One difficulty for many EFL teachers facing oral discussion classes relates to the simple issue of conversational topics. Some topics might be either uninteresting or unfamiliar to some students making it difficult for them to contribute opinions or questions. Explain It: Discussing Japanese Culture in English is a textbook solving this problem, helping students to explore their own culture and opinions about it. Topics range from sports, handicrafts, superstitions, the arts, and theater, among others.

日本の大学英語教育を取り巻く環境は刻々と変化しており、コロナ禍はそれを加速させた。従来型の大学英語教育が未来永劫存在するはずはなく、英語教員は自身に対する積極的な変革を含め、未来に対し先手を打つ必要がある。本セッションでは幅広い視点から発表者が問題提起を行い、本質的な議論を喚起する。

This workshop demonstrates how a virtual classroom based international exchange program implemented with the University of Hawaii, three universities in Europe, and elsewhere enhanced student learning and motivation for international exchange. We will share administrative knowhow and instructional approaches toward successful program implementation using classroom video data and other materials. The workshop is useful for university leaders, international program administrators, and instructors interested in enhancing international exchange in the post-COVID era.

This presentation introduces the Cambridge One online learning platform, the all-in-one online English language learning platform for easy access to all teaching and learning materials across multiple devices including smartphones and tablets as well as on PCs. This session will look at how Cambridge One lets you plan, present, and assess student performance, all in the same place whilst also demonstrating the online learning components learners can fully access on their smartphones.

This presentation covers the IntelliSpeech assessment system developed by EnglishCentral as well as AI-based speech solutions from other providers in the English learning market. It reviews the use of these technologies in read-aloud applications, elicited imitation, sentence building and finally conversational chatbots. The accuracy and efficacy of these systems are discussed as well as the pedagogy that underpins them.

Teaching students how to write a literature review requires providing instruction on respecting academic norms and hands-on, systematic guidance to learners. The presenter will share such an approach; he will demonstrate how to set up a literature review matrix and then add, organize, and tab information from sources in the matrix.

How can we best support our students’ linguistic learning journeys as we simultaneously struggle with our own teaching journeys during a pandemic? This workshop starts with self-reflection, a mental scan of how participants are adapting and coping with the new challenges of being flexible to teach online, face-to-face, and hybrid classes. It is aimed at teachers who are new to using drama: from energizing ice-breakers to project-based process drama, ending with cool downs.

Widgets is the first commercial course to successfully apply a principled, “strong” approach to TBLT. It features a task-complexity syllabus, highly contextualized tasks and projects, and an engaging real-world-like simulation. It is flexible enough to use as a general communication course or within international studies, business English, and STEM related departments. It is especially well suited to mixed-ability classes of 12-24 students. Winner of the 2018 ELTon Award for Course Innovation. Presented by the authors.

The presenter, an escape room creator and writer, will introduce the concept of escape rooms and how they can effectively be used in the classroom. Participants will receive tips on how to add cooperative and competitive elements to quizzes and communication activities along with suggestions for creating immersive puzzles and challenges to engage students. Additionally, the presenter will share how she brought escapism to her university students adapting to English classes on Zoom.

English Bento is a digital platform that can be used in class or for homework. It trains speaking, pronunciation, vocabulary, as well as other English skills with 11 different activities. A brief demonstration of how educational principles drive each activity will be given. This is followed by a description of the instructor’s dashboard which allows teachers to create classes, set assignments, and track students’ progress using three metrics: progress, score and time on task.

Is Speaking of Speech Premium Edition a speaking text? Is it a listening text? Is it a core text? Is it a presentation text? It is all this and much, much more. This presentation offers a variety of activities that will make the most out of you and your students’ Speaking of Speech experience. Plus, most of these fun activities can be successfully adapted to your other speaking, listening, reading, or writing classes.

In this session, one student from each of the grade levels I teach (junior high school 2nd- and 3rd-years, and, and high school 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-year) will take part as panelists in a symposium. They will talk about their experiences as learners with a specific focus on teacher feedback as well as some other issues.

Many institutions are now opting for remote or hybrid classes. Teaching online requires a different approach and different resources than face-to-face situations. This presentation will look at the challenges of teaching in an online environment and present a checklist of tools that can increase the effectiveness of these kinds of classes. The New Interactions series will be used to demonstrate how these tools can be successfully used by teachers and learners in an EAP class.

To encourage student self-expression, meaningful topics are needed. Yet what makes topics deeply engaging? How can educators motivate students to think critically and express their views? This presentation shows how content-based learning can lead to successful presentations. Presenters discuss topic choice, learners’ personal point of view, and supporting students with step-by-step scaffolding. How this can be done online is also discussed.

This workshop will explore what “reading” really means in the IELTS reading test. It will look at the purpose of this test, and how to develop the most appropriate and useful skills and strategies for dealing with the questions efficiently and effectively.

The global COVID pandemic forced sudden, massive changes to how students were being taught. Post COVID, do we just pick up from where we left off? Or do we use this unprecedented event to reflect upon what really works, what doesn’t, and strive for true effectiveness—trusting how learners actually learn languages, and letting them do so—rather than repeating the failed orthodoxies of the past?

Business English learners need a wide range of cultural knowledge and specialized language related to common business situations. Critically, they need activities—both restricted-use and authentic-use—that work with a wide range of learning styles, to give them opportunities to practice as realistically as the classroom will allow. In this workshop, the presenter and participants will look at a range of activities to help learners acquire the language and knowledge they need.

In this workshop, we will introduce news-based media literacy skill units for L2 English learners. Topics include fake news, bias, fact manipulation, and sources. We firstly provide some background and argue the importance of including skill-based units in regard to fostering students’ critical thinking ability. Thereafter we shortly describe the process of making the units. Then, we demonstrate some of the activities, such as identifying fake news and spotting bias.

Project-based learning is a teaching approach that can turn students into active learners by engaging them in real-world situations where they apply their knowledge to achieve their goals. The researcher will present case examples of implementing and organizing PBL projects in EFL teaching. This will include sharing the experiences of PBL English classes in Brazil as well as those in Japan, and how to adopt PBL into various contexts for different age groups.

Gaining mastery of the English tense-aspect system remains challenging for university ESL learners. They may have academic writing needs and a need for proficiency given work-related purposes. We developed shortcuts that reflect the shared conceptualizations of the main tense-aspect grammar rules, based on ontological structures of time and happenings. These have allowed students to efficiently understand the main workings of the system, and to facilitate appropriate use of the English tenses while developing self-correction skills.

In this workshop, we will talk about the students who may read, write, organize, and use their time very differently because of learning differences. You will learn about dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD, dyspraxia, autism, and vision. It will also give you some ideas on what tools and strategies you can use to help all students achieve. Learning differences affect about 10% or more of the population, so there are probably some in your class. Bring questions.

Teaching English language writing online can be challenging. Interactive components such as modelling, scaffolding, and providing one-on-one support are not easy to replicate through online learning. This workshop will review some of these challenges and show attendees how to use the EssayJack application to address them. EssayJack provides smart, interactive writing templates which can be customised for varying writing proficiencies, to include native language support, and for use in in-person or online classes.

This presentation is an update on a project to align existing English communication courses with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The presenters detail the project’s progress as it moves to a practical implementation stage. In this stage, students are interviewed, while can-do statements are modified and employed in the classroom as well as introduced in the self-access center. The voices of students and teachers are included throughout.

This workshop presents a genre-based approach to writing instruction for multilingual learners, drawing on work in systemic-functional linguistics. This approach emphasizes an apprenticeship model – the teaching and learning cycle - based on detailed reading, deconstruction, joint construction, and independent construction. Using examples from elementary classrooms, the presenter highlights some challenges a genre approach can address and shows how teachers can assist second language writers in the context of the classroom.

This workshop aims to provide ideas for addressing social issues and culture in the ELT classroom via critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 2005). Initially, attendee approaches toward tackling social issues and culture will be explored. Thereafter, audience understandings of critical pedagogy will be examined before it and its relevance are defined. Subsequently, attendees will experience addressing example social issues and culture via critical pedagogy before concluding with the advantages and risks of using this approach.

Research has consistently shown that extensive reading (ER) helps students in numerous ways, and most teachers would like to incorporate ER into their English courses. In many contexts teachers are required to use a textbook, and the difficulty with effectively implementing ER may be how to integrate ER with other course materials. This presentation describes a project to create a course based around ER materials, where tasks in the textbook facilitate learning through ER.

ALTs and Eikaiwa teachers in Japan may find themselves limited in future career choices, while entry to university positions can be intimidating and seemingly out of reach. This presentation aims to make this option more transparent to educators interested in exploring this career path. The presenters provide practical suggestions on preparations/steps for obtaining university positions, as well as skills useful in advancing a career within the university system towards procuring a tenured position.

Participants will discuss what the content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach is and how to use it in an international preschool class setting. Participants will also be able to create their own CLIL-based lesson plans during this session.

Presenters discuss the international debut of a new series from Atama-ii Books. The series, aimed at college and university students, features top quality art, highly engaging romance-oriented plots, and an inclusive race/age/gender-neutral second-person perspective. Attendees will receive a free digital book and stand to win one of three complete sets of the Atama-ii Multi-path series (each a 9,350 yen value). The new series is available on Xreading, and coming soon to print.

In this workshop, participants will complete a questionnaire about their beliefs concerning teaching a research paper and discuss these beliefs. Next, participants will brainstorm problems students have with research papers, and what decisions instructors must make when organizing a research project. The presenter will guide a discussion and share some recent scholarship. Participants will be provided with a handout of activities to help students develop their skills at writing from research.

This presentation describes a tool in the form of a pronunciation practice guide aimed at helping Japanese students in healthcare disciplines improve their ability to pronounce English medical terms more intelligibly. A test trial of the guide conducted on 87 nursing and medical technology majors demonstrated a remarkable increase in their intelligibility. The presenter describes the main features of the guide and its trial procedures, and recommends its use in medical English classrooms across Japan.

These days, it seems extremely challenging to get students interested in reading; there’s just so much competition from digital media for young learners’ attention. But teachers are aware that an early, positive experience with reading can help provide learners with vital input and a foothold for learning English. In this workshop, participants will look at how hands-on projects can be used to make non-fiction reading more interesting and engaging for young learners.

English Bento is a speaking and listening training app for students and a progress tracking system for instructors. It was built on the principles of micro-learning, feedback, and fluency training. This workshop begins with participants using the app as a student; followed by a demonstration of how their student data is displayed on the instructor’s dashboard. English Bento is assignment-based with pre-existing content, but also allows instructors to add their own. This workshop is hands-on.

This workshop explores the transformative language learning (TLL) perspective and its implications for foreign language pedagogy. TLL focuses on learner growth and development and contrasts with the mentalist view of learning common in SLA. The workshop will cover theory and practice. There will be a review of key concepts: engagement, resistance, and emergence; an introduction of the linguaculture learning profiler; and a discussion of pedagogical practice that can lead to transformative learning experiences.

Tackling a graduation thesis in English is a huge challenge for undergraduate students in Japan. It is easy for seminar students, for example, to feel overwhelmed. Emphasizing surveys and interviews as means of collecting data can get the research process started and help students understand the goal of creating knowledge. This presentation will cover materials appropriate for students who will benefit from consideration of writing their research in English.

Surveys of English language teachers around the world have reported that teachers find it difficult to make speaking happen. While the need for interaction is frequently acknowledged, educators have reported great difficulty in implementing it successfully in their lessons. This session will look at common misunderstandings about communicative interaction, the teacher’s role in making interaction happen, and practical, evidence-informed solutions to problems teachers may face when trying to get students to communicate in the classroom.

The goal of this workshop is to examine the presumptions we make about other people, particularly people of another race, ethnicity or nationality, but also of other sexual orientation, professions, political affiliations, even age and weight. All come to bear on how we choose to interact with said person. During this session we will: 1- Define presumption 2- Attempt to identify our presumptions 3- If possible, ascertain the root / source of our presumption 4- Ascertain whether said presumption is problematic or not. 5- Establish / Uncover / Utilize Practical ways to reduce our use of presumptions (if it’s called for) Likely we all have done some version of this in our self-assessments, but I’ve found, even in myself, as I’ve conducted this workshop at universities here in Japan, that many problematic presumptions, particularly ones acquired in our formative years, tend to be resilient and will persist to wreak havoc often under the radar. So, let’s pop the hood and see what we see.

This presentation will describe ways to teach conversation online. It will focus on how the researcher utilised the textbook Discover Conversation and Microsoft Teams to implement a one-semester conversation skills course for university students. It will provide an overview of the Discover Conversation methodology, the activities and assessment that were employed, and feedback from students who undertook the course.

This workshop shall attempt to bridge the gap that exists between teaching Core English skills and teaching IELTS test skills. We will analyse the language learning techniques that can facilitate the systematic development of the students’ abilities, especially speaking and writing skills, which may be crucial in obtaining their desired IELTS scores.

It has become increasingly evident that to achieve the key goal of critical thinking instruction and facilitate clear, rational, and open-minded student thinking, teachers need to address the potentially negative effects of cognitive bias on their critical thinking tasks by implementing debiasing frameworks and strategies. Based on the body of research regarding debiasing, this workshop explains easy-to-implement ideas and frameworks for teachers of all levels to debias their critical thinking tasks.

Supported by findings from psychology and neuroscience, the workshop proposes a bottom-up, holistic approach to learning for you and your students. This session focuses on verbal short-term memory (vSTM). Smaller vSTM capacities make word acquisition harder. Natural language is learnt implicitly and ‘stochastically’, supporting fluency-based activities to compensate for such a memory bottleneck. This fun, interactive, and hands-on style workshop aims to help you confidently start applying brain-friendly solutions to your and your students’ learning.

This workshop will discuss teachers’ experiences of managing students’ expectations around their needs for specific IELTS scores, and strategies for convincing students to improve their English before taking IELTS. Resources to help with this, and alternatives to IELTS preparation for students with lower language levels will be considered. Finally, the presenter and participants will examine and discuss ways to adapt two short IELTS course descriptions prepared by the IELTS partners for students at B2 level.

This workshop will focus on reviewing theories of emotional intelligence and social intelligence, how these have been applied in language education (Gkonou & Mercer, 2017, 2018; Mercer & Gkonou, 2017) and how socio-emotional competencies can be used in contemporary classrooms.

Peer review can be an effective tool for involving students in the assessment process; however, the sudden switch to online learning last year introduced new challenges to effective implementation. This workshop will provide an overview of peer review and adaptations the presenter made to continue the activity in an exclusively online university writing course. Then, after examining the effects and consequences, it will reflect on how the modified procedures might inform the practice moving forward.

Best practices in online teaching should include the eight steps of the synchronous online flipped learning approach (SOFLA), a distance learning model which most closely replicates actual classroom teaching. SOFLA includes structured, interactive, multimodal activities, both asynchronous and synchronous, that create fertile spaces for teaching and learning online. Participants will learn how to implement each step and will receive digital resources to guide them in using SOFLA.

Flipped instruction is popular in STEM courses, but it also fits in an ESL classroom. This presentation will explore the advantages and disadvantages of flipped instruction as well as how to incorporate it in an online classroom. The presenter will offer teachers a variety of online tools they can use such as YouTube and Quizizz.

This workshop aims to demonstrate diagnostic EFL listening teaching methods especially for Japanese learners based on evidence as well as two theories on human information processing and the metacognitive process of language learning. The audience is expected to be involved in hands-on activities. By the end of this workshop, the audience will gain some practical and diagnostic strategies to teach EFL listening. If you are not confident in teaching EFL listening, this workshop is for you.

If you want your students to use the English they are studying in class to interact with others around the world, come to this workshop to find out how. It is easy and free-of-charge whilst the benefits are numerous. Students love being able to interact with their peers in other countries. While doing so they improve their linguistic, intercultural and communicative competencies as has been proven by research into this project.

Exercises from improvisational theater have gained attention in educational fields for their capacity to promote empathy and communication skills among learners. The presenter will first describe a study that sought to identify whether use of applied improv exercises boosted Japanese university students’ compassion scores. Attendees will then be able to experience several of these fun and simple exercises and games, which can be done in both face-to-face and Zoom classes.

This workshop explores the use of an innovative new online network to create a community of practice of teachers and practitioners working in the fields of Global Englishes and English Medium Instruction (EMI).