In this interactive session, participants will be invited to reflect on their own teaching career within the life cycle framework as proposed by Sikes (1985), Fessler (1985), and Huberman (1989; 2001). Using the five phases in Sikes' life cycle model and exploring the concepts of growth, challenges and transformation, participants will be encouraged to discuss their own journey as educators in pairs/groups. Finally, everyone will be asked to share their thoughts, opinions and comments with the whole group.

Language learning requires various strategies to be successfully followed to obtain proficiency. This study aimed to ascertain how students actually learn, exploring six types of language learning strategies used by students in Davao City. This presentation will explain the differences in the frequency of strategy use across grade level and gender. The six learning strategies compared were metacognitive, social, cognitive, compensation, affective, and memory. The Proportional Cluster Random Sampling Technique was used for 500 respondents from 2,178 students. A two- way ANOVA analyzed any significant differences in the strategies used across grade level and gender. One of the main results implies that for those more exposed to English, metacognitive strategies are preferred, while those with less experience favor memory strategies.

To establish a basis for investigating teacher talk adjustment and self-reflection in teaching English, the presenter conducted a pilot study of an English lesson for a Japanese elementary school in Myanmar, taught online due to the Covid-19 pandemic by a female Japanese teacher. The study focused on the Small Talk section and was analyzed by using the IRF framework (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), teacher talk categories (Watanabe, Sakai & Urano, 1996), and SETT framework (Walsh, 2013), along with teacher’s self-reflection and interview data. The results show an interaction pattern of referential questions ending with either acknowledgement or form-focused feedback. The teacher’s self-reflection shows her concern for creating natural Small Talk conversation and how it connects to the lesson content.