LOOKING FORWARDLDSIG Get Togethers Plan for the Year
The Learner Development hosts get-togethers throughout the year. All members are welcome to shareand discuss their learning, teaching, and researching practices and interests with learner development inpairs and small groups. Each get-together typically starts with a catching-up session where members getto reconnect and share the puzzles or research they are working on. Following this, one or two members
will give a mini-presentation, which we will all use as a focus point for the discussions that follow.
The first get-together of the 2024 year was on March 24th, attended by four people. For the springsemester term, we have scheduled meetings on April 21st, May 12th, & June 23rd. We will send out
reminders two weeks before, which will include a sign-form, further details, and the meeting link. There will
also be get-togethers in the autumn semester; we will let you know as soon as we have finalised the dates.

LD-SIG Forum: Stories of Learning, Learning from Stories

Amelia Yarwood, LD-SIG Programmes coordinator

The power of stories to transform how we view learner development is the theme of this year’s
LD-SIG forum at PanSIG. Held at Fukui University of Technology, our forum will host four speakers:
1. Tomoko Hashimoto from Tokyo Future University will share an inspiring story of a Japanesemother who pursued a postgraduate degree in English Education while working part-time asa teacher. She will explore how societal norms and expectations for working mothers posechallenges when it comes to lifelong learning. Inspiring and thought-provoking, this story isan emotional rollercoaster.
2. Stories of diversity and minorities within Japan are at the centre of Mike Nix’s presentation.
His students from Chuo University listen and learn from the stories of those within thesediverse communities to understand notions of domination and otherness, and to sit with thecomplexity of real, lived experiences. At the heart of this presentation is connection, empathy
and learning to trust others to find the solutions they know are best for themselves.
3. Anita Aden from Mukogawa Women’s University continues the focus on the classroom, inparticular, the conditions of gaining and demonstrating knowledge. She explores phases ofthe learning cycle and how each phase relates to perspective development for teachers andstudents. Discussions in this presentation are the foundations upon which academic andpersonal growth takes place.
4. From Meiji University, Robert Moreau brings us a personal narrative as a teacher who uses
Project-Based Learning (PBL) to engage his students in an exploration of learner autonomy.
Part personal reflection, part idea generation, this presentation invites attendees to share
their own reasons behind the pedagogical choices they make in the language classroom.
Join us at the LD-SIG forum to (co-)construct stories of learning for our own growth, thedevelopment of our learning communities and for the benefit of all.

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LD-SIG forum details: The LD-SIG forum at JALT PanSIG 2024 Conference will take place on either
Saturday 25th or Sunday 26th of May, 2024 at Fukui University of Technology (福井工業大学) in Fukui.
The format is a 60-minute poster presentation.

LD-SIG Forum: AI: Benefits, Challenges, and Issues for
Learner Development
Blair Barr, LD-SIG Programmes coordinator
When/Where: May 17th to May 19th, 2024, at Meijo University Nagoya Dome Campus as part of theJALTCALL 2024 conference: https://jaltcall.org/jaltcall-2024/
This forum will examine how advancements in artificial intelligence and new technologies can aid
or impede learner development.
Mart Christine Johnston will explore how Japanese university students can improve their writing
skills by using AI (such as ChatGPT) with a single prompt. The students in the study wrote a seriesof passages on pen and paper, in class over a number of weeks. They then corrected their spellingand grammar using a simple AI prompt before making notes of their most obvious/common errors.
Blair Barr will focus on how he has developed the grading schemes of writing assignments to keep
students focused on their abilities to produce English in presentations. At the end, a discussion will
be opened to the audience to explore how our approaches to evaluating writing have evolved withthe rapid development of AI tools such as ChatGPT.
James Underwood will examine how guidelines relating to the use of AI can be negotiatedbetween students and teachers to ensure that AI tools promote, rather than detract from, language
learning and enable learners to foster a sense of independence and autonomy. With theseguidelines, it is hoped his students will take an informed approach to using AI tools and use themeffectively to reach the goals described in their learning plans. At the end of these presentations,the audience will be invited to reflect on and share their perspectives on using AI tools to support
language learning with a focus on learner development.
Join us at the LD SIG forum to investigate together how advancements in artificial intelligence andnew technologies can aid or impede learner development.

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The Learner Development Journal Issue 8:
Exploring Grassroots, Innovative, and CreativeApproaches to Language Learning Materials
Development Through Inclusive Practitioner-ResearchEditors: Anna Costantino, Assia Slimani-Rolls, and Nour Bouacha

The theme of Issue 8 of the Learner Development Journal is “Exploring Grassroots, Innovative, andCreative Approaches to Language Learning Materials Development Through Inclusive PractitionerResearch”. Here, the three editors provide an update on progress and a taster of what we can expect
to read about when the issue comes out later this year.
Issue 8 of The Learner Development Journal features five exploratory and practice-based inquiries
along with two narrative reviews that explore creative and learner-based approaches to language
materials development. Almost all contributors have submitted their third drafts, which are undergoinganother round of reviews.
The five practice-based contributions share a common concern with designing and implementing
learning materials that recognise multilingual identities in complex learning environments. Threestudies challenge monolingual biases and native-speakerism by identifying and harnessing classroomtranslanguaging practices.
Through ethnographic reflexivity, one of the inquiries looks at how an "only-English" traditional
communicative activity affected multilingual learners’ sentiment in a secondary classroom in Berlin.
Two other contributions investigate the potential of translanguaging practices for learner development
in Japan. One explores translanguaging practices in art-based pedagogy in higher education contexts
through a workshop series where performance poetry was used to bring about students’ full linguistic
repertoires. The other reflects on how translanguaging practices helped them to increase student
participation in learning activities in an all-girls secondary English conversation course.
In the fourth practice-based contribution, the writer offers insights into the complexity of multimedia
environments while designing and implementing language learning projects for a CLIL course aboutmanga at a Japanese university. The action research study reveals the endeavour and struggles indesigning and implementing multimodal materials based on the assumption that all language learners
have multimodal competencies.
The fifth and final contribution is an exploratory practice-framed study. The writers engage in an
autoethnography revolving around the idea that learning materials can be deployed as investigative
tools when understood as PEPAs (Potentially Exploitable Pedagogic Materials). They aim to dialogicallyunderstand how one English language teacher, supported by her mentors and co-authors, engages
in creating materials with a desire to expand and adapt the lessons with her students while exploring
the life of the classroom.
In the two narrative reviews based on practical experience, the authors aim to understand two areasof inquiry related to developing teaching materials: (1) how to be creative in designing materials
and (2) how to mentor language teachers in a community of practice where materials are used
for investigation. These reviews can benefit practitioner researchers and mentors as they provide
additional insights into the creative and developmental scope of pedagogic materials.
After completing the third round of review, we will continue to work with the writers towards their
finalised drafts across spring and summer. We foresee publication in autumn.
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We hope readers will appreciate the classroom instances experienced and narrated by the contributors
and their endeavour to understand them through practitioner research.

The Learner Development Journal Issue 9:
Engaging With and Exploring Autonomy, Creativity,and Well-Being for Learner Development
Editors: Stacey Vye, Robert Moreau, Amelia Yarwood, and Ivan Lombardi

We, the editors for Learner Development Journal 9 (LDJ9), share a mutual interest in autonomy,
creativity, and well-being as language teacher-researchers. For the nascent issue of the journal, weare ecstatic to have gathered a healthy number of proposals from practitioners worldwide who areeager to discuss reflective questions and puzzles related to exploring the learner development oflearners and teachers.
We started an inquisitive process prior to the LDJ9 call for proposal submissions that closed thispast February 2024 and posed the following questions:• What puzzles do you have about developing the interconnections between learner autonomy,creativity, and well-being?
• How might you bring those pieces together in engaging projects and understand them in newways?
• What are your experiences as practitioners in such engagements with your learners?
• How do we/you/our learners break through into new practices, spaces, and ways of creative
participation in learning?
• What challenges and questions come up for you and your learners in these processes ofchange in learner development?
• What stories of practice would you and/or your learners like to share and develop to foster
autonomy, creativity, and well-being for learner development?
At the time of writing, the submitted proposals had been reviewed and the invitations tocontribute were sent. Our LDJ9 contributors hail from diverse areas of language education, bothinternationally and from Japan, focusing on practitioners’ and students’ stories and reflections. At
present, we are facilitating response communities based around common themes to support thecontributors. Coordinating online response communities across time zones will be challenging,but by exploring practice-related stories of autonomy, creativity, and well-being through inquiry,reflection, and research, everyone involved in LDJ9 will grow as writers, educators, and editorsfrom now until our expected publish date in the autumn of 2025.

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