JASAL 2024 National Conference: Post-Conference Page

JASAL2024 took place at Soka University, on Saturday, October 26, 2024. It was held in a hybrid format and had around 100 participants. This year, the focus was on Collaboration in Self-Access Language Learning. Visit the 2024 pre-conference page here.

Schedule

Friday, October 25, 2024
A SAC Tour was held in Chofu, Tokyo, at the Self-Access Park, University of Electro-Communications (電気通信大学). More details and photos are here.

Saturday, October 26, 2024
This year was our third year offering the conference in a hybrid format, meaning that there were both online and on-site presentations. As in the previous conference, online presentations were screened in presentation rooms at the venue, and all on-site presenters signed into Zoom and shared their slides. In this way, online participants could also attend their presentations. Some elements, such as the Poster Session and a student-led tour of the self-access facilities, the World Language Center, were available for on-site participants only (see some photos of the SAC tour below).

Presentations

Videos, slides, and posters from select presentations can be viewed here.

Conference Program JASAL2024 Download

Conference Theme & UnPlenary Session

This year, we wanted to highlight the power of Collaboration in self-access language learning. As a community-based learning model, we all know how self-access thrives on the connections made between self-access centre users, service/event participants and the educators who support the facilities. Equally, many successful self-access innovations would not be possible without collaboration between teachers, administrators, learning advisors, students and other people connected to self-access centres.
At this year’s JASAL conference, we invited the participants to share their own practices and research on the role of collaboration in your self-access context, and how it has contributed to your self-access environment and supported learner autonomy. Instead of a traditional plenary session, attendees were invited to participate in a special session of focus group discussions aimed at tackling real-world challenges and exploring innovative research avenues within their field (see photos below).

Inspired by Renaissance Weekend and introduced to the JASAL Board via Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, we aimed at JASAL2024 to foster an environment where diverse perspectives converge to generate creative and tangible solutions to the issues that are most pressing to you–our members. For more information about the ideas shared, follow this link (Padlet).

Registration Fees

Due to an extremely generous grant awarded to JASAL by Soka University, there were no registration fee for JASAL members at this year’s conference, for either online or on-site participants.
We’d like to thank Soka University for their support for the conference.
JASAL Members: ¥0!
Non-JASAL members: ¥500 (payable by bank transfer)

Networking Reception

20:00-22:00: Conference Networking Dinner at Aangan Nepali restaurant in Shin-Okubo (near Shinjuku in Tokyo) was held with around 30 participants.