RLM Slinn-Funabashi

The 2024 Japan Association of Language Teachers (JALT) conference opened with a very impressive taiko performance. I used to play taiko for two years when I first arrived in Japan in 2010 it was really nostalgic to watch.

The opening plenary by Dr Andy Curtis and Dr Liying Cheng about their career experiences and their lives was much more personal than I imagined. I found their family story heartwarming and hearing about their grandchild who is learning 4 languages was amazing!

Relating to my own research interests in GenAI and academic writing, I got to hear some up-to-date research findings! First was from Emi Hennessy, an Assistant Professor at the University of Fukui. She presented findings from her study of A1 level university students use of GenAI in their writing. Her findings show that students do benefit from editing their own work independently using ChatGPT but they have concerns about overreliance. I’m looking forward to see the results of her current work in the Fall with a control group as well.

I got to meet and chat with some of the authors I’d cited in my dissertation – Austin Pack and Juan Escalante – which was very cool! Their latest study with Natasha Gillette, Ammon Hunt and James Hartshorn looked at the ability of ChatGPT to effectively give written corrective feedback on students’ work. Specifically by indicating errors rather than correcting them, so students have to develop their critical thinking and linguistic skills. Their findings reveal some of the weaknesses of GenAI (namely ChatGPT-4 Turbo) on giving feedback in comparison with teachers. They did highlight that more general feedback still be beneficial for students and that the new update which is coming soon (ChatGPT-o1) uses chain of thought technology which will make it much more accurate. This is a really important piece of work and I’m looking forward to reading the article.

Finally, a highlight for me was the plenary on diversity by the amazing Dr Avril Hayes Matsui from Aichi Prefectural University. The talk was titled “We Are All Diverse: Celebrating Diversity in English Language Teaching”. It was emotional to hear the stories from her research participants about their experiences of discrimination as black teachers in Japan. The overall message of celebrating diversity and the changes we can make was inspiring. A man who has been attending the conference for over 25 years told me it was the best plenary he had ever attended 👏