Today was another very busy conference in Korea with lots of presenters mixed between CALL and the Young Learners group. Plus of course a massive meal in the evening with a whole pig as the main course!

First up I had a special workshop for kindergarten teachers. And they were great. It was the first time for them all so it was basics of How are you? + Monster Game + requests of Mr Wolf + Mingle, Left & Right and Thank you.

Then it was the conference proper with quite a few people from last year so it was Name song warm up, Under the Sea + Sticky Fingers + Nemo Game, then Do you like..? + Do you like Karuta. It was interesting to see the Korean teachers make the same mistake as Japanese teachers by asking “Do you like apple?” instead of “apples”. My Korean isn’t quite good enough to explain why yet though!

Generally though the level here is way ahead of Japan. People are very much focussed on research and getting numbers and concrete results to compare teaching methods and ideas. You really have to be on your toes to keep up and there’s none of the “well, that seems nice but….” attitude that you often find in academic circles in Japan.

Then I had a CALL workshop. I was intending to go pretty deep with the hows and whys of using the computer side of Genki English. Mainly the rule of “it’s got to be so, so, so simple!” and of course “kids first!”. There were quite a few kids’ teachers there, so I showed off the GE material with Under, on, in + the game, the talking picture books and the Hip Hop quizzes. They really jumped at the hip hop stuff!

Then lots of chats with lots of very interesting people, lots of fantastic food and some beers and great company in the evening!

So once again, thank you very much and let’s work on getting even more genkiness into Korea!

PS Things to remember for next year: Tooth brush ( Korean hotels don’t have them!) and a power convertor.