The Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages hosted a forum on the Sunfull movement for a sound Internet culture as part of its international conference held at Sookmyung Women’s University over the weekend.

More than 1,500 participants attended the two-day event organized by the country’s largest gathering of teachers of English to share their knowledge and improve language education, according to the organizer.

The annual conference included lectures, workshops and seminars on teaching methods and research, as well as KOTESOL’s annual business meeting.

Under the theme “Methodologies, Technologies, and Communities of Practice,” this year’s panel included professors Mike Levy of the Brisbane Universities Language Alliance and Glenn Stockwell of Waseda University in Tokyo, who explained the use of mobile devices in language learning.

This year, the conference also had a special panel discussion led by Min Byoung-chul, professor of International Studies at Konkuk University, who is also founder of the Sunfull movement.

The Sunfull movement is a non-profit international campaign with the purpose of putting a stop to cyber-bullying in response to a number of Korean celebrities being driven to commit suicide by malicious comments posted on the Internet.

Min launched the campaign in 2007 to encourage young people to post positive comments on the Internet, and currently more than 4,000 students in elementary, middle and high schools are participating in the Sunfull movement.

And so far the members have posted over 3.2 million positive comments on the Internet, according to him.

Under the theme of “Bullying: Looking for Solutions,” Min introduced the Sunfull movement to the participants and described the activity it is engaged in to counter society’s growing problem.

During the panel discussion, the teachers who adapted Sunfull in their classrooms shared ideas and experiences about possible solutions to combat bullying at schools and cyber-bullying.

“This was a great opportunity to introduce our Sunfull program to teachers who are here in Korea teaching English. I hope that through these teachers we can expand Sunfull to more students, as well as to other countries,” Min said.

By Oh Kyu-wook (596story@heraldcorp.com)