Entries from December 2007 ↓

For many people, the upcoming holiday will be their first experience of the new ID requirements for foreigners when entering Japan. It is possible to pre-register your passport and fingerprints. This will allow you to use manned automated gates (I know, there is an oxymoron in there, but it is the government) at Narita on re-entry. That might speed things up.

Download the obscure guidelines
Get the application form

On Wednesday, December 13th, I did an in-house presentation on the principles underlying an effective vocabulary learning programme. This session focused on such practical considerations as: how many words learners need; which words are important; and how new vocabulary can be remembered. The slides for the presentation are contained in this post. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Paul’s Vocab Workshop

For the group presentations here is a worksheet to help the students get organized. In their groups they can work out the order of their individual presentations and write down who will introduce and conclude their group’s efforts. Also they can plan their own part of the show with a list of points they intend to make and the illustrations, charts or slides they need to create or collect. It should help.final-presentation.doc

This PowerPoint file offers a simple way for students to check their answers on the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) Quotation Marks Exercise in the Level 3 Binder.

Quotation Marks Exercise Answer Sheet

The lunch forum that was held on November 13 was a writing swap shop. Here are the activities and materials presented at the swap shop. For more information about these, please see the teachers listed below.

Peter Bellars
Deborah Bollinger
Damon Brewster
Alison von Dietze
Dan Jackson
Paul Joyce
Chihiro Tajima

writing swap shop folder 1

writing swap shop folder 2

On November 30th, I gave a workshop which demonstrated a couple of ways to make web-ready slideshows with voice narration. Here is a handout from the workshop which provides links to the software I used plus a couple of other alternatives. Click on the link to download the handout.

Making Slideshows Workshop Handout