Publication

This is the first-ever book edited and published by Komaba Language Association, supported by the 2013 special research grant from the Department of Language and Information Sciences, the University of Tokyo.

Excerpt from Preface

It has been approximately four years since the Komaba Language Association (KLA) was launched under the supervision of Professor Tom Gally. The original purpose of establishing KLA was to provide graduate students with an environment where they could freely address and discuss research related to language, especially second-language teaching and learning. Up to now, more than a dozen meetings have been held, and as many as 40 speakers from both inside and outside the University of Tokyo have presented their ideas in an intelligent and sophisticated manner.

It was in August of 2013 that Team Glo-Gai-Ken (Gurōbaru-ka Jidai no Gaikokugo Kenkyū), a joint research grant project supported by the Department of Language and Information Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo, was organized by Yoichi Sato, Maiko Nakatake, Yukinobu Satake, and Amy Mills. The four of us met and agreed that the allocated funds should be spent on two projects. The first was an International Student Colloquium to be held on November 16 and 17, 2013, on the Komaba Campus of the University of Tokyo. At that colloquium, the changing roles of foreign language teaching and learning in the context of globalization in Japan were passionately discussed. Faculty and students from the University of Tokyo were joined by people from throughout Japan, leading to a successful international student colloquium. Based on this colloquium, the second project was developed, which turned out to be this current book publication project.

This volume includes eight selected papers that were presented either at the international student colloquium or at previous meetings of KLA. A graduate from the Department of Language and Information Sciences, Misa Fujio, has contributed a keynote article on communication strateiges. Maiko Nakatake and Yukinobu Satake, two of the members of Team Glo-Gai-Ken, submitted papers that were developed out of their on-going doctoral dissertation research projects. Joy Taniguchi, with the help of her husband, wrote a paper on bilingual children’s literacy. Megumi Okugiri, who has recently obtained her Ph.D., talked about the acquisition of relative clauses by university EFL students based on her doctoral dissertation. In addition to these papers written in English, two in Japanese are included: one by Mikie Nishiyama, and the other by Norihiko Kochi. Coincidentally, both papers address the issues of textbooks used in English classrooms. While Nishiyama’s study focuses on the categories of tasks, Kochi discusses how kōchi-shūshoku (post-modification) is presented in junior high school English textbooks. The last article, by Yoichi Sato, sheds light on business English as a lingua franca (BELF) used by non-native speakers of English (Japanese and Chinese) in the context of global business in Asia. Although each of these eight papers confronts different issues of foreign language teaching/learning with different approaches, they all will definitely play facilitative roles in considering the changing roles of foreign language teaching/learning in the context of globalization in Japan.

As a concluding remark, it should be noted that this volume is the first book edited and published by Komaba Language Association. On behalf of the organizing committee of KLA, we would like to express our deepest appreciation to all those who have continuously supported our research activities.

February 5, 2014 Tom Gally, Yoichi Sato, Maiko Nakatake, Yukinobu Satake, and Amy Mill