ETA-ROC and Another Weekend in Taipei
I spent this past weekend in Taiwan, attending the English Teaching Association of the Republic of China (ETA-ROC) conference. While the original intention was for a number of us ETA’s to go, it ended up that I went alone. I saw a number of talks Saturday… I went to a number of the more theoretical or quantitative talks and had a great time. I saw Krashen talk again, this time on the Comprehension Hypothesis. I have to say, he’s a fabulous speaker, and the case studies he looked at for this talk were fascinating: a Mexican immigrant who worked in a deli and learned Hebrew before he knew it, a culture where the rule is that you can’t marry someone who speaks the same language as you, etc. ^^ I also saw Andrew Cohen from Minnesota which made me miss Minnesota a bit.
The conference was held at the Chien Tan Youth Activity Center which has a beautiful pond and great view of the Grand Hotel, on the site of an old Shinto shrine.
As I recently did a little editing for a journal on English teaching here, I was invited to the presenters’ dinner Saturday night. While it was slightly awkward at first, not being a presenter myself, I soon met two representatives from the Korea and Philippines TESOL organizations who were very kind to me and we had some great conversations and laughs. (They are the two on the right in the first photo. The second photo is with the Filipino representative, Bernard Spolsky and me.)
I stayed overnight Saturday at the Eight Elephants hostel. Less than a year old, Eight Elephants is stylish, clean, and comfortable, though not the cheapest hostel in town. My experience there was great… I made a friend, a student of Special Education from Kaohsiung, and we went out to the nearby Shida night market. After randomly running into Kate who was in Taipei with her host family, she took me to a cafe she knew and we had a great time talking. While her English is great as well, we were talking completely in Chinese. After spending the day thinking about comprehensible input, it was great listening to her, understanding about 80%, and chiming in once in a while. As her interests were teaching and learning languages (including Japanese), we hit it off well with some great conversation. I look forward to seeing her again when I visit Kaohsiung in the near future.
On Sunday morning I saw another talk by Andrew Cohen, had lunch, and met up with a couple of the interns at the Fulbright Taiwan foundation who showed me around Taipei. We went to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and randomly ran into Dr. Wu Jing-jyi, the director of the Foundation, on the plaza. We then went to check out the Taipei Modern Art Museum (with the first .museum address I’ve ever actually seen), which was super cheap and very enjoyable, albeit being relatively small. (The last photo below is at the Taipei Story House, which is a historic building—we just took a picture outside without going in.)
We had some Hong Kong-style 燒臘 preserved meat for dinner. I came back to Nanao Sunday night feeling fulfilled and blessed by the people I’d met all weekend, at the conference, at the hostel, and around the city.
Related posts:
- Linguistics in 嘉義
- Weekend update: 師大 café, 南方澳, and 淡水
- Krashen The Party
- Taipei find: a dictionary of Chinese-Japanese false cognates
- A Saturday in 台北
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Tags: conference, English, linguistics, meat, museum, Taipei, Taiwan
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