Dr. Browne is Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Meiji Gakuin University. He is a specialist in Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition and Extensive Reading, especially as they apply to online learning environments, and has written dozens of research articles, books, and textbooks over his 30 years in Japan. In addition to his work in creating several important new corpus-based word lists and a wide range of free online tools to teach, learn and create texts based on these lists, he has also developed many free online ER/EL and vocabulary learning sites, tools and apps, working hard to share this knowledge through countless presentations, seminars and hands-on workshops around the world.

Lecture 1: The New General Service List Project: Meeting the Needs of EFL Learners, Teachers and Materials Developers

by Dr. Charles Browne

This presentation discussed five free corpus-derived word lists that the presenter helped to create in order to help meet the needs of second language learners of English, as well as introduced some of the interesting research studies that have been done over the past few years using these word lists. The lists included:

• the New General Service List (NGSL), a list of words which provide the highest coverage of written, general English

• the NGSL-S, which provides extremely high coverage of spoken general English

• the New Academic Word List (NAWL) for important academic vocabulary

• the Business Service List (BSL) for general business English and

• the TOEIC Service Lists (TSL) for TOEIC test preparation.

Lecture 2: Free Corpus-based Word Lists and the Online Tools to Exploit Them

by Dr. Charles Browne

This session introduced and demonstrated a large and growing number of free and paid online tools and resources for helping to utilize the five word lists created by the presenter as well as for vocabulary learning in general. The tools can be used for teaching, learning, materials creation as well as for research and analysis. The tools included interactive flashcards, diagnostic tests, games, vocabulary profiling apps, text creation tools, and more.

Presentation 1: Me, Myself, and Eye: Struggles of a Visually Impaired Student

by Heather McCulloch

Because Heather’s disease is rare, she began by explaining what it is. She then discussed daily struggles (though she prefers calling them lifestyles), both serious and comical, she faces and further discussed struggles visually impaired students face. She offered ways for the teacher to assist students with the same struggles.

McCulloch was born legally blind and at age 11 she was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a retinal disease with no known cure. She refuses to let this slow her down. She loves to work hard and live life to the fullest. Her accomplishments include receiving a MA TESOL, working as a part-time lecturer at various universities in Gunma, surfing in Malibu, and climbing Mt. Fuji. Her motto is “The only thing that can stop you is you.”

Presentation 2: The Effects of Overseas Study on High School Studnets' Second Langauge Memory Ability

by David Coulson

This session concerned the effect of a year abroad on the English ability of high-school students. The task was elicited imitation, where people repeat short texts as accurately as possible. The texts were very simple, written with high-frequency phrases from Martinez and Schmitt's (2012) Phrasal Expression List. Formulaic language is now recognized as central in language processing, facilitating memory function. The question was to what degree such language is learned implicitly while abroad. The result indicated that expliciting learning the most common phrases of English would help strengthen English ability. Further, extensive reading is a source of reinforcement of L2 ability. Coulson showed a snapshot of the exposure to phrasal expressions available from reading materials available at Extensive Reading Central.