Upcoming Events
Tokyo JALT Social Event!
Let's have a picnic in Yoyogi Park!
Date: November 2
Time: Saturday, 11am-12pm
Facebook event: CLICK HERE for more details
AI-Assisted Learning: Crafting Ethical and Effective EFL Writing Assignments
Presentation Abstract (click to expand)
Abstract
In this presentation, Jesse will explore the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the syllabus for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing courses, focusing on creating assignments that utilize AI tools while preventing academic dishonesty. By breaking larger writing tasks into smaller, more manageable segments and requiring students to present their progress in stages, this approach will encourage active student engagement and the development of essential writing and communication skills.
Jesse also highlights the pedagogic principles underlying these decisions, emphasizing the importance of teaching students to critically evaluate AI-generated content. Since AI systems are designed by humans, they carry inherent biases and limitations that require careful analysis. Students are encouraged to discern between useful AI-generated suggestions and those that may need revision or rejection. This methodology will attempt to demonstrate that effective writing comes not only from AI assistance but also from the writer’s ability to refine and control the output.
Overall, the session will provide some insight to educators seeking to ethically and effectively integrate AI into their classrooms, while promoting critical thinking, accountability, and the development of strong English writing skills in a changing educational environment.
Presenter
Jesse Reed is a lecturer at a number of universities, including Kanagawa University, Musashino University, and Tokyo Medical and Dental University. He graduated from Temple University and his current research focuses on task-based learning.
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If interested, email tokyo.jalt.president@gmail.com
Using Speed Reading as a Tool for Helping Low Level Learners
Presenters:
Tekka Chang and Robert Moriarty
Date: September 12th
Time: 19:30-20:30 on Zoom
Presentation Abstract (click to expand)
Abstract
Have you ever had to teach a course in a university where the text was chosen to prepare students for a high-stakes exam such as the Eiken IBA that is beyond the student’s ability? In this presentation, the presenters will show how a speed reading (SR) program (Jarrell et al., 2022; Millet, 2017) was implemented in an Integrated English course throughout the year in a lower-proficiency English group. In the program, N=25 first-year students met twice a week and finished 12 sessions of a junior high school CEFR Pre A2 level speed reading course, followed by CEFR A1 level speed reading sessions in the second semester. As a result, a significant increase in reading speed was found in the first semester alone, and a quantitative questionnaire showed that 79% of the students either “liked” or “somewhat liked” reading in English as a result of the SR course. Additionally, during the second SR course, students maintained a noteworthy average reading speed around 200 wpm, though further gains did not manifest through the semester. Presenters will offer rationales for the choices made and information on how to set up a SR sequence within a course that has a tight university-wide curriculum.
Presenters:
Tekka Chang is an Assistant Professor at Meikai University. He has a Master’s in TESOL from Arizona State University and has taught English in Canada, Japan, and Taiwan. His research interests include extensive reading, second language acquisition, and pre-service teacher training.
Robert Moriarty is an Assistant Professor at Meikai University in Urayasu, Chiba. He studied Linguistics at Duke University, moved to Aomori in 2005 to teach English, and earned his M.A. in TESOL from Temple University in 2020. His research interests include game-based learning, dopamine and learning, and extensive reading.
References
Jarrell, D., Kaneko, K., & Okazaki, S. (2022) Yomitore 50. Hamajima shoten.
Millett, S. (2017) Speed readings for ESL learners, 500 BNC. (ELI Occasional Publication No. 28). Wellington, New Zealand: School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.
Recent Event Event: Self-efficacy, Willingness-to-Communicate, Perceived-Communicative-Competence as Predictors of Spoken Task Production: My PLL Journal as an ISLA Researcher
Presenter: Dr. Joseph P. Vitta
Date: September 3rd
Time: 19:30-20:30 on Zoom
Presentation abstract (click to expand)
Abstract
In recent years, understanding the psychological factors that influence language learning has become increasingly topical. In this presentation, I will discuss two studies supported by a KAKENHI grant awarded to me to explore this area. In the first (Vitta et al., 2023: RELC Journal), an instrument to measure self-efficacy specifically during English discussion tasks is developed and initially validated. This tool helps capture students' confidence levels in a detailed and task-specific manner, offering a more precise understanding of their self-efficacy. Building on this, the second study (Leeming, Vitta et al., 2024) examined how different psychological factors—willingness to communicate (WTC), speaking self-efficacy (SSE), and perceived communicative competence (PCC)—predict actual spoken task performance. We found that students who felt more confident (higher SSE) and competent (higher PCC) were more willing to communicate, which in turn led to greater language production during discussions. Throughout this research journey, several lessons emerged. Firstly, the importance of context-specific measurements became clear; general measures of self-efficacy were less effective than those tailored to specific tasks. Secondly, the intricate interplay between different psychological factors highlighted the need for a holistic approach when studying language learning. Lastly, the cross-validation process reinforced the value of replicating studies across different settings to ensure the reliability of findings. While presenting this research, I will also unpack how domestic and international collaboration with leading researchers yielded in high quality research.
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Finding the Balance Between TECH and TOUCH in the Young Learner Classroom
Presenters:
Naoko Amano, Barb Hoskins Sakamoto, Budi Azhari Lubis
Date: June 23rd, 2024
Barbara Sakamoto
In this presentation I’ll introduce ways that teachers can incorporate technology tools into their teaching to make learning more inclusive and accessible for all students, but especially for those who need extra support.
Budi Azhari Lubis
In the constantly changing world of English education, combining technology with tactile hands-on learning activities can have a strong and lasting influence on children’s learning.
Naoko Araki Amano
In my presentation, I will use the term “touch” to mean making connections. Real learning takes place when students' hearts are touched, and parents are more willing to support their childrens’ learning journey when they are included as well.
Speakers (click to expand)
Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto
BIO: Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto is co-author of the bestselling Let's Go series, author of "The role of technology in early years language education" (in Early Years Second Language Education: International Perspectives on Theories and Practice) and director of the International Teacher Development Institute (www.iTDi.pro). She is an English Language Specialist with the U.S. State Department, and has conducted teacher training workshops in Asia, Europe, the Americas, and online.
Budi Azhari Lubis
BIO: Naoko Amano, an Eikaiwa owner and teacher, has twelve years of experience teaching English to young learners at her language school, the Yellow Banana Academy, based in Kishiwada, Osaka. Her journey as an educator has been shaped by her own experience of collaborative learning as well as a passion for intercultural exchange. Inspired by her daughter’s introduction to and progress in English language study, Naoko embarked on her career as a Japanese teacher of English, working to foster communication between local Japanese teachers of English and non-Japanese native English speakers working in Japan. Through a variety of courses as well as a study abroad program to Cairns, Australia, Naoko challenges her students to achieve excellence, to explore the world around them, and to share their knowledge through collaboration.
Naoko Araki Amano
BIO: Naoko Amano, an Eikaiwa owner and teacher, has twelve years of experience teaching English to young learners at her language school, the Yellow Banana Academy, based in Kishiwada, Osaka. Her journey as an educator has been shaped by her own experience of collaborative learning as well as a passion for intercultural exchange. Inspired by her daughter’s introduction to and progress in English language study, Naoko embarked on her career as a Japanese teacher of English, working to foster communication between local Japanese teachers of English and non-Japanese native English speakers working in Japan. Through a variety of courses as well as a study abroad program to Cairns, Australia, Naoko challenges her students to achieve excellence, to explore the world around them, and to share their knowledge through collaboration.
Recent Event: Applying Lexical Sophistication Indices to Word List Development
Presenter: Dr. Christopher Nicklin
Date: Tuesday, June 18th
Location: 7:30-8:30pm on Zoom
Presentation Abstract (click to expand)
Language teaching stakeholders, such as teachers and textbook writers, generally rely on corpus-derived frequency to create wordlists for pedagogical purposes, which can be problematic. For example, words that are instinctively easier for learners, such as pizza, can occur less frequently in reference corpora than words that can be assumed to be more difficult, such as physics. Additionally, research demonstrates that combining frequency with other lexical sophistication indices, such as age of acquisition (AoA) and concreteness, can produce better predictions of word difficulty than frequency alone. In this presentation, I will introduce research involving lexical sophistication indices as predictors of L2 word difficulty. I will also present a study involving the practical application of lexical sophistication research to wordlist development. By combining frequency with five other empirically-justified lexical sophistication indices, a set of frequencyPLUS difficulty scores for 14,054 of the 20,000 most frequent lemmas in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was created. In a series of short studies involving students from across Japan and Korea, frequencyPLUS scores successfully addressed the pizza/physics problem and displayed larger correlations with word difficulty than commonly used wordlists across two linguistic domains; English for Academic Purposes and Business English. Importantly, frequencyPLUS performed comparably to a knowledge-based vocabulary list, but contained almost three times as many lemmas for a small fraction of the time and financial costs. Implications for language researchers and teaching stakeholders will be discussed along with avenues for future work to develop language- and discipline-specific frequencyPLUS wordlists.
Presenter
Christopher Nicklin is a project assistant professor in the Center for Global Education at the University of Tokyo, and recently completed his PhD in Applied Linguistics at Temple University, Japan. His research interests focus on vocabulary, particularly in the subdomains of psycholinguistics and research methodology. He has published in several leading applied linguistics journals, including The Modern Language Journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Testing, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, and others. He is currently serving as Associate Editor of Vocabulary Learning and Instruction.
Recent Event: Workshopping with AI for an Academic World
Presenters: Rab Paterson & Kaori Hakone
JALT Link: https://jalt.org/event/tokyo/24-02-23
Call for Papers - 2025
The Tokyo JALT Journal (TJJ) is calling for the submission of papers.
Deadline: December 15th, 2025
To submit ideas for papers, or to make inquiries, please contact the editors Robert J. Lowe and Jesse Reed at:
For the next issue of the Tokyo JALT Journal, we are looking for:
Perspective pieces
Practitioner responses
Research ‘work in progress’ reports
(Please click here for details of these)
All papers should be 1000-3000 words in length, and written in accessible language.
Submission guidelines
If you have an idea for a piece you would like to submit, please contact the editors first with your idea at: tokyo.jalt.editor@gmail.com. Following this, the editors will invite authors to make a full submission.
Initial suggestions for papers for the next issue should be sent by December 15th, 2025, and the deadline for final submission of articles will be March 31st, 2026.
Invited papers
The editors will also be prompting discussion on social media with our research workshop questions, and will invite people to write up their contributions to these discussions as short journal pieces (max. 1000 words). Keep an eye out on social media for these discussions, and contribute if you feel comfortable doing so, and want a chance to publish your contribution in the journal!
Contact
To submit ideas for papers, or to make inquiries, please contact the editors Robert J. Lowe and Jesse Reed at:
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