Abstracts
Presentations
Michelle Bautista (Kurume High School)
Making Meanings: The Use of Multimodality in the EFL Debate Class
According to Kress (2013), “Multimodality asserts that ‘language’ is just one among the many resources for making meaning.” In the context of EFL debate class where teachers of English are faced with the challenges of improving students’ motivation and improving their debating competence, the use of language is limiting for making meanings.
Multimodality provides EFL learners multiple or several different forms of representation with which they engage. These modalities may either be visual, auditory, textual, gestural, and graphical that can be combined and arranged to lead and support students in their thinking, listening, speaking, and writing tasks. The use of a multimodal teaching approach is an effective way to ensure that meaning-making takes place in the EFL debate class.
In this presentation, I will share with you multimodal activities and tasks that I use in my EFL debate class to help my students build their confidence and develop their debating skills.
Abigail Capitin-Principe (Nanzan University, Japan)
Using ReadWorks: How Students can make a Library in Readworks
ReadWorks is free website where students have access to a number of articles and short stories, fiction and non-fiction. It is relatively easy to create classes and have students join the classes. I use ReadWorks both for guided reading activities, and intensive reading. In this presentation, I will talk about how to create a library in ReadWorks, where students can choose articles that interest them. Having their own library in ReadWorks will hopefully encourage students to read more. It will also help educators keep tabs with what and how often, students read.
Hind Elyas (Niagara College, Saudi Arabia)
hindmoelyas@yahoo.com
Lifelong Learning Skills in 21st Century classrooms
The term 21st century skills refers to a broad set of knowledge, skills, work habits, and character traits that are critically important for students to succeed in today’s world. (Great schools Partnership, 2016). Today’s students want to work with their peers, they want to be inspired and challenged and they want technology to be implemented in their lessons. It is the responsibility of teachers to impart their students with real life skills and knowledge, help them become global citizens and make learning relevant, personalised and engaging. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills identified 4 Key skills that are essential in the 21st Century Classroom and they referred to them as the 4 Cs (2007). These skills include Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication, and Collaboration. The session will explain the different 21st Century skills that are needed to help students keep up with fast paced modern technology, and why these skills are so important. It will also provide an overview of the 4 Cs of 21st century skills and how they evolved to the 6 Cs, a more holistic model. The session will also provide examples of different 21st century strategies that should be used in today’s classroom to help learners achieve the best possible outcomes.
Ana Maria Flores (Nanzan University, Japan)
Role play approach to foster EFL learner's speaking skills in a task-based learning environment
This presentation will discuss theme-based role play as an alternative tool in task-based EFL learning and teaching environments and share topics for theme-based role play in an EFL classroom. Also, the presenter will briefly describe the origin of role play, explain what it is, present how it is valuable in the development of EFL learners’ social and communicative competence and discuss its benefits in EFL classrooms. Furthermore, this paper will present the three main stages of role play for its successful implementation in an EFL classroom.
Nancy Henaku (University of Ghana)
nhenaku@ug.edu.gh
Using Messaging Applications as Pedagogical Tools for Multimodal Composition
New media provides ample opportunities to teach language arts in a creative and engaged manner.In particular, messaging applications such as Line, WhatsApp or WeChat can be pedagogically deployed in the English classroom. In this presentation, I discuss how WhatsApp could be used for multimodal composition instruction. I narrate how I deployed this in a first year writing class in a Ghanaian university and the implications that this had for students' learning of multimodality and its affordances. I especially highlight the platform's significance for collaborative learning in and out of class, vocal practice and analysis and finally, for helping students reflect on the pragmatics of voicing.
Naoko Kato (Nanzan University, Japan)
kanaoko@gmail.com
Teaching Listening While Improving Social Skills
Participating in a listening activity may be challenging for some students because sustaining their motivation while identifying the important information is a problematic factor. Renukadevi (2014) stated the importance of improving listening has been pointed out as it is the base to learn a foreign language. Listening skill also promotes an amiable relationship between individuals and society (Abali & Yazici, 2020). In addition, Zúñiga and Gutiérrez (2018) emphasized implementing the communicative tasks that help students to improve social skills in the course of language development. Students’ state of mind, motivation, and attitude significantly affect language development in every skill (Kassem, 2018). In this presentation, the presenter shares an activity which induces students’ interest in the topic and simultaneously alleviates their anxiety by collaborating together.
David Kluge (Nanzan University, Japan)
klugenanzan@gmail.com
On Beyond Student Surveys: Alternative Research Methods
When a teacher has developed an interesting classroom activity, they sometimes desire to conduct research regarding the efficacy of the activity. Often the research starts with asking their students to answer questions on a survey. The teacher may write up the results for publication. There is nothing wrong with this as a first step. The question then becomes, “What's next?” This short presentation gives ideas of further steps, with short descriptions of types of quantitative research, qualitative research, and mixed-methods research. The presentation will mainly focus on articles that provide explanations of various research types and lists of freely downloadable tools to analyze the data.
Tuana Lopez Ibarra (Yeditepe University, Turkey)
tuanalopez1@gmail.com
A classroom-based study: Investigating Learners’ Perceptions of Summarizing Activities in the EFL Reading Classroom
This study examines 11-year-old EFL learners' perceptions of summarizing activities in the EFL reading classroom. Many researchers believe that conscious and unconscious thought processes occur during reading and that readers use many strategies to enhance certain aspects of comprehension, to construct meaning, or to solve problems that arise during reading. Therefore, they believe that the use of strategies is necessary to overcome the challenges readers may face. Since summarizing texts is one of these reading strategies, this study aims to investigate how students perceive summarizing texts in the classroom of English as a foreign language (EFL). In order to find out how students perceive these activities, participants were given a questionnaire with five statements. These five statements were to be rated by the participants according to their feelings and opinions, which ranged from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". The results of the study show that EFL learners find summaries helpful and useful for reading comprehension. They indicate that they understand reading texts better when they use summaries in their EFL reading instruction. The last part of the study provides suggestions on how we can incorporate summaries in our teaching and some implications not only for young learners but also for adult learners of all levels and ages.
Emily Marzin, Diane Raluy Turner & Tim Murphey (Kanda University of International Studies, Japan)
marzin-e@kanda.kuis.ac.jp
Learning at a Weekly French Community in a SALC
The context of this study is a student-led “French Table”, a multi-lingual community which aims at fostering students' interests and language abilities in French and other languages. It should also be mentioned that the researchers are also Francophones and participants of the French community. This narrative inquiry collects students' reflections expressed in their own written French language learning experiences using reflecting
tools such as “language learning histories”, multilingual journaling through weekly communal meetings at the “French table” in our SALC (Self-Access Learning Center). Participants also have the opportunity to meet the researchers face-to-face and in one on one recorded advising sessions throughout the semester to reflect on their involvement in the French community and its impact on their multilingual journaling.
Preliminary findings indicate that advising sessions and tools helped learners further reflect on their learning processes and their zones of proximal development (ZPD) and helped teachers adjust their zones of proximal adjustment (ZPA). The potential outcomes of this study might include further insights to consider students’ multilingualism and their involvement in a student-led community, measuring the possible impact on
their language learning processes. It is also our contention that the results of the present study will provide stakeholders, including language teachers, with some ideas on how to include further reflection and advising opportunities among learners.
Kevin Ottoson (Nagoya University of Foreign Studies)
okevin@nufs.ac.jp
Frameworks for teaching culture and critical thinking in the language classroom
The push for Japanese institutions of higher education to internationalize their curriculum and foster global jinzai (global human resources) is evident through recent different government initiatives (CAMPUS Asia, Global 30 Project, Top Global University Japan). While private universities largely see the efforts to internationalize the curriculum as the responsibility of mobility programs like study abroad (Yonezawa, et al., 2009), the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented many students from participating in these internationalization efforts. As a result, internationalization at home efforts through virtual exchange programs, like COIL, have increased in popularity. While virtual exchanges are more inclusive by letting all students participate in international exchanges, not all language teachers are able to facilitate a virtual exchange in their language classrooms. This presentation aims to present several different frameworks (Moran’s (2001) Cultural Elements Framework and Cultural Knowings Framework, and Risager & Svarstad’s (2020) Cycle Model of Intercultural Learning) for teaching culture and language in the classroom to internationalize their courses through fostering the linguistic skills and intercultural competence that the Council on Promotion of Human Resource Globalization Development (2012) describe as global jinzai.
Minae Sakai (Nanzan University)
minaesakai@gmail.com
Encouraging Shadowing with Graded Readers
Many Japanese learners of English have spent more time reading the language than speaking/listening. This pedagogical background affects and limits their oral communication skills, especially listening, by forming distorted sound image of English in their mind. Shadowing is an effective technique to modify this sound image and develop learners’ listening skills and pronunciation. However, despite its simple procedure and suitable features for autonomous learning, not a few students stop doing this exercise mainly because of its relatively monotonous characteristic. This practice presentation will describe how a class of university non-English majors is encouraged to do shadowing and oral reading practices through audio book reports and audio readers theater using graded readers.
Yukari Sato (Nanzan University)
Developing 4 skills with step-by-step activities on SDGs
SDGs is a buzz word today, but students don't know much about it nor consider it as their own business. This practice seminar demonstrates how to let students acknowledge, consider and act about the 17 SDGS goals in the classroom setting. The speaker introduces various concrete activities including listening, speaking, reading and writing. All these activities can be flexibly combined to suit your class types and student levels. This seminar uses “TAGAKI: SDGs: Problems & Solutions” as a textbook and shows how to make the best use of this book. I hope this seminar will be a starting point for you to tackle these issues with your students.
Cameron Smith (Aichi Gakuin University, Japan)
Setting up creative tasks: insights from recent developments in creativity theory.
Many teachers want to have more creative tasks in the classroom. The open-ended nature of creative tasks potentially provides students with opportunities to use a wider variety of language, as well as produce output that can please and surprise themselves, their classmates, and their teacher. Furthermore, creativity is being promoted as a key 21st century economic skill by institutions and governments. But how should teachers go about setting and supporting such tasks? Is the common conception of creativity as the work of the lone convention-breaking artist appropriate? In this presentation, I will introduce developments in creativity research from the past ten years, particularly the sociocultural approach of Glaveanu, that help us to understand how creativity can be taught, and how people can be creative together. These developments help us move towards a view of creativity that is more appropriate in both language learning where students acquire a skill, and the real world, where people at work typically need to be creative in teams. An example is given from my own teaching practice where students are tasked with designing new “yokai”, a kind of mythical Japanese spirit.
Henry Troy (Nanzan University, Japan)
henryrtroy@gmail.com
Phrasal Verbs: Why are they so challenging and how can we teach them?
This presentation examines the difficulties phrasal verbs present to both the English language learner and instructor, and introduces methodologies that may assist in teaching them effectively. Phasal verbs are known for being both grammatically and semantically complex, and there is evidence of avoidance among L2 learners. Nevertheless, proficiency in their use is seen as vital for English language learning as they are used so frequently by L1 speakers. In this presentation, what constitutes a phrasal verb will be outlined, literature on their use and frequency will be explained, before research on how they can be taught will be reviewed and critiqued. The value of corpus-based learning of phrasal verbs will receive particularly focus, with the wealth of data a corpus provides and the autonomous style it allows for suggested as a means for effective phrasal verb acquisition.
Chie Tsuzuki (Nanzan University, Japan), Yusa Koizumi (Meiji Gakuin University) & Takako Moroi (Bunkyo Gakuin University)
ykoizumi@gen.meijigakuin.ac.jp
Can Computer-Mediated Communication Activities Become an Alternative to Face-to-Face Classroom Activities?
The present study investigates the effectiveness of computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a means to prepare EFL students for in-class group discussions. Data were gathered from 64 first-year university students in three classes over four terms. Each term, students practiced group discussion either face to face or using a CMC platform (text chat or Flipgrid) before taking a discussion test that assessed their communication skills, such as performing various speech acts and negotiating meaning. Statistical analyses of the test scores revealed that face-to-face practice led to significantly higher scores than written synchronous CMC (text chat) or oral asynchronous CMC (Flipgrid), but the two CMC modes did not differ significantly. The results indicate that face-to-face interaction is more effective than CMC. This suggests that students can use a broader range of communication skills when they practice face to face. The scores for Flipgrid varied widely across the three classes, indicating that students did not use the CMC platform as the researchers expected. The study shows that with adequate instructions and training, CMC can be a valuable tool in post-pandemic teaching to provide students with opportunities to interact outside classrooms.
Adiba Zailan & Yong Mei Fung (Universiti Putra Malaysia)
adibazailan@gmail.com
The Effects of Project-Based Learning on Undergraduates Grammar Mastery
Grammar plays an important part in language learning. A lack of grammar mastery will lead to poor language performance. Many instructors often apply traditional lecture-based approach in teaching grammar rather than giving opportunity for learners to engage with and facilitate one another to improve their grammar accuracy. In view of this situation, the objective of this study is to investigate the effect of project-based learning method on undergraduates’ grammar mastery. It also seeks to examine the undergraduates’ experiences of using project-based learning method in improving their grammar. The sample of the study consisted of an intact class of 31 undergraduate students taking a compulsory course of Grammar for Communicative Purposes. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design which uses mixed methods data collection. Quantitative data were collected from pre- and post-tests writing scores. Qualitative data were gathered from semi-structured interviews and students’ reflections. The findings of the study showed significant difference between the pre-test and post-test writing scores (p=.004). Meanwhile, the findings from the qualitative data showed that participants had a favourable overall experience with project-based learning approach in the grammar classroom. The study is expected to enlighten educators’ efforts in finding effective ways to use project-based learning in teaching grammar. It also shed insights into learners’ experiences through project-based learning to enhance their grammar skills and communication.