Tag: Jim Smiley

  • Double Presentation with Edo Forsythe and Jim Smiley

    Date: Sunday, January 21, 2024 1:30pm

    Location: AIINA – Rm 807

    Cost: JALT Members – Free. Non-member – 1000 yen

    Event Registration is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1116409366393717/

    Edo Forsythe
    Student Perceptions of Benefits of Free Writing in English

    Japanese university students are often required to perform free writing activities in their English language classes in an attempt to encourage confidence in writing in English. This session will explain the free writing activities used in the authors’ courses, discuss the changes in fluency observed, and provide qualitative data describing the participants’ thoughts about free writing activities. Attendees will receive ideas for effectively employing free writing in their English language classes to meet students’ desires.

    Jim Smiley
    Multiple document reading in Japanese English majors

    One key aspect of successful academic writing is the capability to assess and evaluate information sources (Moon, 2008). Japanese undergraduate academic writers are known to trust authority sources in preference to anonymous writers when resolving controversial everyday topics (Kobayashi, 2014) and are capable of coherently arguing on social topics with which they have adequate topic knowledge (Stapleton, 2001, 2002). However, the issue of how undergraduate subject specialists deal with unresolved debates in their major field of study remains unknown. The speaker addresses the question of how advanced third-year undergraduate English majors resolve discipline-specific controversies in second- language theory. A mixed-methods research design centring on multiple document reading was used to investigate this question. Participants read two articles that presented conflicting perspectives on the critical period hypothesis (CPH). They answered comprehension questions on each article, submitted a written report on their beliefs about the CPH and participated in a semi-structured interview that collected information about their reasoning and writing processes. The results suggest that the role of prior beliefs, personal experiences and opinions strongly informs participants’ perspectives and that encountering alternative viewpoints may fail to generate a deeper critical engagement appropriate to this level. The presenter will discuss some implications for pedagogy relevant to developing subject specialists’ academic writing in the later years of undergraduate study.

    JALT Officers Meet and Greet after the presentation. 

  • Upcoming – Overcoming Barriers to Critical Thinking – February 2

    Event Speaker: Jim Smiley
    Fee for non-JALT members: 500 yen
    Contact or Queries: iwatejalt@hotmail.com
    Date and Time: Sunday, February 2, 2020 – 1:30pm to 4:30pm
    Location: Iwate University Student Center A Room G23

    Abstract
    Educators in the Japanese context face significant difficulties in developing critical thinking skills in students. Much of these difficulties are well-known, such as the competition for time resources when students have to spend most of their energies cramming for memorization based high-school and university entrance exams and national qualification exams while in university. This results in students being relatively unprepared for and unknowledgeable about critical thinking. However, two other key aspects that hinder critical thinking skills are relatively unknown: students’ epistemic cognition and their underlying knowledge structure. Epistemic cognition refers to how knowledge itself is understood. For example, if information given by an authority figure is automatically believed to be true, critically analysing that information is seen to be a waste of time by students. Furthermore, in the Japanese educational context, the institutional learning experience of students leads to a belief that most information is either a fact or is an opinion. This fact/opinion knowledge structure also presents significant barriers to developing critical thinking skills.
    In the first section, Smiley will interactively survey these barriers with attendees. While exploring these topics, attendees will develop insights into how their students’ epistemic cognition and knowledge structures may be better understood. This understanding leads to more focussed instruction that targets the problematic bases of critical thinking. The second section comprises a set of demonstrations of concrete examples of critical thinking practices and a workshop in which attendees’ own classroom readings are used as the basis for critical thinking activities. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own classroom readings for use in the session.

    Bio Data
    Jim Smiley is an Associate Professor at Iwate National University. He is the author of *Writing a Graduation Thesis *and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Higher Education with the University of Liverpool, focusing on epistemic cognition and academic reasoning in Japanese undergraduates.