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KEERA Event at English Expo 2014

KEERA Extensive Reading Conference, 2014

The conference was held Friday, December 12th, 10am – 6pm, at the 2014 EnglishExpo at COEX, Gangnam, Seoul. The videos of the presentations are here.

General Information

The KEERA Conference on Extensive Reading for 2014 was held, as part of the EnglishExpo 2014, on Friday December 12th at COEX in Gangnam, Seoul, from 10am to 6pm.

English Expo information:

Full Korean site: http://englishexpo.net/2014/kor/main/main.asp

English page: http://englishexpo.net/2014/eng/main_e.asp

Full Program Details (Scroll to end for schedule)

Plenary Speakers

Dr. Rob Waring (Notre Dame Seishin University)

Keynote presentation: Extensive Reading: Going places

This session will first review the progress made in raising awareness of extensive reading over the past decade in North Asia, and especially Korea. We will then review where we are and look to see what needs to be done to get more Korean children reading for pleasure in their own time rather than ‘reading to study’ only within school contexts. Suggestions will also be put forward for the publishing industry to meet the coming increase in the number of public school ER programs in North Asia over the foreseeable future. Several ideas will be put forward including democratizing ER through digital media. We will then review several paid and free models of how to provide digital content to Korean learners.

Workshop session: Doing ER with Teens & Adults – Practical Tips

Research shows that developing an interest in ‘fluent reading’ of comprehensible texts, rather than ‘study reading’ leads to higher scores on tests. The question is, ‘how do we get the students to read?’ This session will focus on some techniques teachers use to get teenagers and adults to read in English enjoyably, and willingly. The session will show how selecting the right story at an appropriate level will often lead to the development of a reading habit.

Dr. Rob Waring teaches at Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama, Japan. He is an acknowledged expert in Extensive Reading and second language vocabulary acquisition and lectures and publishes widely on these subjects. He is on the Executive Board the Extensive Reading Foundation and is also author and series editor of the Foundations Reading Library, the Footprint Reading Library, and the Page Turners Reading Library by Cengage Learning. He has been very active in setting up KEERA and wishes to continue this work. He often travels to Korea.

Dr. Jeong-ryeol Kim (Korea National University of Education)

Plenary: Why Are Korean Public Schools Not Doing Extensive Reading?

Advantages of Extensive Reading (ER) are well established in reading, as well as in the other language skills listening, speaking and writing. Vocabulary knowledge increases and reading speed are also improved in students according to numerous studies. Reading comprehension and overall reading fluency have substantially positive impacts on the readers. Not only these cognitive impacts but also the affective domain showed positive improvement on English reading in interest, confidence, anxiety and self-directedness. The effect study (Kim, 2011) discovered the fact that the impact of ER programs in elementary schools are relatively bigger than other levels of schools such as middle, high school and colleges. Despite all these advantages reported these action research studies, why aren’t all the elementary schools doing the ER as a part of the school program. This presentation explores the problems and provides suggestions of ER program implementation in elementary schools in Korea.

Dr. Jeong-ryeol Kim is an associate professor of English at Korea National U. of Education teaching methodology, integrated content and language teaching, and English linguistics. He is the vice-dean of the Center for In-service Education at KNUE. He has been an active member of KOTESOL and was the president of KOTESOL back in 1995. He is currently the president of KAPEE. He was involved in many different government projects in English education. He has published books on classroom English, teaching methodology, English curriculum, English classroom observation and analysis and so on. He has published numerous articles in the area of elementary English education and technology enhanced English teaching.

Featured Speakers

Mr. Paul Goldberg (Xreading, Japan)

ER, The Transition from Print to Digital

Digital reading has been mainstream for nearly a decade, and still today, the vast majority of extensive reading is done with printed books. This is an unfortunate situation, as digital reading, which can provide support such as dictionaries, character lists and audio, would be particularly useful for extensive reading. The presenter will explain the reasons for this situation, show what kinds of resources are currently available, and what the future may look like. This includes an introduction to the Xreading Virtual Library, a newly developed system that gives students online access to hundreds of graded readers from multiple publishers.

Paul Goldberg has been a proponent of extensive reading for nearly 20 years, having been an early pioneer in Japan. Previous projects include online systems for doing extensive listening and a system for administering quizzes for graded readers. He is the founder of xReading, a cutting edge digital delivery and assessment system for graded reading. www.xreading.com

Ms. Becky Elliott (Rise Education)

Choosing the Right ER Materials for Your Students

How does an administrator, teacher, or parent choose the right ER programs or books for their schools, students or children? Drawing on her wide variety of experiences as a teacher, administrator and in publishing, the presenter will offer a useful set of criteria to use depending on the situation. There will also be references to specific success case examples and links to appropriate resources for those seeking more knowledge or help with decisions.

Becky Elliott is the current head of academics for RISE Global. She is responsible for the blended learning educational program and the teacher training programs. From 2011 to 2013, Becky was the editor-in-chief at Compass Media, and was also responsible for teacher training in Mexico, Latin, and South America. From 2009-211, Becky was also the consulting services director at Innovatus Education. Becky has also managed English kindergartens, after school and university language learning programs.

Mr. Aaron Jolly (Author, co-Founder of KOTESOL ER SIG)

Extensive Reading, Listening and Watching for Young Learners & Teens

This presentation will outline key strategies for success when implementing ER, EL or EW, whether for inside and outside of classrooms with Young Learners and Teens learners. Example resources and a rough how-to guide will be demonstrated for each area of content in terms of getting the program started, training learners, selecting content and tracking progress.

Aaron D. Jolly is a teacher, teacher trainer and materials designer/author for local and international publishers. Formerly he taught English in Korea from kindergarten to college level. He was Korean manager and course designer for English Central, a Google funded video based start-up, and is a co-author of the Pearson 6-level series for Young Learners called Our Discovery Island. Aaron is the co-founder of both the KOTESOL Extensive Reading SIG and KEERA.

Aaron B. Siegel (e–future)

Helping Kids Read with e-future’s Graded Comic Readers

Reading for ESL students can be quite challenging. Students, especially lower level students, are often inundated with texts that are too challenging and hard to relate to. However, to minimize these challenges, this presentation will describe why and how comics in the ESL classroom can help students improve their reading skills, and enjoy it too. During the presentation, you will be introduced to comics as an ESL text for students, you’ll be given background on the challenges students and teachers face in the classroom, and you will learn new activities that you can use tomorrow to help your students improve – and enjoy – their reading.

Aaron Siegel is a certified teacher, ELT author and editor, and a teacher trainer in South Korea. Aaron has had the pleasure of teaching science and ESL in the United States, Peru, and South Korea. He also has participated as an author and editor on several different ELT series, including Magic Adventures, Reading World, Reading Kite, EFL Phonics, and My First Grammar. He has received his Masters in TESOL from the University of Victoria-Wellington. He currently works for e-future, one of Asia’s fasted growing ELT publishers.

Research Presentations

Dr. Doo-Shick Kim (Gyeongsang National University)

Distinguishing Confusingly Similar Words or Grammatical Items Using the Binary Opposition Strategy

According to F. Silver (2007), the number one strategy that produces the greatest gain in student learning is Compare and Contrast, which has been widely used in teaching or learning in general. To be presented at this talk is the strategy of ‘Binary Opposition (BO)’. The concept of BO in linguistics is found in deciding the distinctive features, in structural phonology and semantics, that are involved in distinguishing a pair of similar related sounds (as in ‘dip’ vs. ‘tip’) or words (as in ‘man’ and ‘woman’). Recently Kim (2013) has developed this BO as a strategy for learning to distinguish pairs of similar or related grammatical items in English, such as the main verb vs. the modal verb, the simple past tense vs. the present perfect tense, ‘some’ vs. ‘any’, ‘risk’ vs. ‘danger’, etc. The basic idea of the BO applying in the distinction basically is that one or more (near-)minimal pair of opposite features in a context may be involved in the exact choice of the two confusingly similar words or grammatical items from the context. The presentation demonstrates, especially appealing to the phenomenon of ‘Opposition Effect’, how effectively the BO strategy employing the effect can distinguish between related pairs of words or phrases. It also show how to find out a pair of BO from a set of those words or phrases using the corpus of COCA, time permitted.

Dr. Doo-Shick Kim is a professor at Gyeongsang National University, and a former President of the Korean Association of Corpus Linguistics (KACL), the Korean Association of Linguistic Sciences (KALS), and the Association of Modern British & American Language & Literature (MBALL). He specializes in Discourse Grammar, especially marked constructions such as clefts, inversions, including deixis and grammar teaching. Recently, he has published Binary English Grammar(2014), which attempts to explain the contextual uses of English grammatical phenomena in terms of the Binary Opposition strategy.

Ms. Eunsol Shin (Korea National University of Education)

Development of Korean Lexile for the Book Library in ER-Central

This presentation will give an overview of research being done by the presenter and other researchers to develop Korean lexile for graded books offered by ER-Central, a website of extensive reading communities with more than 1000 graded readers for free. This study also aims to verify how well the level of ER-Central is matched with the Korean lexile level of Korean EFL learners.

Eunsol Shin is a Ph.D. candidate in English education at Korea National University of Education and currently serving as a general officer of KEERA, the Korean English Extensive Reading Association. She has tutored many students as a private English teacher for 10 years, teaching grammar, speaking and reading – including successful implementation of extensive reading programs with individual students. She also worked for The 2nd World Congress in Extensive Reading as a committee member in 2013.

Dr. Haeyeon Kim (Chung-Ang University)

Linguistic Approaches to Analysis and Understanding of Texts

In literature, the term “text” is often used to refer to any object that can be “read,” in a broad sense, but in a narrower sense, texts refer to any coherent written or spoken materials that transmit some kind of informative message, limiting the scope to linguistic materials. Literary criticism has explored information content of literary works as a way of finding out the message or theme of the work in terms such as theme, plot, point of view, character, setting, tone and style, symbols, and so on. Linguistics, as a study of language, has explored nature of language, exploring formal properties of linguistic units, structures, and grammatical functions. A text is basically composed of linguistic units, and it is symbolic arrangement of linguistic units, which deliver the writer’s message or information content. In this regard, there is a possibility of applying linguistic notions to analysis of texts. This talk attempts to explore the possibility of applying linguistic theories to analysis of texts, particularly from the perspective of theories of discourse analysis, conversation analysis (CA), and text linguistics. Based on an overview of some linguistic theories, the talk shows how these approaches to texts are relevant for analysis and understanding of texts or stories. It would be interesting to examine various aspects of literature as written texts from the perspective of linguistics.

Dr. Haeyeon Kim is a professor at Chung-Ang University, and the current President of the Korean Association of Corpus Linguistics (KACL).

Hong-gyu Choi (Gangneung Imgok Elementary School)

Development of CAT Smart App for Elementary English Reading Diagnostic Test

The focus of this paper is the development of a Computerized Adaptive Test (CAT) smart app for Elementary English reading diagnostic testing. It gives students their reading ability index and also recommends English books. The CAT smart app consists of four parts: login, four topics, evaluation questions, and readability index of the student and recommended storybooks. Students can login and answer the questions that are presented to them. The computer automatically presents more questions to the students from the database. The CAT smart diagnostic app for Elementary English reading gives students their reading ability index and recommends English reading books. Finally they can choose the right English reading book according to their readability index.

Hong-gyu Choi is an elementary school teacher who works at Gangneung Imgok Elementary school in Gangwon Province. He is in the doctorate course at the Korea National University of Education (KNUE).

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