CAJLE Conference 2015 a success!

CAJLE 2015 Conference

CAJLE 2015 Conference Panel

“Revisiting teacher roles and instruction of view of diversification of Japanese Language Education”

The Canadian Association of Japanese Language Educators (CAJLE) conference was held on August 20-21 at the SFU campus in downtown Vancouver. The conference had over 200 participants and the members of CAJLE came from seven different countries. Most participants arrived from universities from outside of Canada. A few high schools Japanese language teachers also attended. Professor Aoki, a professor of graduate school of letters at Osaka University was the keynote speaker.

Wendy Carr from UBC organized a panel of speakers to wrap up the conference. Four panel members presented on different topics, for fifteen minutes they spoke and then there was a question session. Professor Aoki presented on, “Tandem Learning.”….Keiko Hattori from Kinki Daigaku in Wakayama presented on: “Multilingualism and multicultural teaching materials”. Kathy Shannon from New Westminster Secondary School spoke on “Teaching in B.C. high schools, and engaging students in learning a new language.” Colleen Lee-Hayes from Pine Tree Secondary School in Coquitlam, spoke on using Twitter and #langchat : “Your Always-There Professional learning platform.” Check her blog at leesensensei.edublogs.org and her entire presentation can be found online at http://bit.ly/CAJLE2015Twitter.

It was a successful CAJLE conference and the university professors appreciated hearing from the high school teachers in B.C. There were over 75 presenters at the conference and 115 attendees from Japan (36), USA (19), Taiwan (5), China (1), UK (1), and Australia (1).  There were also 20 poster presentations which are common for international conferences.

Don’t forget that new teachers can receive info from Nihongobc on Googlegroups, and it is a also a platform for teachers of Japanese to share information.

Next year CAJLE 2016 will be held in Niagara Falls, Ontario.