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. 

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.

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.

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, 2023, and the deadline for final submission of articles will be March 31st, 202.

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:

tokyo.jalt.editor@gmail.com