This year saw a ‘changing of the guard’ for Hiroshima JALT. Of the 5 primary officer positions, 4 were taken over by volunteers who were completely new to their roles, and 3 of those were first time officers. Inevitably there were some glitches along the way, but with considerable patience and perseverance, the chapter executive board was able to emerge from the experience relatively unscathed!
Fortunately neither the quality of our programmes nor our membership levels suffered – in fact the provision of high quality programmes continued unabated, and the number of members actually increased. If re-elected, we’d anticipate a much smoother ride over the next year! The provision of high quality snacks also continued unabated, thanks entirely to the incredible generosity of our facilities chair Miharu Kihara, always the first to arrive and the last to leave. Facilities Chair is all too often an unsung appointment, but suffice to say that Miharu is a very much-appreciated member of the team. Hiroshima JALT salutes you!
Highlights of the year? Despite having less than three months’ planning time, we put together a successful mini-conference in March, featuring 8 presentations on Teaching Children and Teaching Adults. The chapter also sponsored two local members (first-time National Conference presenters Eleanor Carson & Hidenori Kashihara) to present at the National Conference in November 2011. Please be sure to give them your support in Tokyo.
In a further effort to support less experienced researchers who wished to hone their investigative skills, we offered the innovative workshop/seminar ‘Quantitative Research 101’ (October 2nd). With 24 attendees, this proved to be a great success, and many thanks are due to Carol Rinnert, Ian Willey and Hiroe Kobayashi for their hard work and excellent presentations. Hopefully this has opened the door to more such full-day study programmes in the future.
Finally, the chapter only thrives thanks to the loyalty of its members, and the unstinting hard work of its volunteers, the officers who turn out every month to put the programmes together. Please reward this selfless volunteer spirit by continuing to give Hiroshima JALT your full support in the next year and beyond!
*Caveat: At the time of writing the October Meeting and the ‘Quantitative Research’ workshop/seminar had not yet been held. Consequently the figures are not available. However, they will be published later in a separate report.
SUMMARY:
The Hiroshima JALT Chapter meetings took place once a month as usual in HICC (Hiroshima International Conference Center).The Children/Older Learners Mini-Conference was held in March at the good offices of the Hiroshima YMCA. The innovative ‘Quantitative Research’ workshop/seminar was an extra addition to the study calendar in October and held for strategic reasons at Aster Plaza International Youth House.
Structure-wise, the Hiroshima JALT Committee is still made up of 10 people and two of those deal directly with Membership Issues. Next year will see an inversion of the two candidates to allow a better sharing of administrative and practical experience.
Attendance-wise, Officer Turnout this year averaged 8/10 people per meeting whilst around 18 JALT Members and 9 Friends of JALT attended. These three sets of figures are higher than in 2010. Therefore, coupled with the average attendance for the first six meetings 2011 being actually higher than 2010 (196 compared to 184), it could be said that Hiroshima JALT is growing in popularity.
The umbrella-like composition of the Chapter Membership is as varied as usual; professionally ranging from educators in kindergarten through to
teachers at the tertiary level. Other members from different walks of life continue to express interest and bring much to the meetings too, and so we will always try to give anyone a warm welcome.
A huge thanks to everyone who comes to Hiroshima JALT and we hope that we can, with you, create and teach, and learn and grow together !
My responsibility at Hiroshima JALT started with an unexpected surprise last year. My journey on becoming the treasurer required two big steps. One was to register as a JALT member and the second was to assume the role of treasurer. I would like to express my gratitude to Emi Sugita, who as the previous treasurer had contributed her time to us for so many years. She has been a great help to me and was always there when I needed her. Simon, our JALT chapter president, has also been very kind to me in answering my novice questions and has offered me timely advice. Though our budget is limited, with the hard work of the other officers we are able to make each meeting interesting and fulfilling. Hiroshima JALT is one of the largest chapters in Japan and quite active as we meet almost every month. So I stay moderately busy throughout the year. So far, I have spent time understanding the foundation of my work and I hope I will be able to stand on my own two feet next year, working more efficiently while thoroughly understanding the requirements.
Members are informed mainly via an electronic mailing list. They can also find all of the information online at our homepage <http://hiroshima-jalt.org/> or at our Facebook page <http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hiroshima-JALT/165483106820785>.
The new Facebook page has gradually attracted followers, including businesses in the ELT industry. Also, the discovery of the ELT Calendar helped us advertise to a larger audience outside of Hiroshima. In addition, we have grown a little closer with the local chapter of ETJ (English Teaching in Japan) and cross-list events. The most effective means of publicizing events were the mailing lists (to members and friends of Hiroshima JALT) and the webpage. The latter generated on average 10 views per day in 2011 with activity peaking around the Hiroshima JALT mini-conference in March and then again in September as we got ready for the Research 101 workshop in October. Many of these views came via search engines using search strings related to particular speakers at our events or teaching English in Hiroshima. Many people also arrived at the site via updates on Faceboook.
Although we maintain a Twitter account, it doesn’t seem appropriate for the goal of publicizing events. Only Tweeting once or twice a month doesn’t really attract new interest and the people who are following us are already on the mailing list and perhaps the Facebook page as well. My predecessor suggested it was a good way to keep in touch with other chapters in our region, and I would like to put more effort into this in the future. We also advertised on a local SNS called Hiroshima Residents, but the audience might be too general for our goal as very few people attended events as a result of that advertising.
2011 was another good year for Hiroshima JALT. Two events stood out – the mini-conference in March which, though having fewer presentations, attracted roughly the same number of attendants as previous years. The all day research workshop held at the beginning of October attracted members from as far afield as Chiba and Nagasaki.
Other than those two events, there were eight regular meetings. These featured local and national speakers and we were also lucky enough to get one speaker (with local connections) from a UK university to present for us. Overall meetings were fairly well attended – usually around 20 people.
We are currently working on getting a balanced, attractive programme for Hiroshima JALT for 2012.
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