Presenting at the Asia TEFL Conference in Bangkok

I just got back from a very productive academic conference in Bangkok called Asia TEFL (link). The presentation on "Factors Influencing Learner Self-Confidence in a Japanese EAP Program" that my research partner I delivered got some nice reactions from the 20 people who attended.

The conference program is here (link). Asia TEFL 2009 was held jointly with the annual Thai TESOL 2009 conference and that made a fairly big event with about 500 presentations.

Everything went very smoothly--almost. Just before our presentation, we found out that the conference organizers were not able to set up a projector for our PowerPoint presentation due to some logistical problems. Fortunately we had about 20 handouts of our PowerPoint slides and other reference materials, so we just did the presentation with our handouts and that worked fine.

We were surprised that over 20 people attended, filling up the room almost completely. Since our topic focuses on self-confidence issues of Japanese students, we thought we might get just a few people who teach or have taught in Japan. As it turned out, we had teachers and researchers from many different countries: Thailand (of course), Malaysia, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan, and Korea were the ones we found out, but there may have been others who we did not have a chance to talk to.

The Q&A time had some good questions, almost all focusing on how to help students who are shy or afraid of losing face in front of their classmates when they try to speak in English. Our presentation content did not directly expand on "practical solutions" for a boosting self-confidence or lowering anxiety and we only touched on the issue brief in the implications section. However, the interest of the audience mainly seemed to be in the practical application. We had a good discussion about this, suggesting basically, that since the group of students we interviewed felt their self-confidence is positively affected largely by 1) experiences of success, 2) feedback, 3) comparisons with others, 4) familiarity with the learning context, and 5 their personality and culture, what a teacher should do is to create a learning environment that can produce learning experiences perceived as a success, followed by positive feedback, and ensure that the students have enough time to gradually become accustomed to any new learning contexts including new tasks, new methods of evaluations, or new technologies. The teacher also needs to create a community of learners in which all students understand that having a diversity of skill levels, learning styles, motivations and other personal variables is completely natural and the key is to be mutually supportive so that all students feel comfortable to take risks.

For me, making the presentation was the main event, but I also was able to attend some interesting presentations. The plenary by Alastair Pennycook on issues related to globalization and English had some good points to remind us the social and political dimensions of language teaching. He proposed that we encourage our students to become "metrolingual," which is hard to define, but is related to being metropolitan (he referenced John Maher's concept of metroethnicity"). Basically this means highly flexible in the ability to accept, understand, and communicate with a variety of people as necessary. That sounds good to me. The level of English ability or type of English (US, British, Indian, Japanese etc. etc.) that is needed for that will just depend on the circumstances and goals of the student.