On the bright breezy morning of May 24th, the Pusan Chapter of Korea TESOL started it's first conference at Pusan University of Foreign Studies.
Even before the opening address took place at 10:30, the classrooms of the University’s Language Center were full for a set of concurrent sessions. There were 5 presentations at 9:30, for the first session of the day. One of the presenters, Barbara Hoskins, co-author of Let's Go, was one of those early morning presenters. It worked out very successfully, as the book has already become one of the most popular English courses for children in Korea.
Most of the attendees knew about the book and responded perfectly to her guidance. She showed multiple ways of using her books, cards and even small details on each page. But because of the limited time, she concentrated on level 1, and couldn't spare much time on the higher levels.
Anyway, her presentation was full of ideas with joyful methods, with many new ideas to try.
And an afternoon session by former Pusan Chapter President, Michael Duffy, was also joyful, with popular songs for the classroom. We learned vocabulary, idioms, grammar, and even culture in different songs, including a Korean one.
Barbara Hoskin's afternoon plenary was entitled "Getting Children to Speak English" and focused on ways of structuring tasks so as to steer young learners away from speaking Korean to get their point across.
Greta Gorsuch of Mejiro University, Japan, a co-author of the Lingual House "Impact Series" gave the opening plenary talk. Her subject was not the textbook, but student assessment. She argued that testing, rather than being just an unwelcome burden, should be a central part of teaching. She stressed the importance of testing students’ mastery of what they have been taught, rather than their overall proficiency, as measured by TOEFL or TOEIC tests.
Another perspective on teaching children was offered by an old friend of the Chapter, David Paul, in the closing plenary. He stressed that one of the essential roles of the teacher is to create confusion in the mind of students, in order to ask questions. Drills can be initiated by presenting a set of seemingly unrelated phrases, or by posing as an alien who needs to have even the most common place things explained.
All the attendees, teaching English in schools, colleges or institutes, showed an enthusiastic response to the various sessions. They seemed to be very pleased having a high level conference here in Pusan. The teachers I spoke to were interested, above all, in getting new materials, methods and guidance in how to use the author's books