In 2015, I presented about a multicultural children’s literature parent-child class I had started in my community using a homeschooling curriculum. This was an attempt to challenge pre-literacy with my bilingual children and their non-native English-speaking friends in the neighborhood. The following year, we expanded to a school with a curriculum focus of project-based learning (PBL). This presentation will highlight several of those projects, in addition to some of the challenges we faced along the way.

This study examines a task-based learning program in English conducted through video exchange between schools in Japan and Nepal. In this project, students learned about the culture and society of each other through the exchange of the videos. The results of the questionnaire survey show that the exchange program was very successful in achieving its objectives.

English education in Japan is changing quickly at the primary school level, where homeroom teachers are struggling with English as a full-status, evaluated class. With an awareness that English is not the exclusive property of those born into it, this presentation will focus on an ongoing national survey of over 260 so-called non-native English-speaking assistants, both Japanese and non-Japanese, contrasting results that differ from those in the researcher’s earlier studies with “Inner Circle” ALTs.