APET

APET is an abbreviation for Academy of Professional English Trainers.
It is the name of the educational service my company BizCom offers to English teachers working at all levels.
There are nine seminars falling into mainly three different lines.
One of them focuses on participants English ability itself,
and there are six different seminars falling under this line.
I am in charge of all six.
On March 20, and 21, two of these six seminars were held at BizCom Osaka Center.

The one on 20th was Active Grammar.
Its main focus is to help participants brush up their ability to express themselves
with intermediate to advanced grammar.
But there is a secondary purpose to the seminar.
Participants can get tips for how they can teach grammar to their students at their schools.
Many learners of English have an unfortunately negative image of grammar
mainly due to the way it was taught to them at school.
But it has an unshakably important place in one's overall communication ability,
and therefore it cannot be neglected.
The primary goal of the seminar is having participants realize
that grammar can be learned and also taught in fun ways.
Gathering from comments I got in questionnaires after the seminar,
my effort was quite successful.
I had quite a few of them say, "The seminar was packed with practical ideas
I can immediately try in my next lesson!" and similar comments along the same line.

The one I just finished a couple of hours ago is called Active Speaking.
The main purpose of this seminar is to help participants
become comfortable with conducting their lessons all in English.
The seminar divides a lesson into several parts,
and then examine the classroom English the teacher needs
in order to teach is smoothly.
Some activities are simple to manage.
But there are activities that require a high level of sophistication.
Management of pair practice and freer activities is particularly challenging to many participants.
And it cannot be taught verbally, so I ask all the participants to learn it by practicing it over and over again.
But grown-ups do not enjoy mechanical repetition.
So it is my job to make the repetitive practice interesting
by inserting episodes and data every now and them
to reinforce the purpose of it,
as well as by encouraging peer feedback
because participants often feel motivated getting a positive evaluation for what they did.

Feedback I got from the participants in today's seminar was very positive.
I also got some very honest request that's very constructive and useful for me
to further revise the seminar.

Teaching two 5-hour seminars two days in a row was physically challenging,
and mentally fairly strenuous, but it was tremendously rewarding.
What's most exciting about all of the APET seminars
is that the participants are teachers,
so what I teach does not stop there.
They teach their students, so my influence will spread all beyond them.
Filtered through the teachers' perception and individual skills and philosophies, of course,
but nonetheless it goes beyond them.
That's what I truly love about what I do.