A thesis adviser and an undergraduate student, who is studying to become an English teacher, will present a section of a thesis on creating an engaging environment for English study. In addition to the student’s findings, the presentation will cover details about the process of writing a thesis in English from the point of view of the adviser and student. Participants will gain insights into teamwork for English engagement and the undergraduate thesis writing process.

This report on action research was conducted in a university setting with the aim of promoting the “right” talk – exploratory talk in small group work. Action research offers opportunities for teacher reflection on dialogic pedagogy and, in this case, helped to promote student talk that consisted of longer turns and more meaningful content.

Mastering the English tense-aspect system remains challenging for university EFL learners, namely given their writing needs in academic English and, eventually, for work-related purposes. We developed eight shortcuts that reflect the shared conceptualizations of the main tense-aspect grammar rules, based on ontological structures of time and happenings. These shortcuts have allowed students to efficiently understand the main workings of the entire system and facilitated their appropriate use of English tenses.

This presentation will provide a literature review of multiliteracies and offer suggestions on how to utilize multiliteracies in the classroom. It will provide examples of how students can use graphic novels to hone their critical thinking skills to interpret stories without the use of traditional text. Furthermore, it will offer suggestions on how students can use blogs in presentations that use images, video, audio, and text to help them recreate their experience about another country.

This is the annual meeting for all chapter and SIG membership officers. The focus of the meeting will be to exchange ideas and information to help retain members and also increase membership in JALT. Administrative policies, procedures, and documents will be discussed as needed. All current and incoming membership officers are strongly encouraged to attend.

After the digital turn, sometime around the 21st century, literacy theorists argue that spatial, gestural, and materialized elements have important roles for comprehending literal meaning. Combining all these, scholars term the new literacy as multiliteracies (The New London Group, 1996, Mills, 2015). This presentation examines a classroom-oriented research project, in which students learned abstract concepts through excerpts of TED Talks. The presenter will examine possible ways to integrate multiliteracies into CLIL methodology for university students.

This presentation reports on a pilot study for a national needs analysis survey of nursing English. We outline the procedures followed in setting up the survey, and provide suggestions for those wishing to conduct similar enquiries. The survey covered a wide range of nurses’ professional duties, and the findings have implications for anyone involved in teaching English to nurses and in the wider field of English for specific purposes.

This presentation examines learners’ understanding and development of difficult prepositional usages of at, from, in, on, and to. Results indicate semantic complexity and metacognitive understanding of these prepositions are the main obstacles for learners to overcome in order to enhance their learning. This ongoing investigation illustrates that the elicitation of grammatical structures through the development and implementation of task-based learning tasks provides an effective strategy to support learners’ language development, confidence, and self-efficacy.

Despite previous research on the topic, students’ perceptions of non-native English speakers English for Academic Purposes (NNES EAP) professionals in a Sino-British English-Medium Instruction (EMI) University, however, is under-researched. The presentation will share the results of a recent study on how NNES EAP teachers are perceived by freshmen from various disciplines regarding their strengths and challenges in a British-Sino joint venture EMI university.

Can you almost hear the crickets chirping in a supposedly lively English-speaking class? Help students boost their speaking confidence through these teaching tips! Learn how to turn a quiet speaking class into an interactive one. In this workshop, the participants will be presented effective ways to achieve a successful speaking class by using simple methods that centralize on building the learners’ self-esteem and enthusiasm.

Some educators claim that there are students who are suffering from what Earl Stevick calls “lathophobic aphasia” or the unwillingness to speak for fear of making mistakes. This happens when teachers look upon “mistakes” as a sign of failure, either on their part or on the part of the students. This study looks into dilemmas of junior high school students in second language speaking and their academic performance in English.

The objective of the current pilot study is to explore Japanese EFL college students’ cognitive processes caused by written recast and prompt. While receiving either written recast or prompt on cartoon-cued written tasks, participants’ eye-movements were recorded using an eye-tracker. Also, their thoughts during the tasks were documented through stimulated recall. The analysis demonstrated that different ways of attentional distributions and processes were caused by recast and prompt in the course of written interactions.

The teaching of English for Special Purposes (ESP) in non-English departments of Indonesian higher education typically involves a large number of learners, various linguistic competences of learners, heavy workload for teachers, low learning motivation among learners, and teachers’ lack of content knowledge. Thus, this study is aimed at exploring teachers’ strategies in managing ESP classes in five different departments of local universities: accounting, nursing, chemistry, geology, and informatics engineering.

Teacher Corrective Feedback plays a significant role in second language writing education. This session shares the findings of a longitudinal study that explores how EFL students respond to the type of teacher corrective feedback that is informed by students’ preferences reported by Raza (2019) in a quantitative study that found that students preferred handwritten corrective feedback over oral and electronic. The findings reveal significant improvement in student writing and motivation.

The ultimate goal of this research aims to improve speaking ability of Thai undergraduate students by implementing task-based learning in blended learning course. Blended learning provides face-to-face and online learning environments. The students in the online course need to access Google Classroom for completing the exercises and uploading their role-play videos. They can practice speaking with their partners through video call before submiting by selecting the best video and review teacher's online feedback for revision.

Academic writing courses are challenging to teach as well as to take. One way to support students and teachers in this process is by establishing a writing tutorial system. This presentation will share experiences of students, tutors, teachers, and coordinators as members of a community of practice that provides newcomers the support they need and experienced writers a chance to share their expertise.

This research examined the use of extensive reading as a method to improve indefinite and definite article use with university students. By encouraging students to focus their awareness on the context and frequency of article use in their reading time, an increase in students’ own article use and accuracy in their written output was observed.

Research studies centered on tutorial and cooperative learning suggest that social interaction is fundamental to motivation. Working cooperatively with peers promotes students’ engagement in tasks and increases the efforts they put into the tasks. The aim of the present study is to design, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of a paired-reading program. The results will provide a useful resource for creating paired reading situations in college English curriculum.

This poster will outline our efforts to start a student-led English language newsletter and the challenges and successes experienced along the way. We will suggest ways for implementing this in a Japanese university setting, with special considerations for low-level learners. We will also include how we hope to evolve the newsletter to be sustainable and meaningful activity for students.

The medical profession had for a long time a biological emphasis for looking at illness (for 200 years) and basically ignored people’s contributing psychologies and social behaviors. Engel’s BioPsychoSocial model (1977) argued that illness could also be caused by psycho-social reasons and that doctors needed more social “bedside manner”. Education can also benefit from understanding the biopsychosocial of students. The cognitive bias in SLA needs expanding for more ecological humanistic education.

This paper investigates EFL college students’ perceptions and evaluations of an English for specific purposes (ESP) tourism course design based on a learner-centered approach which incorporates authentic tasks, situated learning and multiple assessments. A questionnaire was administered to a total of 110 non-English majors in a local tourism course offered from 2014-2018. Students’ positive response also indicates the need to acquire skills to achieve a two-way communication for cross-cultural understanding.

Student success at National Model United Nations (NMUN) competitions over several years has led to curricular change at one private university in Japan. Over several years, students prepared to participate in NMUN conferences through seven months of student-led but teacher-supported meetings, practice, and study. However, in April 2020, the university accepted a proposal for an international relations course to be taught mainly to English language majors. This presentation looks at how it all manifested.

This session aims to share the findings of a study that investigated teacher cognition about the mission and vision of an English language program to see whether the contents of the mission statement align with the expectations of the language teachers working for that program. Propositions for aligning teacher expectations with program vision and mission statement development, revision, and enhancement will also be discussed.

This study investigated how students develop their learning community in a Japanese university EFL writing classroom. Four students among 16 students were selected based on the results of the pre-questionnaire. They had different perceptions about peer review. In the end, all of the students showed their positive perceptions toward peer review to greater or lesser degrees. The post-questionnaire and interviews revealed that their satisfaction with their community contributed to the positive perceptions.

Empirical evidence exists showing the more exposures to an unknown word during reading, the more likely that word will be incidentally acquired. However, this line of research has overlooked how range and dispersion of these exposures could affect incidental word acquisition outcomes. This study investigates their combined effect.