020). There were two main reasons for beginning the Dis/Connect exhibition project: to provide an opportunity forinternational exchange (and thereby practice English) and use art to share experiences during the pandemic.
Both MIC and KUA have international exchange programs that were suspended due to the pandemic. All secondyear students at MIC have the opportunity to study abroad, while students at KUA can apply to study abroad for one
semester. With study abroad no longer possible, the Dis/Connect exhibition project aimed to provide exchange
between international and Japanese students using capabilities of suddenly very familiar video conferencing software.
An open-call to participate was sent via email to students at both schools in August 2020, and finally 21 students of fivenationalities in three countries decided to join. The project was run completely in English, and outside of regular classtime, giving students the chance to maintain their English skills throughout the summer holiday. Communication was
done via email and two Zoom meetings were held before the opening of the exhibition. The opening day also included
an online reception on Zoom where students introduced their works.
The Dis/Connect exhibition project was partly based on +Project (Plus Project), an international student group at
KUA. Every year, international and Japanese students work together to create art exhibitions, artist talks, and otherevents. This is a student-centered project, also run in English, whereby planning, design, and same day operations aredone by students. One result of this project is that students could use English outside of the classroom and makeinternational friends. Many have gone on to study abroad. In the same spirit, the Dis/Connect exhibition project aimed
to promote interaction between Japanese and international students.
During the first semester of online classes in 2020, there was a concern that the students were feeling isolated(Okutsu, 2020). Many did not have any plans for the summer and some reported that they missed meeting friends andsocial interaction. Extra-curricular activities at the schools were also cancelled. By giving a chance for students to meetothers going through a similar experience, the Dis/Connect exhibition project aimed to support students during thistime.

Theme and Format
When considering what theme would be appropriate for the exhibition, it became clear that it needed to address the
pandemic, something everyone was going through. As the exhibition title suggests, students were invited to make a

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work of art on issues of connection, isolation, and distance. It was hoped that by sharing individual experiences,
students could help each other during this time of isolation, and perhaps find some positives such as how we can
support one another in uncertain times. The Dis/Connect exhibition project was a chance for students to reflect andexpress feelings which are perhaps difficult to share in a classroom.
To encourage a diversity of artworks, students were invited to create a work (or a series of works) in any media. The
final result was a collection of photographs, illustrations, graphic design, video, and manga. Another reason for not
limiting works to one medium was to keep the project as inclusive as possible and avoid discouraging students who did
not come from an art or design background. Along with their work, students were asked to submit a short introduction
in English. In this way, they had two tasks: first, to interpret the theme artistically and second, to reflect on andarticulate the ideas behind their work in English. This helped viewers to appreciate the art, as both text and image aredisplayed together online. More importantly, this also encouraged students to further articulate their ideas. First,
teachers presented their own images with introduction texts as examples. These were discussed in the first Zoom
meeting to provide scaffolding for students to write their own introductions which were edited and checked by theorganizers via email and feedback was given.
It was decided that two hosting formats would be used: Tumblr, a free blog website, and Instagram, the social
media app. Using two platforms made it more accessible to a wider audience. A benefit to using online platforms wasthat all media could be shared, not just two-dimensional works. Viewers could click and immediately see videos.
Judging by the number of students who already had Instagram accounts at the time of the project, it appeared many
students were familiar with the application. This allowed for further visibility as students often shared posts and tagged
other users from the official project account.

Meeting and Exchanging Ideas
The exhibition was planned for the summer break. Exhausted from the disruption of the first semester, and following
social distancing protocols, most universities had planned to limit summer activities to the bare minimum. It was aconcern that students, already suffering from limited social interaction, may feel especially isolated with the ceasing ofa regular academic schedule. We wanted to give interested students the opportunity to do something productive andcreative, while encouraging as much social interaction as possible, under the unprecedented circumstances of thepandemic.
The project consisted of two one-hour meetings and one opening reception, all held on Zoom. The first meeting, atthe end of August, was a chance for students to introduce themselves, share their experiences of the pandemic, andlisten to those of others. It was especially interesting to hear the voices of students from places we were seeing on thenews such as Italy and Sweden, as well as different parts of Japan. The capabilities of the Zoom software, which had
become clear during the spring semester, such as the breakout rooms and screen sharing functions, helped make theexperience involving and interesting. Several art-related warm-up activities had been planned, but students were more
keen to share their experiences with each other, and it seemed a shame to interrupt them. The time went by very
quickly. The remainder of the meeting was used to explain the details of the project (such as deadlines and formats for
submissions) and to answer any questions students had at this stage. Most participants were not art university students
and so had limited experience in creating artworks; especially work to be shown in a public exhibition. For this reason
we decided it was important to provide sufficient guidance and support for them to start their creative process withconfidence and energy, while at the same time avoiding over-prescriptive instruction which might hamper theirindividual expression. We ended the meeting encouraged that students understood the requirements and were excitedabout working on their projects in the coming weeks.
The second meeting was held in mid-September and functioned as an interim discussion in which we could share
our ideas and show what we had made so far. By this time, students had begun to formulate some ideas about thedirection of their artworks. Some had already started experimenting with test works and were excited to share what
they had created. It was crucial at this stage to relieve students of anxieties they had around what makes a good
artwork, or how finished their artworks should be at this stage. We stressed the importance of the process over thefinished piece and encouraged students to discuss their ideas, however unfinished, as a way of fleshing them out andthinking of possible new directions.

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Once finished, the artworks were submitted to the organizers via Email along with the short English captions. They
were then uploaded to the Tumblr and Instagram sites and launched before the online opening reception on
September 28th. The event was a chance for participants to introduce their finished artworks and to see them hosted in
the virtual public galleries. The presentations were followed by lively discussions as we were all excited to see the works
on display and learn more about the creative processes of the artists. Translating creative decisions into words is noeasy task, let alone in a second language. Yet, while this was a new and challenging experience for many, it helped to
add depth to the artworks and a welcome element of closure to the project.

Student Works

Aya Fukunaga Family, 2020
This is my dis/connect image. By using this image, I showed “loneliness” and “connection”. The hand below is mineand the hand above is my grandfather's. He was in a nursing home because of dementia, so I could not meet him often.
This image shows the situation when I held his hand and said good-bye after seeing him. Because of coronavirus, thechance of seeing him drastically decreased. This October, his condition suddenly changed and he passed away. So, thisimage became my treasure and also my family’s treasure. At his funeral, I made a photo album by using this image and I
displayed it at the back of the ceremony hall. If I did not join the dis/connect project, I don't think I could have had thiskind of valuable experience. After joining this project, I thought that taking pictures is important not only in a happy
situation but also a difficult situation because we can look back on the memories. So if I feel loneliness and sadness, I
look back at this image.

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Lucia Rose Buffa, Untitled, 2020

When COVID first hit Italy, there were some initial precautionary measures, but it wasn’t long until the strict, stayhome order was issued. Suddenly, all these layers appeared, separating us from the World, as we’d previously known it.
They arrived overnight, and now they’re integrated into everyday life. There are physical layers—plastic gloves,
Plexiglas, facemasks. Layers of distance - 2 meters from other people, a thousand kilometers from my family. Layers of
uncertainty and unknown, for all of us. Quarantine in my city lasted 12 weeks. I spent a lot of time in my room (whodidn’t?). Spring arrived and I opened the windows to let it in; I watched the street through my sheer curtains. One day, inthe supermarket, the plastic gloves I had to put on at the entrance caught on the handle of my shopping bag and thethumb snagged open. It felt symbolic.

Outcomes and Reflections
Since the launch, the exhibition has been introduced in two PechaKucha Night conferences in Tainan/Kyoto(December 2020) and London (January 2021), helping the artworks reach many more people than would be possible ina physical exhibition. The project was also presented at the CCLT6 conference in which three participating students
from MIC were able to reflect on their experiences and show their artworks. The chance for students to talk publicly
about their artistic process was very important. Not only did it help them to think deeper about their artworks andprocess what they had learned, but it also offered educators a direct insight into the outcomes of the project. This wasa rare chance to hear directly from the students without teacher mediation.
One interesting take-away from the project that was mentioned by students was the novelty of taking part in a
public exhibition. While some participants had prior experience of interpreting guidelines into creative artworks, formost it was their first time. Many commented on the challenge of trying to turn partially formed, perhaps not fully
understood, feelings and emotions into something concrete and visual. As a mode of expression, art differs greatly fromspoken or written language. One difference being that full explanations are, in fact, often redundant in art. Art
welcomes nuance and suggestion, is forgiving of imprecision, and is the perfect vehicle for expressing what you struggle
to with more direct forms of communication. Art can help us in the messy task of making sense of our inner world, evenwhen it is not yet fully understood. It is this dialogue with ourselves that can lead to new realisations and discoveries,
and help to process emotions in tough times. With all the uncertainties and anxieties of the pandemic, perhaps rightnow is the perfect time to introduce more creative expression activities into our students’ lives.
2020 was a challenging year for students and teachers alike, and new teaching methods were adopted anddiscarded with rapid pace. On a positive note, being forced to experiment with new educational tools has led to somevery creative outcomes, but it will take time for us to reflect upon and realise how successful our response to the crisis
actually was. We feel that the virtual exhibition was one step towards helping students process their experience of avery difficult year. By encouraging them to reach-out, make connections, and share what they are going through, we
hope that they could realise that they are not alone in these times and that their anxieties and worries are perfectly

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normal. We were able to create this project thanks to the hard work and openness of the students and we now have a
precedent in place that can be built on. Once we emerge from the pandemic, we hope we can encourage the same
sense of creativity and optimism in future collaborative art exhibitions that transcend the physical boundaries of theclassroom and create real bonds between students, regardless of how disconnected they may feel.
The Dis/Connect exhibition can currently be found at:
Tumblr: https://miyazakikyoto.tumblr.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dis.connect2020/
References
Cohen, S. (2020, September 20). A digital pivot at Japan’s universities: ‘A lot of us expected to have our worst semesters
online.’ The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2020/09/20/lifestyle/japanese-universities-onlinecoronavirus/
Dis/Connect: A virtual art exhibition by students of Miyazaki International College and Kyoto University of the Arts
[Virtual exhibition]. (2020-2021). https://miyazakikyoto.tumblr.com
dis.connect2020 [@dis.connect2020/]. (n.d.). Exhibition by students of Miyazaki International College and Kyoto
University of the Arts. Dis/Connect (Distance, Contact, Isolation) [Virtual exhibition], Instagram. (2020-2021).
Retrieved March 17, 2021, from https://www.instagram.com/dis.connect2020/
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). (2020, September 11). [COVID-19] Information
about MEXT’s measures [Policy brief]. https://www.mext.go.jp/en/mext_00006.html
Okutsu, A. (2020, August 24). Lockdown generation: COVID-19 upends Asian students’ plans. Nikkei Asia. https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/Lockdown-generation-COVID-19-upends-Asian-students-plans

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Silence, Voice, and Writing
Leena Karlsson,
Helsinki University
Email:<karlsson.leena.k@gmail.com>

Chika Hayashi,
Seikei University
Email: <chayashi@bus.sei
kei.ac.jp

The Independent Learning Association (ILA) 2018 was held at Kobe Women’s University from the 5th to 8th September
in 2018. Due to the heavy typhoon that hit Japan at the beginning of September, a number of conferences werecancelled not only in Japan but other countries. Fortunately ILA 2018 took place although the schedule needed somechanges.
On September 7th, we gave our joint plenary titled “A Collaborative Reflection on Our Professional Journeys with
Learners' Voices.” When we were invited as plenary speakers, we were informed that it was the first endeavour to havea joint, collaborative plenary at ILA. Wondering how it would work and what we could co-construct, we started tointerweave the two threads. We thought of our communication and preparing for the plenary as an engagement in“doing collective biography” via dialogic emails. Our first contact with our potential audience happened, when we wereinvited to write a “prologue” (which we later called “A meeting of hearts and minds”) mainly to give readers of Learning
Learning a glimpse into our journey of exploration towards the plenary (Hayashi & Karlsson, 2018). This was our firstcollaborative writing effort. We had hoped that some readers might have gotten a touch of our complexly interwoven
emotions on the journey towards our joint plenary. And so we gave our plenary!

1. Missing a piece: Pursuing the meaning of silence
Chika: Immediately after our joint plenary ended, I realised that the room was full of silence. If my memory serves
me correctly, nobody was applauding. I had attended several conferences and listened to various kinds of plenary talk,but this ending full of silence was my first experience. On reflection, I feel a sense of accomplishment every time I give a
presentation, as do most people. However, I have to say that I felt awkward about the situation at the front of theroom, confused about how to react to the silence (or pretend not to realise it at all) because this was a completely
different ending from what I had expected. Actually, it was my first time to leave the room with such awkward feelings.
What caused the silence? Was the content overwhelming and uninteresting? Was the audience just tired after listening
to our one-hour talk? Had we perhaps disclosed too much in our personal stories? Was our talk too fast to understand?
Was the talk successful overall? I was asking myself, but these questions that I came up with indicate that myimmediate reaction was not positive.
Leena: I remember the silence. I remember how I was trying to first smile, then not to smile. It was me who had
said the very last words. I had spoken about Naoko Aoki, I had finished with the lyrics of a song, I had spoken out her
words: Let’s keep autonomy stories alive. That is, if my memory serves me right. If what I did was taken to be asking fora silence in Naoko’s memory and honour, then the silence was good. But at the moment when the talk was finishedthere was no way of knowing. Because the organizers had asked people to hurry to the next thing, because we hadtaken too long, because… I was stunned and remember seeing how somebody came to talk to you, Chika, to ask you aquestion. I hovered there for a while, then sneaked out into the corridor. A colleague who hadn’t been listening was
sitting and typing in the hall. My answer to a friendly “How did it go?” was a stunned “Nobody applauded.” Would weever know what the true meaning of that silence was?
Chika: “Silence is golden”—this is a common cultural belief and practice in Japan. As far as I know, this is based on a
Buddhist idea that “novice” priests need to maintain silence and devote themselves to special training to be “real”
priests until they completely master special skills and manners as a priest. In my everyday life, I admit that I am

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accustomed to silence in class and meetings, but the silence both Leena and I had experienced in Kobe was completely
different.
On the last day of the ILA conference, Leena and I explored Kobe city (and enjoyed shopping!), chatting about manythings such as our families and workplaces. (Do you remember we even dropped in at a cozy coffee shop and our chatcontinued almost forever over a cup of coffee? I still remember the delightful aroma of coffee we enjoyed together!)Turning this way and that in Kobe city as a stranger, I seemed to be waiting for the right time to talk to Leena about themeaning of silence which I could not get out of my mind at all. I think it was me who broke another “silence” andstarted to talk about the silence we had experienced. I clearly remember that you told me in a soft but firm voice that
we would find out the true meaning of silence after a while. You even said that the audience also would understand thetrue meaning of silence after several years, which reminded me of the “parallel process” we had discussed in our
Learning Learning piece just before the ILA conference (see Hayashi & Karlsson, 2018). I was convinced that ourmeanings of unspoken and nonverbal messages about silence and its various connotations would be transmitted andeven shared in due course.
Leena: On our exploration of rainy Kobe we were talking, sharing stories in yet another way from the days before,
including our plenary. This was more intimate, not done in front of an audience or through writing stories to be later
shared in front of an audience. A Japanese coffee shop was a novel experience for me, and we were, I felt, truly
becoming friends.
In the plenary, we had both emphasized the importance of learners’ voices, including their feelings and emotions.
We had, at length, talked about how we both aim at truly “hearing” students’ insider experiences and their learner
voices. We had written about this in our prologue as well. But now we had had to listen to the silence of our audienceand needed to “hear” their collective inner experience. We both struggled. And yes, Chika, you broke the silence of thelast moment of our plenary. It was important that we verbalised our embarrassment and admitted to not “hearing”
what the voice of the audience was trying to say. A colleague who had been listening to us immediately said to me that
she thought it was meant to be a two-minute silence to remember Naoko. I think that her words gave me comfort andan understanding of sorts was developing in my heart and mind.
When the two of us talked in the coffee shop, we started moving back to what we had come to see as sharedunderstandings and in thinking about educational stories we were looking into the future. At the moment, I feel that
there is never one true meaning for a silence. This is true of the Kobe silence as well. And, we have the same saying in
Finnish: Silence is golden. In fact, the Finnish silence can be read about in a book (The Silent Finn) written by two
linguists, Lehtonen and Sajavaara, in 1982. So I know what a silence can feel like in a classroom with Finnish students!
By the way, wasn’t it on this walk that meeting each other in Helsinki was mentioned?
Chika: The Kobe silence was always in my mind and even echoed (of course, soundlessly). I guess it was the same asyou, Leena. Looking back on our plenary and looking for the meaning of silence like the story of Silverstein’s (2006) “TheMissing Piece,” I came across some reflective writings on our joint plenary in Learning Learning, and Self-Access
Learning Journal, respectively.
■ Maria Giovanna Tassinari & Christian Ludwig (2018)“Opening an authentic dialogue with learners and sharing their own personal stories, they encourage learners
to find their own (inner) voices [……] Leena and Chika’s such a reflective journey as the “textual friendship”(ibid.) they developed through their virtual and textual communication illustrates. [……] Their plenary wasmuch more than passing on knowledge and raising questions as they let the audience participate in their very
personal “process of re-storying [their] professional pasts as practitioners, researchers and persons” (ibid.: p.
34).” (p. 72)■ Elizabeth Schlingman (2018)“This honest and engaging presentation, made more impressive by the fact that Karlsson and Hayashi live on
opposite sides of the globe and …” (p. 449)

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The three participants’ reflective writings give a glimpse of their inner voices that Leena and I had been looking for.
The importance of transparency and authenticity that both Leena and I emphasised and embodied in our joint plenary
were not merely transmitted as Maria and Christian describe, but more importantly, it was mutually shared at least
with the three participants. Reading their writings, I came to think that the Kobe silence may have been a sign of ourcollaborative and reflective moment and endeavour. The audience would have been engaged in the “parallel process,”going back and forth between the present and the past in pace with our wandering stories. They may have looked backon their own personal and professional histories related to teaching and learning, and explored critical incidents as they
gradually emerged as the “fellow passengers” in our collaborative journey. So, perhaps the silence was one of bothindividual and collaborative reflection.
As you said Leena, in Kobe I also truly felt that we were bound more tightly with the magic drink (coffee!) and wealready started talking about Helsinki as our next destination. To my surprise, I landed in Helsinki airport just one year
after our joint plenary. It was September 2nd, 2019—a sunny but a bit chilly afternoon for me.

2. From ILA to Finland: Puzzles, New Encounters and New Challenges
Leena: I, too, read the texts in Learning Learning and Self-Access Learning Journal with a refreshed understanding about
the silence. Our audience had been travelling with us with their own personal memories, histories, experiences, theirwhole autobiographies. Our individual professional and personal stories and, as Elizabeth Schlingman writes, our
virtually and textually shared, and thus entangled, story had resonated with them. Thinking back to our need to look for“the missing piece”, Chika, I feel very strongly and palpably how fragile our stories of teaching and learning always are.
It is, however, this vulnerability as the tellers that also gives positive hope: there are always listeners with whom thestory will resonate.
And a year later you landed in Helsinki and our virtual story continued as a live story. For me it was so enjoyable tointroduce my colleagues, the Language Centre and, in particular, ALMS counsellors and students to you. And Hetti, mydog, who loved you from the very first moment.
It was great to have you sit in my ALMS Opening Session with my theology students. I don’t always wholeheartedly
enjoy having visitors in my classroom because I also tend to feel a bit nervous. Now, it was different. I felt my shy andsilent students and I were safe with you. The group you were observing, like any faculty group, is always very diverse interms of language skills and potential anxieties: not everyone is feeling comfortable in the session when it starts. Somebring a lot of baggage with them. A lot of pedagogical sensitivity is needed and observation can make this a bit
problematic. Not with you, Chika!
Your visit to my Opening session was the beginning for a small project which we also planned to write about one
day. At the moment, May 2020, I am struggling with an article that is a rewrite of something I had already finishedwriting when you came to Helsinki. It was the educational story I had referred to in the Kobe plenary:“My current research work is happening round the ideas of arts-based language, using poetic language, mindful
and attentive listening in narrative inquiry, and how an ethical know-how can be developed using these as inspirations
in research writing (Reed & Speedy, 2011). This is work in progress that is at a beginning stage with a text with theworking title Laura, the girl who wrote the fear. Laura is a diarist, a creative writer, an explorer and experimenter withwriting in English, the girl who suffered from language anxiety but found her voice and used it as an expression of her
autonomy.”
The text, written along the lines in the above paragraph, was not accepted for publication by a particular journal on
the basis of it being too experimental and “not interesting to our readers.” I am now trying to rewrite it for anotherjournal. At the moment, I am pondering about (non-native) academic writing, about narrative educational stories, andwhat kind of qualitative writing is considered “interesting”, acceptable, and publishable in academia. Chika, am I making
sense when I bring up writing for publication? We wanted to write together about our students’ Japanese-Finnish DIY.
What are your passions and concerns as an academic writer?
Chika: My first visit to Helsinki was memorable, enjoyable and informative! Prior to my departure, you kindly
arranged everything for me, asking what I would like to do in terms of my academic (and personal) interests and needs.
You may not have realised this, or this may be your natural manner, but I felt that you were carefully listening to myinner voice. I also thought that this is your way of approaching students ahead of and during your counselling sessions.

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Getting a sense of your educational approach, I was welcomed to your first session with your theology students on mysecond day in Helsinki.
It was the first encounter for all of us, but as you have described, Leena, I was not nervous either and felt safety inthe classroom. I think I was an observer, but I felt as if I were auditing your first lesson. Do you remember that one ofyour students asked about your learning history? I think you didn’t expect to be asked such a personal question at thevery beginning of the first lesson. But you answered when and how you started to learn English in a friendly but sincere
attitude, which I believe sent an implicit and explicit message to your students about you as a practitioner, counsellor,
and person. Also, another magic item (not coffee but chocolates this time!) that you prepared for your students helped
to establish a trusting relationship between you and your students as well as among students! Again, it reminds me ofSilverstein’s (2006) The Missing Piece. By having one chocolate and sharing parts of it, some of them might havethought that each member is an important part of the team. Smiling at this “sweet” story and taking a note of teachingstrategies and critical incidents in the class, I began envisaging a new English course starting from April 2020.
Yes, not only your students, but also your wonderful colleagues kindly welcomed me in a friendly manner! I
immediately felt a warm and caring environment that both you and your colleagues co-constructed—Yes, it was a lively
community bound together with strong ties. I enjoyed observing some of your colleagues’ classes and also talking
about their classes over coffee and lunch. I really appreciate that you kindly connected me to your colleagues!
We also talked about our potential Do-it-Yourself project when I visited your home! I was trying to expand ourinteractive process to a much wider context and wondering if it would be possible to involve our students somehow.
Moreover, I had chances to talk with some of your students after the classes I observed. The feeling I had in talking withthe students made me realise that there are some commonalities between your Finnish students and my Japanese
students. I have no intention to make a sweeping generalisation, but students in both countries are kind of modest but
they have their own ideas and opinions which are probably not expressed or shared so often. I immediately thoughtthat these similarities would work effectively because students would be able to naturally establish an equal andhealthy relationship for their mutual learning without one student dominating.
With lovely Hetti sitting next to us (probably carefully listening to us and hoping for success), we opened ournotebooks and started to make a concrete plan. I soon realised that we were heading in the same direction even if we
didn’t say anything directly. We were also naturally trying to leave some space for our students to make decisions andalso negotiate with each other about how to proceed with the project. Like you, I also invited my students to join the
Do-It-Yourself project in exactly the same way as you.
So, our interests in learners’ voices including emotions and feelings face challenges. It is often the case that texts
related to learners’ voices are as a simple record of their learning processes and get judged as “not academic” as you
say, Leena. This is a big challenge for us indeed. With a careful choice of appropriate research methods and techniquessuch as interviews, diaries and drawings, we are able to step into an internal aspect of individual learners’ minds. We
understand that those are the keys for us to approach and see learners’ internal voices and establish a symbiotic
relationship, which is an important basis for learner counselling, advising and teaching.
I think this is similar to the reading theory that “reading is an interactive process.” As a reader of students’ inner
voices, we activate our schemata and connect their stories narrated verbally and through drawings to our own learning
experiences, several theories, some tips we got in conferences, our former students’ failures and successes and otheracademic papers to find the best practice in a specific context and case. There may be a gap between research andpractice. I’ve just remembered Stevick’s (1980) observation that “Success depends less on materials, techniques andlinguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom.” (p. 4)
Leena: The beautiful analysis in your latest entry, Chika, very strongly resonates with what I am struggling to write
about, or touch upon, in the article that is on my computer screen right now. We teachers, advisers, counsellors “asreaders of our students’ inner voices” indeed struggle with how to show, not only tell about, the internal voices in ourpapers. The challenge is how to “convert” into academic text our research done using research tools and methods likediaries, drawings, letters, stories, creative writing, counselling notes and recordings, research discussions, “dream data.”
When we re-story, we should be brave and stick with evocative storytelling ourselves and this still, amazingly often,
seems to be a problem for journals. But we’ll keep trying!

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I have to confess that all my energy has gone into rewriting the article I keep referring to. In fact, I’ve been “writing”
it for two years now. And I do not think I’m ever going to finish and send it off to be (not) published! In fact, it is turning
into a text about “different” academic writing and the voice is now mainly a practitioner-researcher’s voice, which she
uses as an expression of her own autonomy as a counsellor, as a non-native academic writer. The first version was
telling the parallel stories of two writers, myself and Laura, the girl who wrote the fear. I talked about her in Kobe as you
might remember. I haven’t yet given up on student voices but have to ponder further on how Laura and potentiallyanother student could be written into this “new” story. Writing is a huge struggle and I might be missing a focus and apoint but seem to keep going back to the file, like a cat scratching a sore spot.
Chika: It is obvious that we are always with our learners. As you describe, Leena, we need to analyse and interpretthe data to share it with readers without distorting the learner voices expressed in their “products.” In a sense, we are a
mediator between participants (learners) and readers and take responsibility for all the “interactive” processes.
However, as you said, we also need to convert the data into academic text. Those who engage with learner voices face
the same challenges and dilemmas but both of us dare to choose to devote ourselves to understanding learner voices
and move forward together with whatever voices learners have!
Leena, I was thinking about “learner voices in this COVID-19 pandemic.” Due to this unprecedented situation, we
have been struggling to adjust ourselves not only to the new normal but also to the new teaching/learning
environment. Likewise, we also need to change or transform our ways of approaching our learners. In my case, I’ve
been conducting online lessons using Zoom since the middle of April. To be honest Leena, I cannot really feel thepresence of my students during the classes although I was aware that our interaction should be clearly different fromwhat we used to have before. I cannot physically feel or touch students or directly interact with students.
Any assignments related to their learning are perfectly typed and sent to a Learning Management System as digital
data. Unlike the previous years, I cannot receive their assignments directly from my students, which equally and sadly
means to me that I cannot really feel their authentic feelings and emotions. It is my first time in my teaching career that
I feel I’m away from my students. All the perfectly typed documents I receive from my students every week are a set ofsimple, artificial and monotonous documents to me; I cannot feel their particularity even if the assignments are related
to their own learning history or their opinions about certain topics. Of course, I know that students put so much effort
and time into their assignments and I appreciate their contributions during this difficult time though. I cannot really see
how they work on each assignment, but I can imagine that they rewrite their sentences, carefully choosing more
appropriate words as they type.
It is a very natural thing, but this means to me that their spontaneous and authentic voices are easily altered tosomething different or even erased completely. The strength of their hand writings, their use of space, their choice ofcolour pens and drawings are what I’m missing. I’m missing even dirt like coffee or sweets on some papers I received
from my former students, which gave a glimpse of their personality and personal lifestyle. That kind of small but
significant “trace” tells me something which is not explicitly expressed but implicitly shared through each student’s
product. As for my feedback, I myself typed my comments in the same Word file and sent it back to each student,
strongly feeling that some important things are really missing …
Struggling with this challenging situation and pursuing alternative ways, last week I decided to print out all the
documents that students had sent to me. I then wrote my comments manually using various color pens. Yes, I decided
to be transparent myself in this small way and share my own voice not verbally but visibly. I’m wondering whether andhow it will work…

3. What is Writing?
Leena: Chika, I simply love your new angle, the effects of COVID-19 on our students’ and our own embodied being in
the world and our (written/Inner) voices! It’s so very tangible to me, the whole destruction and loss of teaching andcounselling as meetings of minds and bodies. I love the way you write about the “perfectly typed” texts with no tracesof life in or on them (the dirt, the lovely dirt, the wonderful messes are missing). “Simple, artificial and monotonous,”
yes, that’s what writing can become when we make it possible for writers to use templates, models, when they can just“copy and paste” in their minds, if not in reality, when they never leave an Other’s influence, when the whole English-

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speaking and English–writing world is writing on their screens, when “help”, when “inspiration” is only a click away.
When the product becomes more important than the process, again this happens but for different reasons than before.
In my own work, I got more and more interested in asking the students to freewrite, to write in order to think, toclaim their voice, enriched with the native language, but authentic, not copied (Karlsson, 206; 2017). More and more I
was inspiring writing that would be messy and colourful and could be worked with endlessly and “improved” but not
immediately, but with time, first reflecting and then “editing”, first generating and then polishing, first making a messand then cleaning up. This writing approach makes use of pictures and coloured pens and scrap books and glittery
pictures.
Do you remember the ALMS Diaries in the session I had with my students when you visited? And you have beengetting those kinds of spontaneous texts and drawings back from your students! And we have both enjoyed thereading! We have been reading and thinking with their stories, living their stories in the pictures and colours andhandwriting, the scribbles. I think we need to print these pages soon and both take pictures of how we handle them,
what visible traces we leave (I can promise footprints of coffee mugs and other dirt!). In fact, could this be the next
phase: printing what we have and taking time to READ, UNDERSTAND, BE SURPRISED and DIGEST and do ourhandwork? Will we see what inner voices are expressed in our entries? Will we be able to spot and mark each other’s
feeling voices (a lovely term I came across again just now by Elbaz-Luwisch, 2014)? In my email I said this, right? On 24
May I wrote:
We both need to print out this diary, read it with a pen (or many coloured ones) in hand in order to understand andfeel what's going on in the text, what (inner) voices are being expressed. When we do it, taking our time, I'm sure
we will know what to do with our dialogic diary, themes will emerge…
As I am (almost) retired now and not active in teaching, I can see how these times of upheaval in our lives and ineducation make me stop and sigh, but not necessarily think of immediate solutions to the problems. I also want to
attach a bit of text from my article to this email, the one I’m struggling with, just to hear your immediate reaction. The
thing to know is that the article is experimental and I am including my own writing exercises from a course in creative
academic writing I took in the research story, using my own writing as data. This bit might be of interest because it isabout voice, although a spontaneous writing exercise. I ponder on unique voices in educational stories, how we cankeep our own unique, although incomplete, voices as practitioner-researchers and also allow our students to keep
theirs. I write how previous student stories always echo in our texts and how it’s always a chorus of voices in narrativeinquiry that the readers will hear. You’ll see that I worry about silence, I truly worry about how to write about it in mytext and also about not hearing the sound of Laura’s silence, perhaps even silencing her story.
Chika: I was thinking about Freire’s (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He demonstrates the dichotomous
relationship between teachers and students and defines it as “the banking model of education.” In that model, theexpected roles of students in a traditional classroom are clearly described in contrast to those of teachers. One of themis that students are expected to listen to teachers. This means that the student role is to be silent and their voices are
not expected to be heard. Then I came up with an idea of two types of silence: intentional silence and oppressive
silence. In the former case, we are supposed to read between lines and keep quiet so as to maintain harmony. For
example, students who believe that “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” would choose not to express theiropinions so as not to stand out or to be isolated from others in a group or class. On the other hand, in the latter case,people are forced to keep quiet to play a role imposed on them like Freire’s example of students described above.
Whatever types of silence it is, silence includes (un)intentionally unspoken messages and implicit or explicit meanings,
and appear and disappear any decisions a learner makes and a sign of autonomy behind their authenticity.
Leena: Permission to write, that’s the name I decided to give to my article! I think that what you and I are talking
about now is about the right to write, the right to write academic texts, too, “differently”, in a more human language. I
did send my article and will hear in due time if this journal, if these reviewers, might consider that some of their readers
might be interested. I’ll keep you posted, Chika! But even to be given a vague permission is not enough; one needs tobe able to call oneself a writer by claiming one’s voice and right to write. There are always multiple social and cultural
norms that won’t allow a writer writing against them to quite use her voice because there’s always the possibility to be
rejected. I guess that somebody from the margins of academia, like myself, a non-native writer, a practitioner-

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researcher, not a real researcher, will always hear the nagging internal censor’s voice in her head: “This is not going tobe accepted, and for a good reason!”
So what can we do? Keep writing and sending our papers to different journals. Live with the rejections andsuggestions of re-writing and editing. There are also different rejections: rejections for a good reason and for the wrong
reasons. The wrong reasons often have to do with strong expectations of conventional and conforming writing only. I
believe that the world of education needs experimental writings, texts emerging from experience; it needs narrativeand stories, memories and dreams, the use of imagination and creativity. I think it needs feeling voices (Elbaz-Luwish,2014). It needs practitioners who listen to the inner voices of their students and have micro-dialogues with their own
inner voices. If we write in our feeling voices arising out of our inner dialogues, perhaps the readers will hear our inner
voice, and perhaps they will also hear our students’ inner voices in our re-storying. Perhaps it’s about a resonance ofexperiential stories (Conle, 2000) in the world of learning and teaching (advising/counselling for) foreign languages?
Chika, it is a perfect point to bring in Freire! Silence indeed is about power. And here it is learner autonomy thatgives me hope! A student who has autonomy, a permission to act autonomously, can choose to be silent and weteachers/counsellors have to have the skill and sensitivity to listen to that silence. Granger (2011) writes about silence
as “a presence rather than a lack, as a methodology rather than a pathology.” Isn’t it also a permission to be(autonomously) silent that students need to have in classrooms and counselling offices? We are the ones who can givethat permission. But we are also the ones who can reject and refuse silence, force our thinking, our meaning and power
on students.
Silence is an ethical question in education, in practice and research. Giving thought to and exploring how welistened to a certain silence might be the starting point to understand it, the slippery and obscure meanings of silencesin different contexts, our own prejudices included. Which takes us back to the beginning, to Kobe, and the moment at
the end of our plenary.

4. Collaborative Reflection After Writing …
Leena: I’m looking at a printed version of our dialogue so far. Colours, underlinings, circles and words are trying to tell astory of a collaborative writing project, a project which is experimental in terms of what form the end product, an
article will/could/might/should take. Writing has many meanings here, writing is the inquiry in the project. Our writing
takes the form of a dialogue, consistently so. And yet, there are fragments, episodes, small stories by Chika and yetothers by Leena inside the big story called Silence. Because I am not a particularly visual person, my use of colour isvery modest and pragmatic, I go for words, this time I used a red pen to write my words/reactions/ideas/interpretations, which is very interesting as I don't use red as a teacher at all!
We both seem to have an agenda, or an underlying silence/passion/issue wanting to find a form in words; these are
not exactly the same but they do emerge from the dialogue for both of us. For me, it's definitely writing, academic andpersonal, students' and practitioners', writing as written voices, feeling voices. I do not venture to say what's yours,
Chika, perhaps you disagree with the whole idea of agendas (a negative word but I mean it as a neutral way of saying
we want to focus on certain issues). For me, the other issue, which also gets coloured in yellow (=hope) or orange(=vitality), is minds and bodies, learning as a bodily process, embodied encounters in counselling/teaching, which wemight not have in the future. No colours, pens, handwritten texts, breathing the same air, smelling each other. I guess
I'm not alone here…
Chika: Our collaborative writing is an explorative process of our own and collaborative voices. We have spent somany years exploring our common interests, students' inner voices, but we may not have been so conscious of thepresence of our own voices or we simply didn't have any chances to express or share our own voices at least in a
written form and even didn't expect our voices would go across oceans and continents, but we have still continued our
dialogue even if we didn't know what our end product would be like.
The dialogue started with my voice and included the emotions I had in Kobe. In response to that, your voice also
included your real voice of the negative feeling you had after our plenary session. In this way, our monologue graduallyturned into dialogue, expanding it with the others' voices like Elizabeth, Giovanna, and Christian, who had shared thesame space and time with us in Kobe. As researchers, we understand the importance of triangulation, so we might have
tried to explore the meaning of silence, which is our main concern, from various perspectives. However, it might have

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been simply out of our curiosity as human beings that we wished to understand how the audience felt about ourplenary.
As the dialogue goes on, not only voices of ourselves as plenary speakers, but also various voices emerge, such aspractitioner-researchers, counsellors, writers, teachers, and human beings. It was like a soap opera and each player
appeared one after another and expressed their own emotions and feelings from their own perspectives. Theirstruggles, challenges, passions and hopes are well reflected in our collaborative dialogue. As we responded, repeated,paraphrased and summarised what they expressed, we reflected on our specific teaching/learning environments like amirror image. In this way, multilevel voices are echoed, mingled and resonated.
Leena: Thank you for the great insights into silence, Chika. I've read your reflections with interest. You don’t
mention colours at all, this is the only thing I’m surprised about. These months, even years, that we’ve spent with first
the idea of silence and now the writing project are indeed a rich story of professional and personal development. I can
see and feel a web of experiences forming and resonating and I can hear a chorus of voices joining in, speaking and atother times listening, silently pondering. Voices in us and around us.
The starting point for us was indeed the need for ”triangulation” as researchers and plenarists but also humancuriosity or perhaps both? For me, this dialogue has given a peace of mind about the original Silence of Kobe. It has
provided me a space for reflecting and critically looking back at the silence and its repercussions. During our dialoguing
I’ve written three papers and been engaged in inquiries about themes that are not directly related to silence but alsowith one that has to do with being "silenced" as a writer. This silencing, or more accurately, the feeling of being silenced
has to do both with my inner voice and my written voice as an expression of my autonomy as a practitioner-researcher.
Our text as a “soap opera” is a telling metaphor, Chika!
Because we’ve shared our feelings and opinions and ever-evolving ideas about silence and its meaning, I’ve started
to hear novel echoes of voices having to do with English as an academic lingua franca and writing as a non-native
practitioner. During this time, I wrote one text in Finnish about (learning) diaries in ALMS and felt much more expressive
and playful in writing it than I do when I use English. Ideas emerging from our “dialogic diary via emails” have writtenthemselves, in deliberately reformed ways, in the other texts and papers I have been writing and vice versa. Two ofthem have now been published and one is still “becoming” an article. The article I mention struggling with will be
published soon and the one in Finnish has just come out. There is a writing story (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) or astory about writing here that I'd be interested to pursue now that as a “third age” teacher, or rather a third-age
practitioner- researcher, I have all the time in the world.

5. Closure
Chika: Like our joint plenary at ILA 2018, this piece of writing reflects our authentic voice narrated from themultidimensional aspects of ourselves: teachers, counsellors, researchers and human beings. Whatever aspects it is, wehave been constantly pondering, wondering and facing issues, but we are surely moving forward. In my research study(Hayashi, 2010), one of the participants (a 15-year-old junior high school student) drew rock climbing on a sheet of apaper and explained that rock climbing is closely related to English language learning. If we need to climb a rock byourselves, it would be very challenging and hectic; we might easily give up on the way to the top unless we do not havea strong motivation and can maintain it. However, if we do that with someone with similar interests and goals, thewhole process will be more dynamic, motivating and more importantly enjoyable! Likewise, our second piece of writing
demonstrates the power of dialogic inquiry between Leena and me, which always empowers me both professionallyand personally even under the unprecedented circumstance of the COVID-19 pandemic!
Leena: The experience of writing this text with you, Chika, and our whole two-year-process, reminds me of a
project we did in ALMS and reported on in Bradley et al. (2015). This was an exploration of our (possible) counsellor
selves, of our beliefs and attitudes but also a way of visioning our professional futures. Most importantly, we wanted to
explore how a scholarship of language counselling (Vieira, 2010) could be developed via professional discussions andcollaborative writing. The way the two of us have worked together since we started preparing the plenary has been asimilar effort in developing our scholarships of teaching and pedagogies for autonomy across the oceans andcontinents. It has been a project of sharing and caring, of peer mentoring, or learning together: learning about
ourselves, about teaching, about autonomy, about writing, and about life, both our personal and academic lives.

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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Andy Barfield for his insightful comments on the first draft of our collaborative writing and more
importantly for making it possible for us to engage in the joint plenary at ILA 2018 in Kobe, which was a seed of ourcollaboration! We would also like to express our gratitude to the Learning Learning editorial team, especially HughNicoll and Ken Ikeda, for sharing their thoughtful perspectives and for providing kind support in finalising this piece ofwriting.
References
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advising and counselling in language learning. Helsinki: University of Helsinki Language Centre (pp. 91-118).
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Conle, C. (2000). Thesis as narrative or “What is inquiry in narrative inquiry?” Curriculum Inquiry, 30(2), 189-213.
Elbaz-Luwisch, F. (2014). Auto/Biography & pedagogy. memory & presence in teaching. Peter Lang.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum International.
Granger, C. A. (2011). Silence in second language learning: A psychoanalytic reading. Multilingual Matters.
Hayashi, C. (2010). A teacher’s perceptions of students’ transformational creativity in a secondary language classroom
in Japan: A case of professional development [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Nottingham.
Hayashi, C., & Karlsson, L. (2018). A meeting of hearts and minds. Learning Learning, 21(1), 32-35.
Karlsson, L. (2017). “It’s all in the writing” – Learning diaries and secret diaries in a pedagogy for autonomy. In C.
Nicolaides & W. Magno e Silva (Eds.), Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics and learner autonomy (pp.
231-256). Pontes Editores.
Karlsson, L. (2016). Write the fear – autobiographical writing and language (classroom) anxiety. Scriptum: Creative
Writing Research Journal, 3(1), 32-59.
Karlsson, L., & Bradley, R. (2018). Storytelling for learning and healing: parallel narrative inquiries in language
counselling. The Learner Development Journal, 2, 100-116.
Lehtonen, J., & Sajavaara, K. (1982). The silent Finn. University of Jyväskylä, Department of English. ISSN 0358-6456;
0358-6456.
Reed, M., & Speedy, J. (2011). Scrapbooks and messy texts. Notes towards sustaining critical and artful narrative inquiry.
In S. Trahar (Ed.), Learning and teaching narrative inquiry: Travelling in borderlands (pp. 107-123). John Benjamins.
Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage
handbook of qualitative research (pp. 959-967). Sage.
Tassinari, M. G., & Ludwig, C. (2018). Reflections on the Independent Learning Association (ILA) Conference 2018,
September 5th – 8th, 2018, Kobe, Japan. Learning Learning, 21(2), 72-74.
Schlingman, E. (2018). Review of the Independent Learning Association 2018 Conference. Studies in Self-Access
Learning Journal, 9(4), 448-455.
Silverstein, S. (2006). The missing piece. HarperCollins.
Stevick, E. W. (1980). Teaching languages: A way and ways. Heinle & Heinle.
Vieira, F. (2010). Towards teacher and learner autonomy: Exploring a pedagogy of experience in teacher education.
Revista Canaria Estudios Ingleses, 61, 13-27.

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LD SIG Grant Awardee Reports | LD SIG 研究助成金受
Reflections on JALT2020:
Professional development through the pinhole of learner development
Malik Amir Feroze,
Hiroshima Shudo University
2020 LD SIG International Conference Grant Awardee
Email: <ma_feroze@yahoo.ca>
JALT2020 was my second JALT International Conference and was different from JALT2019
for two main reasons. One, it successfully brought together “communities of teachers andlearners” from around Japan in times of a pandemic that continues to affect our living andworking. Two, it was unique as it was online, which created a special call for collaboration andjoint sessions. Originally, JALT2020 was scheduled to be held in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, which is along way from Hiroshima city where I live and work. Going totally online saved me fromplanning for a long trip, and I could appropriate the grant money to research and prepare for my own talks. As a parttime university teacher without any access to research funding or monetary support to cover the registration fee andother expenses involved, I was fortunate to participate and present as well as co-present at JALT2020 Online with thesupport of a LD SIG International Conference Grant. In this essay, I would like to tell you a little about my own teachingstory and learner development interests, and share with you what I enjoyed learning about at the conference.
From 2007 I was a beginning teacher as a Canadian participant on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. I
am a Pakistan-born Canadian. I grew up in Pakistan, and my family moved to Montreal, Canada in 1998. By that time, I
had come through English-medium schooling and had finished my BBA (Bachelor of Business Administration) inPakistan. This single handedly helped me the most to continue my studies in economics with an intensive one-year
masters in 2005. Encouraged by a graduate teaching assistantship but feeling fatigued by the pace of all the studying I
had done for the masters in economics, I took a couple of gap years to focus on volunteering as an adult literacy
instructor at the Reading Council for Literacy Advance in Montreal (RECLAIM; see https://www.reclaimliteracy.ca/) totutor adult literacy students with individual learners’ needs. It was here that I found my calling for teaching English.
English is not my second language: I speak Punjabi (my maternal language and a language of my ethnicity), Urdu
(Pakistan’s official language), Hindi (roughly speaking, the spoken equivalent of Urdu, but different in its written form),and English (de facto my “langue du jour” or daily language for my career as a teacher and researcher). On the JET
program, I felt I was not only a cultural ambassador of Canada, or for that matter Quebec, but also a Punjabi and a
Pakistani. In the classroom, the thing that excited me the most, and filled me with the most pride, was that I was a faceof Canada as well as Pakistan. This looping of multiple identities through languages helped me establish a deep
connection with my learners in the early days, as their struggles and development reminded me of my own earlyschooling experiences with a mixed sense of confusion as well as clarity: confusion as to why English, and clarity as towhy not English. For me, like the young learners I was now teaching, in my early schooling English had little use ineveryday life. Yet, as schooling progressed, the use of English in higher education clearly singularly influenced me andmotivated me to succeed.
I worked as an Assistant Language Teacher for the Hiroshima City Board of Education (BoE) for five years. The
collaborative teaching experience, specifically team-teaching practices in English language instruction at junior andsenior high schools, helped me grow as a teacher from feeling that I was on my own to developing a sense that we wereNewsletter of the JALT Learner Development SIG <http://ld-sig.org>

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): LDSIG Grant Awardee Reports
working with the students and learning together. The collaborative classrooms singularly shifted my teaching to excite,
engage, and empower young learners with practical everyday English. The JET experience was a breakthrough period in
my own development as a teacher and became the springboard for my university teaching career in 2015. Currently, I
am an adjunct lecturer at a private city university in Hiroshima. I am also pursuing my second master's degree inApplied Linguistics, and my main interests as a teacher are collaborative classrooms, learner development, andpragmatics.
In planning and developing my courses collaboratively, one of my goals is to help prepare a greater number ofstudents to graduate as capable, confident users of social English. Learner development is an integral part of myapproach to collaborative learning as I want my students to make shared decisions in socially interactive situations ofrole play and teamwork. To that end, three key components of my classes have been: (a) task-based “learning-by
doing”, (b) measurement of performance against outlined targets, and (c) self-assessment for reflection. Practicallyspeaking, I look to orient the students with a warm-up activity, review relevant past lesson content, pre-view thecurrent lesson and its focus, move into a combination of teacher-led instruction and student-centered activities, withreflection on achievement or movement toward the goals and things to be working on independently or in dyads or insmall groups. In a collaborative classroom we together create a learning environment that demonstrates the relevanceof English to our learners’ social lives. Coming back to JALT2020, I was looking forward to learning more about thesekinds of issues at the conference. I focused in particular on presentations and workshops that covered theaforementioned three components, specifically in terms of collaborative practices and learner development in online
classes.
The LD Forum offered a range of interactive presentations that focused on distinct groups of learners (high school
students, university students, teachers, teacher trainees, and practitioner-researchers). In terms of creating social
language learning communities in face of social distancing restrictions, I listened to a presentation by Jim Ronald, titled
Learner Community Development with Google Docs, on how to use these for sharing some personal news (good news,
bad news, any news), preparing for activities together, and fixing problems together with students. Jim showed how ouronline classes and online presence could be all about students caring for each other in these times of feeling lonely andnervous, not to mention confused and discouraged. I appreciated the idea of turning Google Docs into a shared dailyclass journal that could teach the students how to respond in courteous and friendly ways while learning about eachother personally.
One crucial element in the LD forum discussion was self-assessment and reflection. I also focused on this in mypresentation on using End-of-Class Feedback. In face-to-face lessons, feedback opportunities always were and still are
important; now they are arguably essential. It might be more necessary than ever for the learners in our online/hybridclasses to have a voice, and to know that they are heard. In my presentation I showed how to turn a Google Forms into
an “end-of-class feedback” form that included free-response questions as well as scaled questions. The data collected
through completed forms was helpful in establishing rapport with my students and shifting their focus towards sharedreflections.
Overall, for planning online classes, a critically central concern is how teachers present materials and information tolearners. At JALT2020 I later attended a practical workshop by Bob Aschcroft, How to Teach Online Classes Using
PowerPoint, to learn about PowerPoint as a tool for lesson presentation and as a whiteboard for online classes. I was
thrilled and excited to learn how to mesh seamlessly easy-to-use, easy-to-read PowerPoint slides with other digital classapplications such as Zoom. I got to see some creative ways of organizing teaching materials on screen with thepresenter sharing useful tips and tricks on creating with Powerpoint engaging, interactive online educational
experiences for students. I found this workshop useful and instructive as an integral part of the courses I teach is active
learning and participation through project presentation(s).
Speaking of active learning, I presented together with Cooper Howland in a research-oriented session, Student
Poster Sessions to Promote Learner Agency. We showed how students conducted their research to make and complete
posters using a rubric for assessment of poster design, poster language and public speaking skills. In our talk, we
focused on how posters on a variety of topics and issues can help students experiment with the basics of criticalthinking, media literacy, and public speaking. The use of Google Slides/Powerpoint here also enabled them tocommunicate and collaborate with each other in the absence of any face-to-face contact.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): LDSIG Grant Awardee Reports
In connection with class work and project presentation, I joined a practice-oriented workshop, Benefits of Online
Group Projects, by Kazumi Kato. The workshop was effective for learning how to set up an online group project using
the free version of Zoom. I found this workshop particularly helpful for switching from teacher-centered lessons tostudent-centered group discussions. In another practice-oriented workshop, Productive Activities in an Online
Classroom by Kirsten Waechter, I could learn how to teach better online with technology. This workshop showed
participants how to plan and prepare for writing and speaking activities that could be easily transferred to an online
interactive classroom. For example, it was encouraging to see how using Flipgrid could benefit students in theirspeaking and listening activities.
Another major part of JALT2020 Online featured presentations and workshops on the benefits of being a JALT
member and professional development opportunities for teachers who are interested in sharing and publishing theirresearch activities. One presentation, Writers’ PSG: Improving Writing for Publication, by Dawn Jin Lucovich and Paul
Beaufait, talked about the training support available to JALT members through the Writers’ Peer Support Group (PSG).
The PSG are a group of teachers who work collaboratively with interested JALT members to help them see their writing
through to publication (see https://jalt-publications.org/psg for more details). Through shared educational or researchinterests, I hope to become involved in working together on research activities and publishing projects.
In conclusion, I am glad I could join the JALT2020 Online conference as a participant, presenter, and member of the
LD SIG. On the whole I was pleasantly surprised at the openness of the presenters. The presenters were friendly,
approachable, and ready to share their contact information. They encouraged discussion and readily welcomed
questions and comments. There were plenty of feedback opportunities. It was easy for me to share my opinions andthoughts. The presenters were kind to provide access to useful materials, including outlines, activities, examples, andrubrics, for a variety of teaching contexts. I felt encouraged, socially as well as professionally, to collaborate with likeminded people for research activities. I could furthermore learn by engaging with their work, joining discussions, andasking questions. My one regret was that I was unable to attend a few presentations that I was keen on learning from,due to schedule conflicts with other presentations and with my on-line university teaching assignments.
Last but not least, my conference experience was greater than that of simply receiving the financial support the
grant provided. The LD committee warmly welcomed me when I attended their Annual General Meeting and received
the grant. I could feel and appreciate the committee’s open and frank atmosphere. Most importantly, this very
openness helped me through the developmental process of writing this report. The Learning Learning editors werewilling to address any of my concerns, and gave me helpful suggestions to complete this short essay. Thank you again,
everyone.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Research & Reviews

RESEARCH & REVIEWS / 研究 & レビュー
Language Teacher Recognition: Narratives of Filipino English Teachers in Japan.
New Perspectives on Language and Education Series. Alison Stewart.
Multilingual Matters, 2020. E-book (pdf, EPUB). 168 pages.

Reviewed byMichael Carroll
Momoyama Gakuin University, Osaka
Email: <carroll@andrew.ac.jp>

It’s not often that the word “unputdownable” is heard in relation to an academic book, but this book had me engrossed
from the moment I picked it up. It contains narratives by nine Filipino teachers working in Japan, telling the stories of
their teaching lives, and one by Alison Stewart herself. These ten stories are told in the first person, in the words of theteachers themselves, with only some ‘cleaning up’ by the author to make the transcripts more easily readable, and arein a sense the heart of the book, in that they speak to the reader directly both about shared experiences (being
teachers of English in Japan, living in a country not their own, and so on), and about experiences that may not befamiliar to many (being a minority within a minority—Filipino teachers within a European-Australian-North American
dominated profession). There are stories of people already established in their home country, as teachers or otherwise;
people who come into teaching by chance, after coming to Japan; stories of hard work and success, of struggle to findacceptance, of challenging and overcoming prejudice and stereotypes. What really makes this volume so intriguing,
though, is the way in which Stewart eloquently weaves around these narratives her argument about the nature ofidentity, and in particular the centrality of the concept of recognition to any understanding of identity.
Stewart argues that recognition is the key to any identity theory. In essence, recognition consists in “submitting to
the power” (p. 31), or accepting the right to recognition, of the person being recognised; while mis-recognition, or lackof recognition, is at the root of the identity politics that we see in societies around the world today. If our sense ofidentity is essential for our self-respect and our sense of being in the world, it is through the struggle for recognition,
which “is the basis of human subjectivity and agency” (p. 27) that individuals strive to claim different identities forthemselves. There are many examples of this struggle, in the narratives. Aurora, the founder of Filipino English Teachersof Japan (FETJ), notes that in the early days, “we [felt] that we didn’t have the right to speak out,” (p. 81) and Lori,
worries that the mothers of her students will not approve of her. Stewart locates the key elements of this concept ofrecognition in the twin emotions of prejudice (particularly as it is experienced by those who are its object) and pride. In
doing so, she places herself in opposition to the post-structuralist position which dominates applied linguistics, andespecially identity studies. Her argument is that post-structuralism, with its focus on the ubiquity of the ideologicalsystems that form all social frameworks, sees the individual as always ‘subjected’ to one ideology or another. A person
can choose the identity they will enact, but only from ideological frameworks already in existence in the social realm.
Recognition theory, on the other hand, allows for the “affective or psychic nature of identity” (p. 57). This taking
account of the role of affect in identity (the self-affirming emotion of pride, and the sense of hurt that comes from

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Research & Reviews
feeling prejudice coming from others) means that people are constantly mutually co-constructing each other,negotiating each others’ identities, making change possible through the actions of individual people taking charge of
their lives, rather than only through the large scale political action that, Stewart says, is implied by a post-structural
perspective.
This is the central theme of the book, and is developed step by step by the author, in between the narratives. As
Stewart points out at the outset, this is not a book to dip into, but needs to be read in order, from beginning to end.
As readers of Learning Learning will know, native-speakerism, the ideology (and prejudice) that English can only betaught by native speakers of English, and only those who conform to a narrow stereotype (inner circle speakers ofEnglish), is especially strong in Japan. Filipino teachers of English, despite being 'native English speaking
teachers' (Stewart discusses the problems with this term), have traditionally been excluded from EFL roles in Japan.
Only in recent years have they begun to be accepted, and then for the most part in the informal language school sector
where pay is low and job conditions insecure, rather than in formal public school settings. These first small steps havebeen largely made possible by the activities of a teacher’s association, FETJ, and in the first story Aurora describes how
she came to found this organization in 2000. After realising that many Filipino teachers were inhibited from taking anactive part in other teaching associations, she started study groups in her home at weekends. Her story, and the next
two, Lori’s and Elma’s, illustrate something of the variety of the backgrounds that led each of them to teaching English
in Japan. What they have in common, though, is that each of them faced significant prejudice, and hardship, whileconversely, each talks about the pride they feel in overcoming that prejudice through hard work and achievement. Fromthese accounts, Stewart pivots to discuss the notions of investment, about which she has reservations, in that it reduces
human value to market terms, and desire, another powerful emotion which Stewart maintains takes us back torecognition theory as a way of theorizing about identity. The concept of investment was first used by Bonny Norton
Pierce (1995) in her study of women immigrants in Canada. Despite a wide-ranging and detailed critique of the use of
the term, Stewart concludes the discussion by acknowledging the ground they share: that denial of access toparticipation, and the desire for recognition are the keys to understanding identity, and why it is so important.
Chapter 4 introduces Sampaguita, who, aside from telling the story of her teaching life, describes a major changebrought about in FETJ. Sampaguita's story leads to a discussion of how groups form, change and maintain identities,
and how that impacts on individual teachers’ identities. This happens through recognition mechanisms such as theaward of achievement certificates and the provision of opportunities for professional development and management
roles within the group. The theme is continued in the stories of three younger teachers, Anna Marie, Shin and Katrina.
All three discuss their increasing pride in themselves as teachers in terms of the recognition they receive at FETJ, notleast as a result of the confidence invested in them by being able to take organizing roles there. The strong emotions
which color all these teachers’ accounts leads Stewart to a consideration of the notion of value, not in an economic
sense, but as a moral sensibility which motivates the teachers to try to improve their skills, and to support thecommunity of their fellow Filipino teachers. At the same time it is seen in the work of FETJ, with its dual mission to
support teachers and to foster teaching excellence.
The two final stories come from university teachers, Renata and Carmela, whose experiences of teaching are quite
different from the earlier narrators, and who were not members of FETJ. Their accounts provide a welcome balance,
reminding the reader that not all Filipino teachers in Japan have the same experiences. While the earlier narrators all
felt that their identity as Filipinos was central to their teaching identity, Renata and Carmela identify themselves asteachers first, with confidence in themselves as professionals. They also provide a somewhat more critical view ofaspects of FETJ, which adds to the richness of the overall picture. Not being members of the group, and perhaps
because they choose to identify as teachers or researchers first, rather than as Filipinos, they feel themselves to beoutsiders, and the group as overly parochial. Despite this, both of them are in general positive about the benefits FETJ
have brought to the Filipino community. This section is a useful reminder of the complexity of the issue, and supports
Stewart’s thesis that identity is rooted in emotion, and fluid, rather than enforced by ideological structures. Renata andCarmela are labelled as Filipino teachers, but the identity they claim is different.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28(1): Research & Reviews
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in giving some thought to what it means to be, and to feeloneself to be, a teacher. Identity politics is of course a highly contested area just now, arousing strong feelings among
many. Stewart offers a refreshingly new way of thinking about identity, through her critique of poststructural
explanations, and through the concept of recognition, “the precondition for ontological security and social justice” (p.
235). Not only is there a comprehensive and scholarly review of a host of topics related to these questions, but thebook also provides a thoughtful discussion of the methodological issues involved in this kind of study: therepresentation of interview data so that the voices of the participants themselves are heard, the political choices
involved in selecting and ‘cleaning up’ that data, the inevitable influence of the researcher on what the interviewees
say, and how they say it. The thought that stuck most in my mind, as I turned the last page, was Stewart’s statement ofher core belief that “the world exists independently of the way we think about it” (p. 59), but that the way we think
about our identity is also rooted in reality, and is deeply felt. An account based on recognition theory allows her to treat
emotions as central to the issue of identity, and to make the persuasive claim that the pursuit of social justice depends
not only on the location of economic power, important as that is, but also on the agency of teachers insisting on
earning and receiving the recognition that is their due.
Reference
Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29(1), 9-31

If you would like to review this book for the 2021 Autumn issue of Learning Learning, pleasecontact the LL editorial team at <lleditorialteam@gmail.com>. Many thanks.

Whose Autonomy? Voice and Agency in Language Learning
Edited by Adelia Peña Clavel & Katherine Thornton(Independent Learning Association) [Free ebook PDF | ePub | Mobi for Kindle ]Publication date: 2020
PDF: free, will be available to download from this website
Ebook. ISBN: 978046357804. Free ePub: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/995845
Kindle ebook. Free Mobi file
Produced by: The Independent Learning Association
Published by: Candlin & Mynard, Hong Kong
The 2018 Independent Learning Association Conference was held at Konan Women’s University, Kobe, Japan, in
September 2018 and brought together autonomy researchers from around the world under the theme Whose
Autonomy? Voice and Agency in Language Learning. This collection of papers includes a variety of voices, from bothclassroom and non-classroom contexts, including from learners themselves.
The first part of this collection of articles contains papers that explore the development of autonomy of students in theclassroom. The second part consists of projects which focus on learners’ opportunities to use English outside theclassroom and showcases multiple instances of learners exercising their agency in an interesting variety of contexts. The
third section focuses on how advisors and teachers exercise agency in teacher education contexts. The fourth section
includes a number of collaborative reflections on the conference. Finally, the fifth part includes seven student papers
from the Learners About Learning student conference, organised by JALT Learner Development SIG Kansai Group, andheld within the main conference.

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Back

Looking Back | 報告
A Collage of Reflections on the
Learner Development (LD) Forum:“TLC from LD: Transformative
Learning Communities”
JALT 2020, Online Zoom Session,
Friday, November 20, 2020 (6:15 PM –7:45 PM)
Forum Abstract
In this forum, a range of interactive presentations
critically explored the theme of transformative learning
communities (TLCs), based on theories of transformative
learning where learners reach fundamental shifts intheir worldviews and actions through reflection.
Presenters focused on distinct groups of learners (highschool students, university students, teachers, teacher
trainees, and practitioner-researchers), with forum
participants invited to discuss and share their reflections
about TLCs in Learning Learning, the Learner
Development SIG’s newsletter.

What are some key points that you picked
up in the LD SIG forum?
Google form is live and current to gauge feedback-Teh Pei Ling (Melta)
Transformation of our learners over a period of time
- Feroze Malik Amir (Hiroshima Shudo University)That using google docs is still quite new in Japan but
it was nice to see that it works as a collaborative tool
between students and teacher, unlike in my home
university. It was nice to see how it works in practice inthese situations and enables real & genuine
conversation between the teacher and the student. I
was one of the presenters so it was really interesting tohear the responses and comments from others - thankyou everybody for your views! - Riitta Kelly (University of
Jyväskylä, Finland)
Research diaries used in developing thesis writing.
End of class feedback and reflection used as a means tobuild community in the classroom. - Oana Cusen(Kwansei Gakuin University)
The concept of the "research diary" was somethingthat I found valuable. - Phillip Alixe Bennett (Kanda
University of International Studies)collaborative dialogues, reporting research journey Yuri Imamura (Kanda University of International Studies)
life stories of learners -- development over a long
period of time; the dynamics of creating community, as
a parallel process to the ongoing development of selfdirectedness, learner autonomy. Apologies for thetechnical hiccoughs at the start ---- I wish we could have
had a longer discussion -- so many interesting points
were coming up. The question of the dynamic between
participant research-writer/editors and othercontributors and how it may change as LDJ5 moves into
its later stages is really good to raise. I hope we cansustain the dialogic quality of what we have set out to
do together - Andy Barfield (Chuo University)
I went to Aya Hayasaki's presentation. Interesting
focus on Kagoshima - very different social context toTokyo. It raises questions for me about classstratification in Japan. Among my students there is astrong belief that Japan doesn't have a class system. But
clearly that's not true, and I would imagine that thefurther away from Tokyo you go, the lower down thescale, and the harder it is to reach elite universities oreven imagine that you could. Of course there are classdifferences in the regions too. Good to hear about the
progress and impressions of LDJ5. Inspiring to hear how
enjoyable the collaboration has been for all participants.
- Alison Stewart (Gakushuin University)
Glimpses of other classes, other learners - leaving
me to want to know more. As a presenter, this does feelvery different from a face-to-face LD Forum - goodinteraction, but movement is not so easy. - James Ronald(Hiroshima Shudo University)
Although there are pros and cons about online
lessons, Google docs and Zoom lessons encourage
people to write research papers. - Riho Osaki (Otsuma
Women's University)
Trajectory Equifinality Modeling - an interesting way
of comparing similar respondents and qualitative data.
The data suggests that regional Japan remains a little
parochial in its outlook, especially with foreign language

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Backlearning, but for those who do go beyond theirprefectural border, there does not seem to be one
specific causal factor. Interesting to hear about Narrative
Inquiry as I have very little experience with it. The
perspective that you have to keep trying to include
writers in their own writing highlights how much we
think of writing as presenting a finished product for
judging - a kind of hangover from school writing classes,
I guess. I also liked the idea of quality through inclusion:dialogue with reviewers. - Dominic Edsall (UCL IOE /Ritsumeikan University)
Identity is not fixed, and affiliations to communities
are also dynamic in response to events inside andoutside the classroom. Aya Hamasaki’s talk highlighted
this kind of change in young adults from Kagoshima. The
models she introduced were new to me. The idea in
Meizirow that change is preceded by a disrupting event
was interesting and made me think about whether
autonomy can ever be easily achieved. - Ellen Head(MIC)
I got some ideas from Jim on how to generate apositive collaborating atmosphere with a group of
students who have yet to meet each other. - Jackson Lee(Toyo University)
It was inspiring to hear about the dynamic process
of editing a journal. - Phillip Alixe Bennett (Kanda
University of International Studies)
I'm part of one of the response communities for
LDJ5, and my experience has been quite similar to what
the presenters talked about. I've gotten a lot fromsharing my experiences (both related to the subject of
our writing as well as the process of writing) with theother contributors. And as this kind of narrative is new
for most of us, it's helpful to have people to support
each other during the process. I also thought it wasinteresting to hear from the editors about some of theissues that come up during the editing process (e.g., interms of power relationships). As one of the co-editorsof LDJ6, we purposely kept the basic format of the
response communities because they have been positive,
and it was good to know of some potential issues thatmight come up further down the road. - Isra
Wongsarnpigoon (Kanda University of International
Studies)Jim Ronald's presentation caused me to reflect on
the degree that I am (in)sensitive to student needs andmoods during this period. I think all of us in our own way
have had to find ways to cope, cut corners, compromisewith ourselves, students. Thought-provoking is the lackof camaraderie with colleagues and staff in my
institution. I am a loner by nature, but I imagine thispandemic lockdown has wreaked havoc on social
relationships. - Ken Ikeda (Otsuma Women's University)
I made a presentation in the LD SIG community forthe first time. I appreciate all the participation andcomments I received! I gained hints for further
deepening my understanding of learner development:
exploring the roles of different social fields and parents'
values in adolescents' language learning experiencewould be indeed interesting. I am very much interested
in joining the response community as well. - Aya
Hayasaki (Waseda University)

Other comments:
Thanks. Interesting sessions. Teh Pei Ling (Melta)
Questions about the feedback and how to make it acollaborative exercise among learners for learners …
forming learners' community through google docs
collaborative, interactive activities among learners. Feroze Malik Amir (Hiroshima Shudo University)
Thank you to the presenters, this was a very
interesting presentation to see! - Riitta Kelly (Universityof Jyväskylä, Finland)
Having a student's perspective in the presentation
was excellent. - Phillip Alixe Bennett (Kanda University ofInternational Studies)
Very interesting sessions - big thank you to thepresenters - Andy Barfield (Chuo University)
Receiving the link to the Google Slides was very
useful - a good way to catch up on what I joined late James Ronald (Hiroshima Shudo University)
As a presenter, too bad I could only attend one
session. - Ken Ikeda (Otsuma Women's University)
Thanks again for the great opportunity to connect
with amazing people! - Aya Hayasaki (Waseda
University)

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Back

Short Reflections on Creating
Community: Learning Together 6
Ian Hurrel, Ken Ikeda & James Underwood

Learning from Students:
Applying the spirit of CCLT to a year of
online learning
Cecilia Smith Fujishima
Shirayuri University
Email: fujishima@shirayuri.ac.jp

Creating Community: Learning Together 6 took place on
Sunday, December 20, 2020, through the event
space: <https://cclt6.eventzil.la>. The decision to moveonline came in response to the restrictions posed by the
COVID-19 pandemic. Although holding it online broughtsome challenges, it was thanks to the great team ofvolunteers that we were able to overcome these. The
was accessible to all, and people joined from the UK,
Mexico, and Japan. Like before, it was also open to
student and teacher presenters, and all together, there
were 30 presentations. Many thanks to those who
presented and took the time and energy to help andsupport the presenters as well.
The conference started with an engaging opening
plenary from Joseph Shaules. In his talk, he explored thepsychological resistance that learners may experience
about learning and using language. Then encouraged theaudience to think about how to motivate their students
to counteract this.
Following the plenary, there were four rounds ofpresentations. After each round, small discussion andreflection circles were held for 10 minutes; in these,
both students and teachers could explore the questions
or puzzles they had about learner development andtheir challenges and triumphs with the COVID-19
pandemic.
The conference finished with a closing session
where participants and presenters shared reflections of
the conference in small groups in breakout rooms. As
they did so they collaboratively designed a slideshowthat documented their experiences. The participants
were invited to write up these reflections formally,
which we include here.

Thank you very much for theopportunity to have students
presenting work that they havedone during the year. CCLT isalways a wonderful conference that gives students apresence and a voice in the world of English teaching, afield that tends to talk about students in academic terms
while at the same excluding them from the dialogue. In
contrast, CCLT gives an opportunity for students to beexperts, and provides them an opportunity for personal
and academic growth. I appreciate the efforts of theconference organizers to persevere with the conferenceby moving it online to accommodate the restrictive
measures for dealing with COVID-19. This not only gave
students a rare opportunity to present, but it also
opened up the conference to all Japan, and beyond. In ayear of remote classes, the 2020 CCLT experience
seemed especially poignant as a chance to appreciate
the support and camaraderie that has been evident in
the online teaching community this year, as well as being
a way to celebrate this year’s students as a cohort whose
resilience and adaptability have been an inspiration.
The first presentation I watched was from presenters
in Mexico. It struck me how being online had reduced
barriers to entry and had broadened the scope of theconference. There were presentations from Gifu,
Hiroshima, Miyazaki, Sapporo among others; this year’s
conference was a chance to hear about how people in avariety of places and teaching environments had
adapted to the changed circumstances of this year.
A further theme that ran through the conference
was the ability to create opportunity from adversity.
Ellen Head’s students in Miyazaki who presented at theconference, expected to be on a study abroad year. In
their presentations we gained insight into how they had
adapted to the circumstances by using technology tocommunicate with people overseas. Jenny Morgan used
the COVID-19 situation to create an opportunity forstudents to record oral histories about the ways in which
the pandemic had affected life this year.

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Back
Four second-year students taking my Japanese
History class also presented at CCLT6: Rino Yoshida,
Ayaka Muraishi, Remi Hayasaka, and Nagisa Sato. They
too adapted to the difficulties and turned it into alearning opportunity. In their presentation, they talked
about the difficulties they faced at the beginning of
online learning: the lack of internet connection, theunfamiliarity of the technology, the lack of access toteachers and the inability to connect with classmates to
ask for help. As English majors taking the International
Society and Culture course, each of them had more than
10 online classes per week where they were expected tointeract with other students. This gave them ample
opportunity to become breakout room experts and it
also made them a valuable source of information forteachers as we tried to improve the online learning
environment. In a debrief with the students after theyfinished their presentation, their strongest impression of
their CCLT presentation was that they realized how muchthey have grown up this year, thanks to online learning.
From their point of view, despite the difficulties, they
could thrive in 2020.
Watching them present, I realized that the social
dimension of online learning underpinned theiracademic achievement and this was integral to their
feeling of success. In their presentation, they gave advice
on how to communicate effectively in breakout rooms,
particularly when in groups with senpai, kouhai andunfamiliar people. Advice included establishing an
understanding that cameras should be on, smile and use
gestures, and start each session with greetings and self
introductions in English. In addition, they emphasised
coming to class well prepared so that they could focus
on understanding the task, sharing the screen to show
their answers as a way to scaffold students with lower
English comprehension, asking groupmates questions,particularly “why” and improving their own homework
by adding ideas that they learned during class from theirgroup mates. Through break-out sessions, they
developed confidence to be the person to start inEnglish, initiate discussion, ask questions, summarise
ideas, and present information to the whole class when
breakouts had finished. Exit cards gave them an
opportunity for focused reflection as well as
communication with teachers, including theirfrustrations and complaints. When teachers respondedwith advice and modifications to the class, it further
motivated the students to keep experimenting withstrategies for effective communication in breakout
sessions.
Secure in their social environment, their learning
flourished. They, and their classmates, understood thatwith good preparation they could exchange ideas
effectively about the class contents, for example the way
Japan remembers (or doesn’t remember) history andhow history should be taught in Japan. They advised thatto make good breakout room discussion, all answers, nomatter how misguided, should be accepted. In thethorny subject of Japanese history and regional
relations, the student’s idea to accept all answers isquite sensitive. From their point of view though, a
student who musters the courage to express their ideas
will have chances in the future to adjust their point ofview but if their opinion is denied, they may lose thewillingness or courage to speak out again. From ateacher’s point of view, it became an opportunity tointroduce lateral reading as a way to help students
discern the reliability of information. The process of
exchanging ideas between students and teachers
facilitated an environment of mutual learning.
Their presentation provided me with an opportunity
to reflect on what went well in the year and what needs
to take place to have more successful learning
environments for students. It has motivated one of mycolleagues and me to try and learn more about whatmade for successful online learning by making a survey
about their online learning experiences. Stay tuned!
Thank you again to all the organizers andparticipants for an exceptional conference. It was
stimulating and provided fruitful opportunity to reflect
on a challenging year.

Our CCLT6 Conference Reflection

how to overcome our difficulties. One of our classes wascalled SDL, which stands for self-directed learning. In thisclass, we chose one skill from a Readiness to Learn list of
skills (University of Waterloo, n.d.) that we wanted to
improve to become better learners.
In our SDL class, we regard “metacognition” as animportant idea. Metacognition is thinking about oneself.
Our ideas about metacognition were expressed in our

Shiori Kishihara, Yuki Murakami, Chika Matsumoto, &Kristina Reyes with Lorna Asami
Keisen University
During the COVID-19 pandemic, our classes went online
so we did not need to spend time commuting. As aresult, we had more time to think about ourselves and

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Back
SMART goal. This smart goal should be Specific,
Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based(Doran, 1981).
Yuki selected “study skills” as she wants to study
more efficiently. She will do four things to improve herstudy skills, which are to decide on her tasks, organize
and analyze them, gather information about them which
will help her, and write notes along the way. Shiori
decided to improve her “note taking skills” by using her
i-phone to take memos of URLs. Smartphones are one of
the normal things in our life. Shiori has evaluated and reevaluated her note-taking style and keeps improving
herself. Chika selected “coping skills” then analyzed herlifestyle and her stress, and her stress was divided into
three types. She made a To-Do-List to be stress free.
After learning how to better cope with her stress, she
has been able to concentrate on her work more than
before. Kristina described her planning skills which uses
PDCA goals where P is plan, D is do, C is check, A is act.
She now uses a PDCA chart to help her deal with her
many university assignments, part-time job, study ofother languages, and club activities. She feels that her
PDCA chart has helped her to be more organized andfind free time for herself.
We divided our roles and helped each other to makethis presentation. We worked hard to finish by thedeadline and thought about how to make it moreinteresting. Each of us made an effort even though we
had a lot of work and also had our part-time jobs. We
felt we did not have enough time but we had good
teamwork and were able to prepare and practice ourpresentation slides.
As for other sessions, we listened to “An Interuniversity Line Study/Share Group for 2020” by Takefumi
Ariga, and we learned from Lee Arnold how to use
Flipgrid more smoothly. While we were there, we hearda speaker mention acronyms like our SMART goals. Ms.
Anita Aden introduced SMILE which her students usedduring their class time together. She creates a goodmood while students study in English with the acronym
SMILE. S means start with a question, M is Make
mistakes, I means increase interest in people aroundyou, L is Listen and repeat and, E is Enjoy your life. It was
an interesting and fresh thing for us. We think it makes
students feel better and enjoy studying and using
English.

Throughout this coronavirus pandemic,
everyone has been thinking about how to improve ourlearning environment. When we go to school, we cansee our friends and greet them, and then the classstarts. We took these simple things for granted as part of
the normal life at university and what should be in theuniversity. We realize now that our ordinary lifestyle
before the pandemic was actually extraordinary, andthere are real risks in that once ordinary lifestyle. When
we meet friends, we always hug or talk and laugh out
loud. Hugging and laughing have been part of ournormal lifestyle until now. However, these things havebeen shown to be the cause of infection clusters. To
overcome the difficulties in this pandemic, many people
must think of ways to improve this situation. If we could
improve this situation we would be able to significantly
improve the place we learn.
We felt not only Keisen university students, but also
other university students and teachers experienced
difficulty in online classes during the coronavirus
pandemic, and most of us tried new ways to study
English or study without feeling lonely. As we listened to
the CCLT6 presentations, we heard and thought thateveryone felt similar feelings and tried to overcome
difficulties, so we were stimulated by other ways of
studying and we will work even harder from now. We
joined sessions where most of the speakers or listeners
are teachers at university. We thought teachers had adifficult year and tried some ways to communicate withstudents by using emails, reaction papers, andquestionnaires. We thought reactions or reflections areimportant ways to communicate with our teachers
because teachers could find out how much students
understand, how students feel about class, or if students
are having any trouble. We think it is important for
students and teachers to keep communicating with eachother to solve problems.
In this conference, we gave our presentation andalso heard other presentations. We will keep studying
each skill in our list of Readiness to Learn skills andcontinue to improve our skills and competencies. Even if
online classes continue next year, we will find ways tocommunicate with our teachers and friends andcontinue with our studies.

References
Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.
(n.d.). Independent studies: Readiness to learn, https://

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Backuwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teachingresources/teaching-tips/tips-students/self-directedlearning/independent-studies-readiness-learn
Digital Marketing blog. (2018, April 24; 2021, January
13). PDCA to wa nani ka? Totemo kantan ni setsumei
shimasu! [What is PDCA? I'll explain very briefly!].
https://digitalidentity.co.jp/blog/analytics/aboutpdca.html
Doran, G. T. (1981). There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write
management's goals and objectives. Management
Review, 70(11), 35-36.
Morin, A. (2020). Healthy coping skills for uncomfortableemotions. Verywell mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/forty-healthy-copingskills-4586742#:~:text=Coping%20skills%20help%20you%20tolerate,coping%20skills%20are%20created%20equalTomida, K. (2016). Onisoku PDCA [Updated PDCA].
Kurosumedia.

CCLT6 Reflections:
From face-to-face to Armchair
Patrick Kiernan,
Meiji University
Email: <kiernan@meiji.ac.jp>
After the exhilarating experience of participating in
CCLT5 where my students gave poster presentations
using posters created during my academic presentation
course, I was keen to participate again this year. The
event not only provided an opportunity to give a realpresentation in a supportive atmosphere but also toshare ideas and communicate with students from otheruniversities. I was even able to have students from two
different universities I teach at meet up. However, I wassomewhat anxious about how this would play out in an
online context for CCLT6 and indeed whether mystudents would wish to participate. I need not haveworried, however, as, although not all the students wereable to present at the conference, those that did werekeen to do so and positive about their experience
afterwards.
This year four graduate students from Ochanomizu
University, researching in a variety of different areas,
presented at the conference. In this case, the research
fields on which they presented were English Education(Kimika and Miho) Semantics (Saki), and Human Biology(Trinh). Worrywart that I am, I was also concerned thatdeveloping presentations that would fit in with theconference theme may prove problematic but again,
though initially expressing concerns about the topic
seeming far from their chosen research themes, they all
found ways to adapt their interests to the theme of theconference as indeed did all the other presenters that I
saw at the conference. Moreover, they even tweaked
things from the final “dress rehearsal” that we had inclass on Friday for the big day. On the day, Kimika andSaki attended the event from the opening plenary to thefinal reflections and participated in sessions throughout
the rest of the day. In this reflection, I’ll do my best to
share both my own personal experience and somethingof the feedback I received from my students after the
event.
The plenary is as good a place as any to start because
it really was an excellent start to the day. Professor
Joseph Shaules talk on “The Psychology of Resistance toLanguage Learning” was not only a topic that got close
to the heart of the SIG’s concerns with motivation andlearner autonomy but was one that I am sure chimed
with the experiences or both students and teachers
attending the event. Professor Shaules also did an
excellent job of building a rapport with his audience
both through his comments about the SIG and the way
he picked up comments from the chat such as Ellen’s“the devil and chocolate”(?) bringing some humor andlightheartedness to his serious and important message,
based on a wealth of research about how motivation isalways a challenge. We had talked in class aboutknowing your audience and building rapport andProfessor Shaules’ talk served as a nice example of this.
Some of the presenters I found most informative andinteresting would probably not have been part of theconference had it been offline. Two talks about CLIL
“Experiences of CLIL and Study Abroad Online in Japan”
and “Resiliance in Mexico’s SALC and students in
Pandemic” included talks from teachers in Miyazaki and
Mexico respectively who introduced an online language
exchange project called Teletandem. It was interesting tohear both teacher and student perspectives on thisexperience. It was also a reminder of how reallymeaningful language learning takes place incommunicative contexts outside the classroom.
I enjoyed some other presentations throughout the
day including my students session at the end, but it wasnoticeable that whereas the previous year’s conference
audiences had been carefully managed, it is just too easy
for students to tune out for other sessions. That said,

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Backthe student who came to listen to the Ocha-dai students
was clearly genuinely interested and it proved an
opportunity for some real sharing.
In the breakout rooms during the closing session, I
talked with Ken and a charming American gentleman
whose name now escapes me but whose main pointthat he noticed many students were simply reading theirpresentations and that this was completely
unacceptable remains fully engraved in my memory. As
Hugh Nicoll has pointed out in his kind comments on thisreflection, reading aloud can have its place inpresentations, particularly when introducing a text
about which comment is being made. Nevertheless, theunderlying concern was presumably that students had
not prepared fully and so were focused on reading theirnotes rather than focusing on communicating theirmessage to the audience. This negative evaluation ofreading aloud may in part also be a result of differing
cultural notions of what a presentation entails: reading
aloud, a tradition that is still prominent in Japan, showsthat the content is prepared and intentional, whereas
presentations, particularly in the US have evolved into
theatrical events (think Steve Job’s productannouncements though not his famous Stanford
Commencement which was read aloud) where fullcommunicative engagement with the audience isparamount (as espoused by presentation experts such as
Garr Reynolds). Language teachers brought up in acommunicative tradition naturally tend to sympathisewith the more communicative realisations of apresentation and so feel that students who read theirpresentation are hiding behind their script and cutting
themselves off from the audience because the bodily
modalities of voice tone, eye contact, posture andgesture tend to be inert. These are all issues that mystudents had discussed extensively in class in relation to
extracts from Garr Reynolds’ book Presentation Zen. As
the students in this class already had a good general
fluency in English that would have allowed them toexplain their topics without any script (something they
did in class) and they had already given several in-classpresentations on their topic including an in-class dress
rehearsal of their conference talk, I partly wanted toobject that my students had gone to considerable efforts
to avoid just reading from their script. I wished he could
have seen them talk! Even so, I recognise the problem asa central concern when asking students to prepare
presentations which may also otherwise include
material found online and read as is, potentially without

fully understanding it. The temptation to read is aparticularly insipid and tricky point when presenting
online through Zoom but no less forgivable for it. The
script can be put on the screen or out of sight of thecamera so that it is invisible to the audience. Signs ofreading tend to be detected according to the tone ofvoice, something speakers may not be aware of. The factthat my breakout room colleague shared his views on
reading aloud when we returned from our breakout
rooms also made an impact on Kimika and Saki as he put
it a lot more unambiguously than I might have done.
Moreover, it is always good to have important points
expressed by others! It also gave us a focus for further
discussion of this topic in class after the conference.
All in all, then another exhilarating conference, thistime from the comfort of my own home and online oroffline, I am already looking forward with excitement to
CCLT7!

Reflections on Dis/
Connect: virtual art
exhibition
Will Hall
Miyazaki International College
Email: <whall@sky.miyazakimic.ac.jp>“We learn geology the morning after the earthquake…”(Emerson, 1860)
This was my first time to take part in CCLT, either as apresenter or part of the audience. Together with Eric
Luong from Kyoto University of the Arts (KUA), andMiyazaki International College (MIC) students Aya
Fukunaga, Masataka Ochiai, and Serina Yano, we
presented on Dis/Connect: virtual art exhibition. The
exhibition, organised during the summer, involved
students from Miyazaki, Kyoto, Italy, and Sweden, whoshowed their artworks on the theme of distance,isolation, and all things pandemic. It was a chance toshare our own experiences, while learning about thoseof others, and try to process, on some level, these
unprecedented times as they were unfolding. A wide
range of media was submitted, including photography,
illustration, graphic design, and video, and the artworks
are displayed on these Tumblr and Instagram platforms:

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Back
Tumblr: <https://miyazakikyoto.tumblr.com/>
Instagram: <https://www.instagram.com/
dis.connect2020/>
One important aspect of CCLT for me was the voicesof students. Many of the presentations involved
students sharing their ideas and reflections, most in
their first public conference, such as MIC students
discussing their experience of “Studying Abroad Online
in Japan.” These voices, free from the filter of teachingtheory, offer us a level of direct insight into the learning
experience that is difficult to attain from the usual
teacher-focused conference. For students of the Dis/
Connect project, CCLT was an opportunity to introduce
the details of the exhibition and why they decided tojoin, as well as a chance to think a little deeper about
their own artworks. As an organiser of the exhibition, it
was moving to hear students reflect on the ideas behind
their creative process with such depth andconsideration. Several of the artworks were very
personal and resonated deeply with participants, such as
Aya Fukunaga’s “Family”, an intimate portrait of her
grandfather in hospital. Hearing students describe theirimages added an extra layer to the works. It is often said
that art helps us express what we cannot with words.
Certainly, as a mode of expression, art is unique in theway it lets us externalise some of the more nuanced
subtleties of our thoughts and feelings. But more thanjust conveying a message, art can help us in the messy
task of making sense of our inner world. It is a process of
self-discovery and realisation: a complex, deeply
personal dialogue with ourselves.
2020 was a difficult year for us all. As teachers we
struggled to get to grips with unfamiliar technology andrun our classes from behind a screen. Online teachinghas, so far, proved to be a mixed bag. Yet it is students
who have been the most affected. In Japan, the firstwave of the pandemic coincided with the start of theacademic year and an entire cohort’s university
experience was dramatically disrupted. The damage
from the past year will reveal itself in years to come, andit will take time for us to fully understand what
happened, how we reacted, and how successful our
coping methods were. By providing a platform forstudents and teachers to share experiences, CCLT6 was
an important step in that process of understanding.
Reference

Emerson, R. W. (1860). The conduct of life. Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, reprinted by Forgotten Books.

Reflection on CCLT6: Learners (andTeachers) in the Virtual Moment
Lee ArnoldTokyo University of Science
Email: <washizora@gmail.com>
To begin with, kudos to the organizers of CCLT6 given
the logistical difficulties of online coordination throughZoom. As we had never before embarked on this, I know
fully the fear and trepidation, yet sense of grit anddetermination, to pull off the endeavor of a synchronous
virtual conference. It mirrors the sense of apprehension
many of us have felt over this year at our institutions.
We have struggled to deal with the reality of online
instruction while striving to learn what it can makepossible, and there has been a commensurate level ofthat same fear of the new and determination to make itwork for our instruction and our learners.
One major challenge I have had this year is inmaintaining the motivation for exploring issues inlearner development given the new and differing
demands of remote instruction and learning. The mostimmediate issue has involved the technical difficulties
that arise with the video-based platforms we have had
to deliver our instruction in. In that sense, and without
casting aspersions on the event, some technicaldifficulties with the conference reprised the technicaldifficulties that we have experienced with online
instruction this year. In my case, my presentation was
delayed by around an hour due to a connection issue inthe room I was assigned to. Yet again, the organizers
were gracious enough to allow me to present anyway
with the awareness that these problems could arise.
Their patience with the situation enabled me to present
with great response from the attendees, and their
reception has gotten me thinking about how to attend
to the needs of learners online in any (possible)
subsequent online interaction.
Given that issue, I was unable, unfortunately, to seevery many of the other presentations. But what I wasable to catch glimpses of were the various tribulations,and success stories, of working with our learners in thevirtual moment we have found ourselves in. One thing I
was intrigued by was the learner response to the online
reality and how well learners could cope. In my own

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Backcase, my presentation dealt just with this issue, and I
could see from the titles of the other presentations that
this loomed in the minds of a number of the otherpresenters as well. It reminded me all the more how
special to me LD has been in the concern and care oflearner quality of learning and how it can best takeplace. The online reality, in that sense, has been a
blessing – it has levelled our positions vis-à-vis thelearners, in that in some respects, we have had to learn
with the learners on how to cope within thisenvironment. Consequently, that can only contribute toa greater empathy with our learners, as well as allowing
some of the pressure many of us tend to place on
ourselves to ease – it is by way of understanding, notperfection, that can do more to relieve the anxieties of
our learners while allowing ourselves as teachers to see
technology in more level-headed terms.
Given this virtual moment, many of us have had tobecome better acquainted, and some of us
completely acquainted, not only with video-based
instruction but also with learning management systems.
In my situation, this has had the effect of constricting
research exploration given the amount of time requiredin LMS work. Yet the successful realization of theconference was due in no small part to thedetermination of the participants to continue to explore,
gather, and reflect through the technological challenges.
It is therefore all the more remarkable how successful
the conference was, perhaps from the crash course invirtual instruction and learning we have been put
through over this year.

Acknowledging the tiredness andappreciating the struggles
Andy Barfield
Chuo University
Email: <andybarfieldchuo@gmail.com>
I found myself reflecting on the photograph Family 2020
that Aya Fukunaga shared in the Arts Project
presentation by Will Hall, Eric Luong, and students
Masataka Ochiai, Serina Yano, and Aya Fukunaga. The
photo shows Aya's hand gently holding her grandfather's
as she said goodbye to him in August. This was the lasttime she saw him. He had senile dementia, Aya
explained. He died in October, and the photographcherishing this moment and representing much more
had been displayed in the funeral hall.

Aya's artwork and experience were profoundly
moving and thought-provoking. I am grateful to Aya,
Masataka (Lonely Fireworks), and Serina (Not Cheerful
Aoshima) for what they each shared about their arts
projects as part of a virtual arts exhibition between
students at Miyazaki International College and Kyoto
University of the Arts. This re-confirmed for me thevalue of project-based learning in enabling learners tocreate, collaborate, and become more autonomous andreflexively critical about issues that they are interested
in and that they freely choose to focus on.
Unexpectedly it also led to waves of memories
coming back to me of saying goodbye in different
situations. The enormous emotional force of such
moments seemed to surge through me as I listened later—screen off—to a couple of presentations, but didn’t
speak. … Walking across the dayroom in the oldpeople’s home with my 8-year-old son after saying
goodbye to my mother … She was sitting in a highbacked armchair … At the door, stopping, turning,and giving her a wave, knowing this might be thelast time I would see Mum. (It was.) Over 10 years
later, that moment suddenly present again,
inexorably vivid … I needed a quiet reflective time formyself as these visceral memories came up, and as I
looked back over 2020 too. How had I responded todifferent students? Had I been able to sense their own
vulnerabilities and been there for them? How could I
have responded differently? How might I attend betterto others in my personal and professional life? And
what, in the end, have been the enduring traces andimpacts of online learning, teaching, and meetings
pretty much non-stop for the last nine months?
Exhilarating in many ways, exhausting in others, theacademic year was still a blurred image, and it felt too
early to grasp more deeply what it might yet mean for
the future.
At CCLT6 it was good to start to let go, quietly
acknowledge the tiredness, appreciate the struggles …
and smile … then switch off the computer—at least for a
few hours, perhaps even for a few days, but not for thatlong … Onlineness was now more than ever part of theeveryday texture of our lives.

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Forward

Looking Forward | 今後のイベント
Dates: May 14-16, 2021.
Venue: PanSIG 2021 will
be held online due toongoing concerns over
the COVID-19 situation.
Website:<pansig2021.eventzil.la>Conference Fees:
JALT Members: 3,500 yen•
non-JALT Members: 5,000 yen•
students: free (either JALT student members,•
or full-time students with proof of student
status, such as a valid student ID)

LDSIG FORUM:
Challenges in Multilingual Learner
Development
Sat, May 15, 13:00-14:30 JS
Connecting with the theme of “Local and Global
Perspectives: Plurilingualism and Multilingualism,” weinvite proposals in which presenters explore thedevelopment of linguistic diversity in learners’ lives andenvironments, whether within formal education or in
the wider world. What affordances and constraints dolearners face in developing their linguistic repertoires
beyond a simple binary of first and second language?
What challenges do they face as multilingual learners
and users in participating in different communities andin becoming more autonomous? What peculiar
trajectories do learners’ language biographies take, andwhat dilemmas, questions, or puzzles do they have?
Why? In this Learner Development SIG Forum at PanSIG
2021, we would like to explore the challenges andbenefits of learning and using multiple languages fromdiverse perspectives. We welcome digital and poster
displays that engage with learner language biographies,
learning strategies, lingua franca, majority/minority
language use, content-based learning with more than
one language, CLIL, and other related topics and issues.

Our aim is for presenters and participants to engage in a
lively exploration of the challenges of multilingual
learning, use, and development. Depending on thenumber of presentations, the forum will feature timed
rounds of interactive presentations followed byreflective writing and discussion. Presenters andparticipants will also be invited to contribute writing andrelated multimedia resources to the LD SIG’s newsletter,
Learning Learning.

Other Sessions related to
Learner Development:
As yet, the times of thesepresentation are yet to be
confirmed, please click the titles formore information.

Exploratory Practice in an L2 Genre Writing
Class
Matthew Miner
This presentation initially defines Exploratory Practice, astyle of practitioner research in response to Action
Research (Burns, 2003) that seeks to integrate classroom
research and empower students as co-researchers
studying language classroom quality of life (Allwright,2005). The presenters discuss implementation of EP intoa Japanese university freshman-level reading and writingclass that follows a genre approach. The presenters will
share results of an ongoing EP project which
contextualizes genre writing of academic research
papers by instilling concepts of autonomy, personalized
language-learning research topics, and teacher-student
collaboration. The presenters will end with reflections
and suggestions on the potential role and benefits of EP
in the language learning classroom.

Online Poster Sessions as a Student Activity
Malcom Swanson
Poster sessions, whether face-to-face or online, requirea different set of skills than presentations or speeches.
Presenters work with just one poster or slide, can only
give a brief explanation, and must then respond to a
constantly changing group of viewers. The interactiveT

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Forwardand dynamic quality of poster presentations can offer
university students useful opportunities to developthese explanatory skills in a very structured setting
without the pressure of large audiences or a set script.
In this session, I will describe our experiences of running
an online poster presentation event in our university in
Kyushu. The programme was intended as an opportunity
for our 4th-year students to showcase and share theirgraduation thesis findings to inspire younger students.
I'll explain the system we used, and some of the many
pitfalls we encountered - and how we intend to improve
the process for next year's event.

The Efficacy of Online learning: A Students’
Perspective Survey
Dr. Michael Greisamer
During the spring of 2020 Universities in Japan for the
first time began either partially or fully to teach classes
online. This sudden change in the way students aretaught created a new style of learning, for them as muchas the teachers, and as such, initiated discussion about
the quality of learning and the effect on students. The
implementation of online learning has the potential tosubstitute or supplement traditional language teaching
far beyond the initial purpose; the safety of staff andpupils via social distancing during the Covid19
pandemic. The purpose of this research was to assess
student responses to the first semester of online
teaching and explore in what ways online education
enhances language education for university students. A
large number of university students (N=642) in the
Kansai area were surveyed. The data is collected from
University students in the Kansai area via an anonymous
survey with a sample set of 642. Questions focused on
their readiness to embrace online learning, theiranxieties and what effects learning online has had on
their learning in general. The results indicate that while
the students accept the situation they would rather getback to on-campus face-to-face (F2F) classes. As online
learning is now expected to continue at least for the
next semester, the presenter will discuss the results ofthe survey as well consider what effective strategies
students can use to manage their continued online
learning. Questions of student satisfaction and student
retention will also be considered.

Making classes 'SMART' to boost
motivation and achievement
Stephen Harris / Robert StroudSelf-Determination Theory states that all humans
possess the motivation to improve and feel a resultantsense of achievement (Reeve, Deci & Ryan, 2004). One
problem which can hinder such motivation and progressfor students studying English is a lack of clarity of the
expectations for their oral performance. Research showsthat students will make greater efforts if they are shown
where their performance 'is', where it should 'go' and'how' to get it there (Atkin, Black, & Coffey, 2001). In
addition, clarifying the purpose of the learning for realworld use beyond the classroom will further motivate
students to improve. This presentation explains how
such theories of learning and human psychology can beapplied to language learning classrooms by using original'SMART' checklists, designed specifically for second
language oral tasks. These checklists better define anddirect students’ efforts so that classes demonstrate
higher levels of motivation and resultant achievement inlearning English speaking skills. By clarifying oral task
Skills, Measures, Actions, Reasons and Time, students
become more focused on and confident at improving
their speaking skills over time. The presenter will give
clear examples of how to create and apply these SMART
checklists to existing oral tasks to motivate and engage
students.

Motivation and meaningful connection in
the changing classroom
Andrew Reimann
The main goal of language learning is undoubtedlysocial. We all have a strong desire to connect with others
in meaningful ways, sharing experiences, exchanging
information, or collaborating. Apart from language skills,
connecting with others in meaningful ways requires
intrinsic motivation, self efficacy, social and emotional
intelligence as well as other traits or states that make upinterpersonal competence (Spitzberg, 1989; Goleman
2006). This presentation will discuss key issues affecting
relationship building and communication in the modern
classroom through demonstrating activities andstrategies for improving interpersonal skills andmeaningful connections in both early and higher
education contexts. These include storytelling,

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Forward
collaborative video projects and interactive
presentations, all of which can help to provide learners
with opportunities to develop empathy, self-awareness,
active listening, critical thinking, assertiveness,sensitivity, and tolerance of differences. With the rise of
online learning, social media-based interaction, andsocial distancing norms, making ‘real’ connections withothers is becoming increasingly rare and difficult. By
using relationship-building strategies to become better
communicators, learners can develop multiplecompetencies and a multilevel awareness needed formaking meaningful and interpersonal connections.

The evolution of a four-dimensional EFL
classroom
Adrianne Verla Uchida
Teaching students only English is not enough these days.
While students do need to master the four skills of
reading, writing, speaking, and listening, they also need
the skills known as the 4Cs: critical thinking, creativity,
collaboration, and communication. Additionally, there isa need to foster students' character and metacognitive
abilities. The Center for Curriculum Redesign’s FourDimensional Education Framework (Fadel, Bialik, &Trilling, 2015) is designed to foster all of those traits instudents. The framework emphasizes the importance offour dimensions that are essential to learners in the 21st
century: knowledge, skills, character, and metacognition.
A flipped learning approach was used to assign thegrammar drills as homework and class time was spentparticipating in group tasks and projects that utilized thehomework and integrated various dimensions of theframework. This study examines student perceptions
about their growth as English language learners over asemester-long, first-year required EFL course with afocus on grammar. The course was held in the springsemester each year. Data were collected over threeconsecutive years from three different groups ofstudents by analyzing the instructor’s syllabi, student
reflection sheets and a voluntary post-course survey.
How the tasks and projects were designed andimplemented over each semester to engage students
with the traits from the framework will be discussed.
Additionally, ways that other educators can implement
the framework and the various tasks and projects will beshared.

Every language learner is different: A
personal perspective
Dominique Vola Ambinintsoa Razafindratsimba
As a learning advisor (LA), I often reply, “It depends.
Everyone is different” to my advisees’ “how-to”
questions, before engaging them into what is referred toas an "intentional reflective dialogue” (Kato & Mynard,2016). My role as an LA and my research on learnerautonomy have enabled me to understand and accept
the uniqueness of each learner’s experience with theirlanguage learning. The latter involves internal factors
such as personality, motivation, agency, and feelings
about the language. These factors can be influenced byexternal factors such as the learning environment,
including the geographical location (Benson, 2020), thesociety and the culture to which the learner belongs(Little, 1999). The frequent “how-to” questions from myadvisees prompted me to reflect on my own language
learning journey, including the struggles, the successes,
and the fluctuation of emotions related to each of thefive languages I have learned. I used some advising tools
to help me with my self-reflection, and then, writing as a“method of inquiry, a way of finding out about [my]self”(Richardson, 2000). In this presentation, I will discuss my
self-reflection and the self-awareness resulting from it. I
will then suggest some implications for language
teaching, mainly highlighting the need to promotelearners’ self-reflection.

Multilingualism in self-access learning
centres in Japan
Katherine Thornto
Self-access centres, non-classroom language learningspaces which promote learner autonomy and provide an
informal setting for extra-curricular language learning,are now common facilities at campuses across Japan.
While some of these centres are multilingual, others
promote only one foreign language (usually but notalways, English). On establishing and subsequently
operating such a facility, language policy and how target
languages are promoted and supported are important
aspects to be considered, which will determine how
potential users interact with and in the space.
This presentation will present some of the main
findings from a KAKEN project investigating language
policy and language use in self-access learning centres

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Learning Learning『学習の学習』 28 (1): Looking Forward(SALCs) across Japan. Several institutions were chosen ascase studies. Through surveys, interviews and focus
groups, data was gathered from SALC directors andadministrators, learning advisors, instructors andstudents about attitudes to policy and how language isused in these semi-naturalistic language learning spaces.
Issues arising from the data include the roles ofmotivation, identity and autonomy in student language
choice, the dominant role of English, and how attempts
are made to make space for multilingualism.

Exploring a Full-Time Learning Advisor’s
Autonomy
Andre Parsons
In self access, there has been much research on learnerautonomy (Benson, 2007; Benson & Voller, 1997; Dam,
1995; Holec, 1981; Little, 1991,1999, 2007; Sinclair,1999). Nevertheless, to our knowledge, there have been
few to no inquiries into learning advisor autonomy (cf.
Shirakawa, 2018). Having proposed a model forunderstanding learning advisor autonomy via teacher
autonomy (Warrington & Parsons, 2019) andsubsequently applied it to ourselves to test its feasibility(Warrington & Parsons, 2020), this presentation stands
as an attempt to further address the aforesaid gap in the
research literature. Discussion will first focus on what
learning advisor autonomy looks like through the lenses
of professional freedom (Pearson & Moomaw, 2005;
Vieira, 2006), continuing professional development(Huang, 2005; Smith & Erdoğan, 2008), and thephenomena of the interconnectedness between teacher
and learner and their mutual and simultaneousdevelopment (Jiménez Raya, Lamb, & Vieira, 2007; Little,2007). Thereafter, attention will be turned to a casestudy which examined one full-time learning advisor’s
autonomy using these lenses and the implications andfuture directions of this for his ‘learning advisor self’ andthe underlying identities within it.

Dates: June 4-6, 2021.
Venue: Hirosaki Gakuin University, Hirosaki, Aomori& <https://jaltcall2021.eventzil.la>More information: see here: <https://
jaltcall2021.eventzil.la> or here <https://jaltcall.org>

Call for presentiners: LD Forum at JALTCALL
Reimagining Learning Communities Online
Submit proposal here (Deadline April 23, 2021)
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/
1FAIpQLSd9qr6VVoORvWdZk3PJIfZTKAY2emQf0UUl__FKdjxRx
1oEdg/viewform?usp=sf_link

Connecting with the theme of the last year withemergency remote teaching, we invite proposals inwhich presenters explore the development of language
learning communities during online classes. In the springof 2020, we were all suddenly faced with the challenge
to bring our institutions of learning to a fully online
environment. This undoubtedly challenged the way weinteracted, worked, and learned. How did learners andteachers first respond to the emergency? Whatchallenges and questions were encountered? How didlearning evolve into a “new normal”? What aspects ofthis new normal will affect the ways the community will
return to classroom learning? In this Learner
Development SIG Forum at JALTCALL 2021, we would
like to hear what tools were used to navigate the newnormal, and what were the challenges and benefits ofthese tools for the learning community. We welcome
digital presentations that explore the use of particularapplications or websites with learning groups orindividuals. In addition, narratives, interviews, and otherexplorative research into the social constructs thatdeveloped with online learning will also be accepted.
Our aim is for presenters and participants to share both
the rewards and challenges that we encountered in thisperiod of online teaching and to discuss ideas about how
this could challenge future directions to learning andlearner development. Depending on the number ofpresentations, the forum will feature timed rounds ofinteractive presentations followed by reflective writing
and discussion. Presenters and participants will also be
invited to contribute writing and related multimedia
resources to the LD SIG’s newsletter, Learning Learning.

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28 (1): Sig Matters

SIG MATTERS | インフォメーション
Learner Development SIG Financial Report August 2020 to February 2021
As reported at the AGM in November, there was some concern about the potential impact of pandemic on the LD
SIG’s finances. This prompted us to consider how we would respond to a situation where finances were suddenly cut,which was probably not a bad thing. The general conclusion of this exercise was that we decided to base our budget for
the following year (agreed at the AGM) on current finances. Hence, any cuts in income will affect the following year’s
budget rather than the current one. As it is, our income from JALT was only reduced in accordance with a slight drop in
membership and the pandemic generally meant cancelation of activities or moving them online, and even a reduction
in grant applicants which has overall meant a large reduction in costs. Indeed, besides the one grant application, theonly other anticipated expense is the cost of holding CCLT6 online. I am currently waiting for invoices for this event.
Overall, finances remain healthy and our budget for 2021 is similar to last year.

Revenues: August, 2020 – February, 2021 /収入：2020年8月〜2021年2月
JALT Grant

157,697

CCLT6 conference participant fees

30,472

Total revenue / 収入合計

188,169

Expenses: August, 2020 – February, 2021 /支出：2021 年8月〜2020年2月
Research grant (1x40,000)
CCLT6 expenses
Total Expenses / 支出合計

40,000?
40,000

SIG fund balance, February 28, 2021 /SIG資金残高2021年2月28日
Balance in bank account / 銀行口座残高

268,804

Reserve liabilities / JALT本部預け金

200,000

PayPal

25,972

Cash in hand / 現金
Balance / 合計

0494,776

The next few months may include further cancelled events, but it is to be hoped that as we move towards the endof the year and into next year we will gradually be able to expand events and even meet again face-to-face.
Patrick Kiernan, SIG Treasurer
Email: <kiernan@meiji.ac.jp>

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Writing for Learning Learning『学習の学習』応募規定
Deadline for Contributions to the Autumn issue: August 31st 2021
Contributions / 寄稿
We encourage new writing and new writers and are happy to work with you in developing your writing. We
would be delighted to hear from you about your ideas, reflections, experiences, and interests to do withlearner development, learner autonomy, and teacher autonomy. これまでにない形式のもの、また新しい方々からのご投稿をお待ちしております。内容についてもぜひご相談ください。みなさまのご意見やお考え、ご経験、そして学習者の成長、学習者と教師の自律性に関することなど、ぜひお聞かせください。For more details about formats and lengths (形式と長さ) of writing suitable for Learning
Learning, please see below. To upload your writing to the editorial team of Learning Learning, please use thislink.

Formats and lengths / 形式と長さ
Learning Learning is your space for continuing to make the connections that interest you. You are warmly
invited and encouraged to contribute to the next issue of Learning Learning in either English and/or Japanese.
In order to provide access and opportunities for Learner Development SIG members to take part in the SIG’s
activities, we welcome writing in different formats and lengths about issues connected with learner andteacher development, such as:『学習の学習』は会員の皆様に興味ある繋がりを築きつづけるスペースです。次号の『学習の学習』への日本語（もしくは英語、及びニ言語で）の投稿を募集しています。メンバーの皆様にSIGの活動にご参加いただきたく、形式や長さを問わず、学習者および教師の成長に関する以下のような原稿をお待ちしております。

Mini-profiles: Sharing your learner development interests / ミニプロフィール：学習者
ディベロップメントについての関心の共有
Here SIG members introduce themselves briefly (just 50 to 100 words or more), and write about what interests,
puzzles, intrigues them about learner development, and/or about a particular approach or project, or research thatthey are doing or plan to do, or simply share a short reflection, to do with learner development (about 100 words ormore)：… ここでは、SIGメンバーの学習者ディベロップメント研究に取り組む原動力となる関心や課題とともに短い（200から400字程度）自己紹介をお届けします。特別なアプローチやプロジェクト、現在進行中の研究やその計画、さらには学習者ディベロップメントの取り組みに関する内省など、それぞれの思いや考えが寄せられています (約200-400字程度以上)

Short articles on issues to do with learner/teacher development and autonomy /学習者と教師の成長・自律に関する小論#1: short individual articles (1,200 – 2,500 words)： 小論（単著） (約3,600-7,500字)#2: short group-written articles (1,200 – 4,000 words)： 小論（共著）(約3,600-12,000字)
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Reflective writing about learning for learner/teacher development and autonomy / 学習に関する省察 ー 学習者と教師の成長・自律を目指して#1: particular puzzles that you and/or your learners have about their learning, practices, development,
autonomy, and so on, and inviting other Learning Learning readers to respond (1,000 words or more)：ご自身や学習者の悩み（学習、実践、成長、自律など）に関して、LL読者と一緒に考えましょう。(約4,000字)#2: dialogue with (an)other SIG member(s) (1,000 to 2,000 words)：SIGメンバー同士の対話 (約4,000
字-8,000字)#3: stories of learners becoming autonomous (about 500 to 1,000 words)： 自律・成長する学習者に関する話 (約2,000字-4,000字)#4: stories of your learning and teaching practices: success and failure (about 500 to 1,000 words)：学習・
教育実践の成功談・失敗談 (約2,000字-4,000字)

Members’ voices / メンバーの声#1: a short personal profile of yourself as a learner and teacher and your interest in learner development(about 500 to 1,000 words) ：学習者・教員としての自身のプロフィールと学習者の成長に関する興味(約2,000字-4,000字)#2: a story of your ongoing interest in, and engagement with, particular learner development (and/or learnerautonomy) issues (about 500 to 1,000 words) ：学習者の成長や学習者の自律に関する興味や取り組み(約2,000字-4,000字）#3: a short profile of your learner development research interests and how you hope to develop yourresearch (about 500 to 1,000 words) ：学習者の成長に関する研究内容と今後の研究の展望 (約2,000
字-4,000字）#4: a short profile of your working context and the focus on learner development/learner autonomy that a
particular institution takes and/or is trying to develop in a particular curriculum (about 500 to 1,000 words)：
教育環境の紹介、所属機関やカリキュラムにおける学習者の成長や自律に関する取り組み (約2,000
字-4,000字）

Learners’ voices / 学習者の声
Learners share stories of their learning, reflections on their practices of learning, or report on a project or research thatthey are doing or plan to do related to learner development (about 300 to 500 words)：学習者が自分の学習経験、学習者ディベロプメント研究部会 <http://ld-sig.org>

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 28 (1): Sig Matters
学習の実践についての考察、または学習者の成長に関連して行っている、もしくは計画しているプロジェク
トや研究について報告します。 (約1200-2000字程度以上)

Research & reviews / 研究 & レビュー
#1: summaries and accounts of new graduate research (1,200 – 2,500 words) ：大学院での研究内容の要約
やその振り返り (約2,400字-5,000字）#2: proposals for a joint project/joint research (about 500 to 1,000 words)： 協働プロジェクト・リサーチの提案 (約2,000字-4,000字)#3: reports (of a conference presentation, research project, particular pedagogic practice, and so on, to dowith learner development) (about 500 to 1,000 words)： レポート（学習者の成長に関する学会発表、研究プロジェクト、教育実践など）(約2,000-4,000字)#4: reports of research in progress (about 500 to 1,000 words)： 研究中間報告(約2,000字-4,000字)#5: book, website, article reviews (about 750 to 1,500 words)：書籍、ウェブサイト、論文の批評(約3,000
字-6,000字)

Free space / フリー・スペース#1: photographs, drawings, and/or other visual materials about learner development, and/or related tolearner autonomy：学習者の成長や自律に関する写真、絵、視覚資料#2: activities and tips for learner development/autonomy (about 500 to 1,000 words) ：学習者の成長・自律を促す活動やヒントの紹介 (約1,000字-2,000字)#3: some other piece of writing that you would like to contribute and that is related to learner development：その他の学習者の成長に関する執筆#4: poems… and much more： 詩、その他。

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Learning Learning Editorial Team
<LLeditorialteam@googlegroups.com>
Those working on Learning Learning share a commitment to working together in small teams. We aim tolearn together about writing, editing, responding, and/or translating, for our shared personal andprofessional development. Some areas where we would like to encourage SIG members to take part and work
together on Learning Learning include:• Layout and Design: working on the formatting and preparation of finalised content for online
publication• Members’ Voices (co-)coordinating: contacting news members of the SIG and working with them todevelop their writing in a variety of formats and lengths as a first step to taking part in the SIG’s
publication activities;• Looking Back (co-)coordinating: working with contributors writing on events related to learnerdevelopment (conferences, forums, get-togethers, workshops, both face to face and online) for
publication in Learning Learning;• Research and Reviews (co-)coordinating: encouraging potential contributors to send in summaries
and accounts of research, as well as reviews (of books, journal articles, materials, or web resources
relating to learner development), and working with them to develop their writing for publication in
Learning Learning.
If you are interested in any of these areas of working together (and/or you have other areas of interest)
and would like to discuss your interest and ideas, please email the Learning Learning editorial team
<LLeditorialteam@googlegroups.com>
Many thanks!

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ISSN 1882-1103