Category: IICLLHawaii2017
What’s Love got to do with it? Motivating Intercultural Competency and Language Learning Through Discussions of Intercultural Romantic Love Relationships
While English is a required subject in Japanese junior and senior high schools, Japanese university students’ communicative language competency is generally very poor. Many blame this on the Japanese entrance exam system, which overemphasizes grammar rather than communicative competency. To counterbalance this, many Japanese universities have started creating “Language Cafés” and “Language Lounges” where students …
Teaching Japanese Across Borders: An Original Intercultural Approach
The goal of this paper is to present to the international academic public a unique and original book for teaching Japanese, the first of its kind in Serbia. However, its significance is not limited only to the students of Japanese in Serbia, because this manual can be the source of ideas for teachers of Japanese …
Introducing the First Large-Scale English Collocational Chunk List and Innovative Methods in Which Collocational Fluency Can Be Mastered
This presentation will discuss the findings of the speaker’s PhD thesis which identified the most common chunks of English. The resulting large-scale list is the first of its kind, and a major breakthrough in that a resource is now available that replaces the dated method of studying via word lists. Studying such chunks is not …
Facilitating Language Use and Communication in ESL/EFL Classrooms through Game-Based Learning
The objectives of this paper are (a) to argue for the benefits of immersive virtual environments to enhance language use and communication in ESL/EFL classrooms using theories of second language acquisition (SLA); namely, sociocultural SLA (Vygotsky, 1978) and psycholinguistic SLA (Long, 1985), and the theory of situated learning (Greeno, Collins & Resnick , 1996); (b) …
Challenges for the Online English Curriculum
Curriculum is a control for any study; it exemplifies the teaching and learning theory including what to teach (content), how to teach (teaching pedagogy), and how to measure the results (evaluation). Online curriculum faces additional challenges both in theoretical implementation of English content and skills and by means of Information Technology. As English is important in …
Intensive English Program for Engineering Students: An Action Research
Most international students take pre-college or pre-graduate school Intensive English Programs (IEP) to improve English skills in order to fulfill the language requirement of universities. While most IEPs offer courses that address skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing for personal and academic enrichment, to prepare students for their future majors also needs to be …
Writing in a Foreign Language
For many Japanese students, writing is probably the most difficult skill in English. The Ministry of Education of Japan (MEXT) conducted research on the English proficiency of the third year (senior year) students of high school in 2014 and 2015. They reported that in writing and speaking the scores of tests were significantly lower than …
Junior College EFL Students Respond Better to a Formative Assessment Project Than a Paper Midterm
Replacing paper midterms with a challenging, assessment project is in line with Robinson and Ross’ ideas on measurement: “traditional skills-focused tests of EAP ability relate only weakly to learners’ ability to act on such skills in authentic task conditions (1996).” The Be Our Guest Midterm Assessment Project aimed to confirm that classroom-based, formative assessment leads to …
Effecting Positive Change in English Language Learning with Universal Design for Learning
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an instructional framework developed from education and neuroscience research. Based on the knowledge that there is no such thing as an ‘average’ learner, the central claim of UDL is that the diverse learning needs of students are best addressed through curricula and lessons that provide multiple means of Representation, …
Developing Spoken Corpora of Non-Native English Teachers to Assist in English Classroom Interactions
This study reports the classroom speech traits of non-native English language instructors (NNIs) observed from the bilingual spoken corpora compiled by the authors from four elementary school and two middle school English lessons in Japan. We will analyze our corpus structure using the four modes to specify the NNIs’ L2 classroom discourse introduced by Walsh …
An Application of Team-Based Learning (TBL) with Thai as a Foreign Language Course
Team-based learning (TBL) is a structured type of cooperative learning that has growing application in many education fields. As opposed to the conventional lecture where instructor lecturing to a group of students in some didactic presentation format, the role of instructor has changed to a cognitive coach in TBL. TBL improves academic outcomes by shifting …