Day1: Oct 30, 2026 (Fri) – Keynote Speaker
Dr David Marsh
CEO, MED Finland
Session Title
Towards Educator Genki: Turning Trends into Opportunity
Abstract
Two major shifts are reshaping education worldwide. First, society is redefining what it means to be educated in a technologically interconnected world. Second, advances in cognitive science and language research are placing language education at the center of innovation.
The growing significance of multiliteracies is transforming how we understand language and communication. Research increasingly shows that learning additional languages brings cognitive and broader benefits beyond linguistic competence alone. This strengthens the case for making additional language learning core for all students.
At the same time, transversal competences — creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and intercultural understanding — are increasingly essential. Japanese, with its multiple scripts and culturally embedded communication patterns, offers particular value in fostering abstraction, perspective-taking, and conceptual agility.
By turning these trends into opportunity, language education can cultivate both learner and educator genki — renewing energy, resilience, confidence, and future readiness in an era of digitally saturated lives.
Biography
Dr. David Marsh (Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London) is actively involved in developing bilingual education globally, and a key architect of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). His current initiative, The Children of Cyberspace: Adapting Learning Processes and Spaces, explores how schools can redesign practices, environments, and pedagogies to enhance young people’s wellbeing and readiness for an uncertain future.
Day2: Oct 31, 2026 (Sat) – Keynote Speaker
Dr. Julie Choi
Associate Professor, Additional Languages, Faculty of Education
The University of Melbourne, Victoria
Session Title
Working the Current: Connecting Capabilities and the Language Teacher
Abstract
In most classrooms, students bring far more than what gets measured. Their languages, stories, and ways of knowing are present in the room, yet rarely treated as resources for learning. Curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment culture are organised in ways that keep students’ funds of knowledge and identity largely hidden, not because students lack capability, but because they lack opportunities to connect what they already know to what the classroom is asking of them. Drawing on Arts-Rich Translanguaging Pedagogy, this keynote introduces the concept of connecting capabilities and presents a case study of multilingual secondary students whose sophisticated thinking became educationally visible through multimodal, arts-rich approaches. Using a theoretical framework that maps what learners bring, how affect and cognition work together, and the conditions that make learning possible, this talk invites language teachers across all levels to consider how these ideas might reshape what they notice, value, and build on in their own teaching. The test is the test. What happens in the learning that surrounds it does not have to be.
Biography
Julie Choi is an Associate Professor in Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne and the developer of Arts-Rich Translanguaging Pedagogy. A teacher educator and critical applied linguist, she teaches across the Master of Teaching, TESOL, and Modern Languages Education, and works with parents, young learners, low literacy learners, and second-generation speakers in community settings. She researches the embodied, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of multilingual meaning-making for language and literacy learning, including the role of digital tools and AI, and is the author of multilingual picture books, including Kimchi Is for Everyone, that open up language and literacy practices for the reclamation of voice, identity, and belonging among multilingual speakers.
