The JALT 2010 National Conference was held in Nagoya again for the first time in 15 years. It was wonderful to have this major teaching conference in our area again. The theme of the conference was “Creativity: Outside the Box”, so there were a lot of presentations which drew on the findings and resources of NLP. Of particular interest was a lovely presentation by Francis Bolstad and Tim Murphey which looked at the use of chunking up and chunking down as a creative tool. Another great session involved five speakers who were talking about positive psychology in the language classroom (Marc Helgessen, Bill Synder, Curtis Kelly, Ben Blackwell, and again Tim Murphey who was mighty busy at this conference). The speakers were all emphasizing that learners learn more effectively when they are engaged and happy. They backed this up with stories, activities, and summaries of the latest neurological studies.
Marc Helgesen has a page with EFL activities that take account of research into positive psychology.