This year’s national conference has been gamified. The games being played are more than just a way to bring fun and delight to the conference. They are a way to get attendees more involved with our online conference, which will hopefully bring about more interactions with each other and contribute to participants feeling more connected despite being online and not collected in a traditional conference space. Additionally, the games serve the purpose of putting educators in their students’ shoes. One of the biggest things teachers seem to be looking for when it comes to their classes, whether its online or offline, are ways to engage students with the lessons learned in class. By playing through the games being put on by the conference you can experience fun new ways of learning and engaging with materials. You will learn about the games in play at the conference and you will also learn how to put together something for your own students using Discord, Flipgrid, and Google Workspace applications such as Forms, Sites, and Slides. EASTER EGG 1

ABOUT THE TOUR:

Squid Game, Parasite, and now My Name. Chances are excellent that know about the first two of these, and by the time of the Reel to Real conference rolls around you will probably have heard of the latest hit as well. Korean cinema, on both the large and small screen, has been front and centre on the global stage for the last while.

It’s quite possible that you’ve run into other English-language films by Korean directors and production companies (Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer and Park Chan-wook’s Stoker immediately come to mind). Or perhaps you encountered Korean cinema via one of the many remakes: Spike Lee’s version of Old Boy or the American version of Kim Jee-woon’s absolutely awesome-sauce A Tale of Two Sisters (which gets a different title: The Uninvited).

On the other hand, you might not know any of the above and are just beginning your journey into the world of Korean cinema. If that’s the case — don’t worry!

Whether you’re a newbie to Korean cinema or not, you’re cordially invited to join your host, Michael Free, who will take you on an interactive tour of the last 60 years of Korean cinema. Going decade by decade, and letting attendees ask questions along the way — which very well might take us off course, but in a hopefully delightful and informative manner!) — Michael will show you what Korean cinema has to offer beyond these recent hits. From Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960) to Park Kim Do-young’s rendering of Choi Nam-joo’s novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (2019), this quick romp through Korean cinema’s history will give those interested places to look for Korean films and suggestions for what to watch according to their tastes and interests.

ABOUT YOUR HOST:

Michael has been teaching English in Korea for over 15 years now, with an extremely wide range of students (public and private, academic and casual, as well teacher training). The courses he has taught are, for the most part, the usual: conversation English, speaking, academic writing and so forth. In addition to those, he has developed content-based courses in film: general film appreciation, the horror film, as well as courses dedicated to the vampire and zombie genres. Living in Korea and teaching mainly Korean students, a natural part of the growth of these courses (and his own knowledge of Korean language and culture) was the not-quite-casual study of Korean films. Recently, this study has become more intensive with his most recent course assignment: teaching international students about Korean language and culture via film and TV dramas.

In a world where the vast majority of texts our students are encountering and dealing with are visual texts or multimodal texts that use visuals, the importance of visual literacy increases greatly. In this session, we will explore what visual literacy is, why it is important in language education, how two new skills, viewing and visually representing, have been added to the traditional skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking in the English language curricula of a number of countries, and explore a number of simple, tried-and-tested viewing frameworks that help students become more active and effective viewers of photos, paintings, films and videos.

Teachers will go away from the session with a clear understanding of what visual literacy is and a number of tried-and-tested viewing frameworks to use with their students.

Celebrate Friday night with us! A mixer for any and all to join for chatting, networking, and sharing the highlights of the day. A casual, come when you want, leave when you want social zone.

During the first 20 minutes, participants will gain an introductory understanding of the basic theory behind the current form of TPRS as of its developments this past year, 2020, originally created by Blaine Ray in the late 1980s - early 1990s. Participants will also receive technical explanations of the main ingredients of a TPRS lesson: adding a detail or character, circling, triangling, and "Describe the Situation". The next 40 minutes will be devoted to a student experience of a TPRS German lesson in which participants will gain microfluency in German through interaction with the presenter by answering questions in German and retelling the story in German using their own words, supported and scaffolded every step of the way. The final 15 minutes will include a debriefing period for reflections as well as Q&A to deepen the experience from both the student and teacher perspectives. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

This session explains the MA TESOL, MA Applied Linguistics, and the Micro-credential currently offered by the University of Birmingham. The programs are part-time, asynchronous learning so that your studies can fit into your schedule. The presenter, Joanne McCuaig is a graduate of the MA Applied Linguistics and a current Doctoral Researcher in the department. She will present the information about the programs and explain her personal experience as a distance based learner. She is also able to answer questions about the PhD application process and her experience as a PhD student.   Click here for details about the program: https://canvas.bham.ac.uk/courses/11732   Alternatively you can send your questions to the department using this email address: ELALpg@contacts.bham.ac.uk MYSTERY EASTER EGG

For many years, academics, psychologists, teacher trainers and teachers have been trying to define how to motivate students. We read about these techniques every day but we never find out if they are finally implemented or work out.

The assumption that, maybe, instead of trying to find out how we motivate “students”, we first try to find out how to motivate “people” will be primarily discussed. The speaker will also try to demonstrate that the motivation we are seeking for learning a language is the same that we need in our everyday lives. We also need to be aware of the “dark side of motivation” as a pitfall that teachers may be falling into often without realizing it. All these assumptions and ideas will be accompanied by suggestions on how they can be positively transferred through ELT tasks.

Let’s help any teacher transform from an educator into a motivator. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

In this seminar, I will give shortcuts to graduate students, recent graduates, and developing professionals on how to design research and publish quickly. My talking points will emanate from personal experience, literature review, and interviews with research associates. To this end, I hope to provide strategies to help others graduate and publish on time. Attaining a graduate degree is an early step in starting a professional career in academics. However, graduate supervisors cannot always find time to help students with research designs and write-ups. Further, graduate degree programs often focus more on coursework than writing which creates an abundance of graduate degree holders ill-prepared for publishing in their careers. To remedy this, my presentation will explore solutions to research and academic writing challenges reported by graduate students and early professionals, including issues related to work-life balance, the co-author relationship, the write-up, and the strategies to publish in academic journals. The interactive component of this workshop entails voluntary participation in designing your own moc (or real) research projects which we can critique together. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

If you’re struggling with online teaching, or thinking about how to improve it, reflective practice is for you! Among the best reflective tools are tasks, particularly observation tasks. However, most of these were designed with the traditional classroom in mind. Can we still use these tasks? How? The purpose of this session is to address these questions.

This workshop will be in two parts. After briefly rehearsing some terminology, the facilitators will present tasks from some of the standard resources categorised according to their applicability to ‘the new normal’: tasks that can be used, those that can’t, and those that require adaptation. The bulk of the time will be spent in the second, highly interactive, section. Participants will work in small groups to create tasks for their own contexts. The takeaways will be tasks participants can either use or adapt as, as well as ideas for self-designed tasks. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

In this presentation, we describe online materials designed for groups of sixth and seventh graders with diverse social, racial, and cultural roots. To help children depressed in times of loss, disease, and social distancing during the pandemic, we turned to Asian, African, and Native Brazilian stories of characters who faced hardships and made their dreams come true. The objective is to widen students’ reading repertoire and promote multimodal analysis. After storytelling sessions and discussions about songs, tales, poems, historical documents, and myths from different parts of the world, learners were invited to write back to such narratives, criticizing the texts and reconfiguring them in different discourse genres. Therefore, they had the opportunity of interacting with the stories, reacting to them, and acting socially (or even dramatically) according to the themes tackled. EASTER EGG 5

Watch all the Reel to Real 2021 Films, Student and Non Student Films! In this room the films will be playing in succession in an infinite loop.

This session will be a live synchronous watch party and discussion featuring some of the students films created by students from Nagoya City University. The teacher will introduce the course and process of planning and creating these films, and give some behind the scenes details about how they were made. The audience is encouraged to participate in the discussion, by asking questions and sharing your opinions and reviews of the films!

Watch all the Reel to Real 2021 Films, Student and Non Student Films! In this room the films will be playing in succession in an infinite loop.