JALT International Conference is the biggest conference for the scholarly group I joined since I came back to Japan. I don’t know how many people were there, but it was not like the 4Cs in the US, which attracts more than 3000 people, and it feels really big. By comparison, JALT International had a village feel to it, and I felt I already knew a lot of people, even though I had been with them for less than 6 months.
And I was busy. Now that I was a program co-chair for CUE (College and University Educators) and a Peer Support Group mentor, I had things to do and people to meet on top of attending presentations and looking for positions for next year. One regular attendee reminded me, “Don’t forget to eat.” It was a challenge since the official conference program did not schedule a lunch break, so it was always a choice between lunch and another session.
I attended quite a few sessions on technology, and these sessions were always well-attended. My favorite session was “Improve Speaking in ESP Using Chatbot and Speech Recognition” by Gary Ross and Jeanette Dennison. They performed a live demonstration of ChatGPT to pose as a patient for a medical student to interview and diagnose. Because it was a live demonstration, the presenters themselves did not know what ChatGPT would do: it delivered a brilliant performance of a cheeky and reluctant patient who resented the doctor’s probing questions into her [the patient was supposed to be female] personal life.
Talk of generative AI was everywhere, and we were rightly concerned about what it would do to language education and our job as language teachers. One presenter told me that he started the second class of the semester by casually telling his students to log on to their ChatGPT accounts. About 50% of the class was confused (“What is he talking about?” “Are we supposed to have an account?”); the other 50% logged in as a matter of fact. This was the status of ChatGPT proliferation among first-year college students as of April 2023. He and many others are trying to find a way to incorporate ChatGPT in our classroom while still engaging our students to produce texts of their own. I learned valuable insights from hearing many of their stories.