Conferences

The weekend before last found me down in Nagoya attending the annual conference of the Japanese Association of Language Teachers (JALT). This is probably the most important, or at least, well attended, conference for Japan based language teachers, though given the rather middle-aged fraternity feel of many of the participants, this tends to undermine the academic respectability it strives for. By this I mean the overpowering sense of American-led clubbiness that pervades the proceedings (Yanks make up by far the largest majority of members in JALT). Presentations are seen as a forum to interrupt the speakers with supposed 'witty' comments; the speakers often pander to their pals (or 'dudes') with in-jokes; there are constant interjections, often shouted, and questions invariably begin with "Well, in my case..." and end up as vanity proclamations on the inherent superiority of their way of doing things.
Now before this descends any further into an overly cynical exercise in Uncle Sam bashing, I should explain that such 'dudes' are in a minority, albeit, unfortunately, a painfully vocal minority. By assiduously choosing which presentations to attend, the worst excesses of this insidious back-slapping bonhomie can be easily avoided.
In fact, I attended a number of very good presentations, particularly in the area of bilingualism/biliteracy. For me the highlight of the conference was meeting Mary O'Sullivan from Ballinskelligs in Kerry, who turned out to be (a) a remarkably nice woman; and (b) Jack O'Connor's first cousin. So, no more ticket worries come All-Ireland Sunday.
Amongst some other observations of the conference were:
* The baffling popularity of black-white check fleck wool trousers. I know, I know, what the hell was I doing looking at the people's trousers, but the sheer, ubiquitous, monochrome awfulness of these trousers couldn't be avoided.
* The sweeping generalizations beloved of the plenary speakers, who take the same speech on a multi-country tour, in a one-size-fits-all approach to second language acquisition. Context is blithely ignored and pronouncements, carved from stone, are uttered with with an authority worthy of Moses. Any dissent is summarily dismissed with a condescending "The research clearly states..". Not in Japanese it doesn't. And yes, I'm talking about you, Marianne 'Moses' Nikolov.
* Nagoya is an unremarkably bland city. Bombed to bits back in World War II, it was subsequently entombed in concrete so that it now possesses all the distinctive charm of a large, FedEx distribution warehouse. At least Muroran has surf. Plus, it's the home of Toyota and as I drive a Mazda, I was never going to cut it much slack anyway.
* The Miso Katsu though, is sublime.
* Japanese presenters, or rather the four I saw, tend to like their statistical analyzes. A lot. So no presentation is complete without a baffling digression into their methods of analysis which invariably include correlation coefficients, r points, anova's, scatter regression and lots of numbers.
The results people, show me the results. I don't care how you got them, just tell me what they are and if they are in any way important.
* The breath taking brilliance of Japanese public transport. From our house here in Muroran to the conference venue in Nagoya city centre, I took public transport all the way. Bus, plane, train, no delays, everything smooth and efficient, arrivals and departures on time, to the minute, people, to the minute.