The annually JALT-National Conference (2019, URL) is really amazing big, but is not easy to focus on the most important point of view. What is it? Seeing friends or working with colleagues on projects with could be helpful for the students. For the students future political projects, like working against global warming (Wp Portal) is somehow vitally important.In this context it is important to consider that Jalt is not only a national, but also a international conference, with corresponding traffic. (Gurdian has an article about this). Sure, foccussing on climate chance and climate justice is everywhere important, but what is the special contribution of an organization like JALT? What has the fight for climate justice to do with language policy in Japan? The first point is reflexive and has to do with the use of language, more specific with English as a "hypercentral language" (as de Swaan 2001 calls it). This means that the climate justice is a global issue, therefore it also an issue for a global language. The second point is that environmental issues are taken serious in JALT (URL: environmental comimittee). But of course no conference would be the most environmental friendly solution, but then the core activities of JALT would not take place. And that is what I call: "Language policy on the ground", which is related to the first point (global communication), but JALT is working to bridge global (English) and local communication. In this sense the agency of the learner is really central (more on this has Benson 2011), but the agency of the teachers also. Of course teachers should do their job properly and this sense "efficacy" is important. However, is more teacher efficacy a solution for the problem of climate chance. Efficacy is compatible with a top-down paradigm. But teacher's (and learner's) agency is solution for groundbreaking chances, which are inevitable. Only changes from the ground and on the ground can cause the necassary paradigm shift. Of course there has to be a comination of bottom up and top down approaches for an overall change. While there is no shortage of (partly) really good top down programs, like the SDGs from the UNO (URL), bottom up change are not that easy to find. One approach, combining top down and bottom up in language learning is the CEFR. Also in the case of the CEFR top down approaches (from governments or big organizations) are more prominent then bottom up inputs. Therefore the CEFR & LP SIG (inside JALT) is forstering bottom up approaches. This is not new. The novelty of our approach now is that we try to forster a more local and networked approach, which continuing communications. Our forum (15.25h-16.55h, Room 904) on Sunday (3.11.2019) is scheduled to provide this....
References:
Benson, Phil (2011), Teaching and Researching Autonomy, 2. ed., Pearson de Swaan, Abraham (2001), Words of the world: The Global Language System, Blackwell
