David Paul

David Paul – Featured Speaker @ KOTESOL 2024

 Featured Session

Using Classroom Games Effectively with Young Learners

This presentation will address key issues that we face when using games with East Asian elementary school children. How can we maximize learning through games? How can we keep the children’s focus on learning? What kinds of games are most effective? This presentation will look at games from the perspective of self-determination theory and constructivist psychology. According to self-determination theory, we are motivated to develop and change if three universal psychological needs are met: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. And constructivism emphasizes the central role of the child as an active learner who constructs their own meaningful interpretation of whatever they are learning. This presentation will look at how both of these approaches apply to classroom games and their implications for using games effectively.

The presentation will directly relate theory to practice. The aim is for teachers who attend the presentation to have a chance to both think about the deeper principles involved when using classroom games and to gain practical ideas that can be applied immediately in the classroom. The presentation will also show how classroom games can be used to help children develop their ability to handle uncertainty and confusion, which is at the root of a child’s ability to play a positive role in a world that is full of different cultures, races, and beliefs. 

 Invited Second Session

Fun and Effective Classroom Game Activities

If learning itself feels like a game, and if children feel that they are discovering a fascinating new world of English through games that they would also enjoy outside the classroom, it is much more likely that the children will be motivated to learn English both in the class and between lessons away from the classroom. And it is much more likely that they will use English in their daily lives. How do we go about achieving this in practice? This presentation will look at examples from two different approaches: gamification and games-based learning. 

Gamification of a lesson means having an overall game theme that ties a lesson together and having engaging game elements that are applied during the course of a lesson. Individual activities within a gamified lesson may or may not be games.  For example, the theme of a lesson might be space exploration, and each child or each team could have a rocket that travels through space, discovering planets and avoiding dangerous monsters or aliens.

A games-based lesson is different. In a games-based lesson, much, and maybe all, of the learning and practice of English is through individual games. The second part of this presentation will look at examples of classroom games and everybody will play some of these games.

 Biosketch

David Paul graduated with an MA from Cambridge University, specializing in social psychology. In the early 1980s, he started teaching by himself in an apartment in Hiroshima, and this quickly grew into a successful group of schools that also had franchises in Korea and Thailand. His schools became centers for the professional development of teachers in the region, running teacher training courses and setting up MA programs with British universities. He also founded ETJ (English Teachers in Japan), a free volunteer group that supports teachers in Japan and currently has around 10,000 members. As his schools grew, he had opportunities to write ELT coursebooks and resource books, including Finding Out, Teaching English to Children in Asia, Communicate, Communication Strategies, and Songs and Games Phonics. Most of these books became best sellers. His schools closed in 2010, and he then established Language Teaching Professionals to continue to support the professional development of teachers. He also has an active Language Teaching Professionals channel on YouTube, where he uploads teacher training videos for teachers of young learners; an active Teaching English Around the World group on Facebook; and other social network groups and pages that support teachers. 

Select Sites
David Paul: LinkedIn.
Language Teaching Professionals Website.
Language Teaching Professionals: YouTube Channel.
English Teachers in Japan Website.
Books by David Paul.
David Paul Article in The English Connection.

 Return to Invited Speakers webpage.
 Return to International Conference frontpage.