Student Room Hosts, Please join this session for training.

This presentation will share research on how dubbing audio in the EFL classroom impacts student oral proficiency. The presenter will share data comparing the pre-post oral proficiency from two groups of students. The experimental group worked with dubbed audio materials and the control group did not. Findings related to variation in proficiency across the two groups will be discussed.

EFL university students are often crippled by their writing anxiety, making it difficult for them to accomplish a myriad of academic writing requirements in English. Understanding the types and levels of students’ writing anxiety would help EFL teachers improve their pedagogical approaches in making students confidently write right.

This corpus-based study examines lexical bundles and their functions observed in Taiwanese college English majors’ essays. Three corpora of academic essays were established based on the students’ writing fluency levels. An online instrument, N-Gram Extractor (Lextutor), was used to identify 2- to 6-word lexical bundles. The results showed the intermediate-fluency-level students used more lexical bundles, whereas the lower-fluency-level students hardly produced any. Stance bundles were found to be the most used function types.

Loanwords, or gairaigo, continue to capture the attention of teachers, researchers, and the general public. Yet how useful, really, are loanwords for Japanese learners of English? In this presentation I will reflect on a three-year project investigating the potential of loanwords for lexical inferencing. I will describe my findings from recent empirical studies investigating whether simply raising learners’ awareness of loanwords can increase the accuracy of their guesses about the meaning of unknown English words.

This presentation reports on findings from a mixed-methods research study with 40 beginner-level university students to explore the effects of asynchronous and synchronous online peer feedback (AOPF and SOPF) on their lexical diversity in writing based on data collected from students’ cause-and-effect essay drafts and their feedback comments. Findings illustrated that AOPF provided students with more opportunities to negotiate with others and had a more positive influence on their lexical diversity than SOPF.

This presentation will introduce an action research project designed to improve students’ productive vocabulary accuracy conducted with intermediate-level Japanese university students. We implemented two weeks of receptive and productive vocabulary interventions for one textbook unit. Through carrying out quantitative surveys, semi-structured interviews, and speaking test transcriptions, the results of this project indicated a marked improvement in student productive vocabulary accuracy.

In Zoom online English lessons, the researcher-teacher conducted explicit instruction in reading strategies by using two web cameras: one showing the teacher’s face, and the other showing her hand and explicitly showing where she was pointing in an English text. This presentation examines how beginner-level university students perceived the online explicit strategy instruction by using two cameras and how it influenced their English reading.

Many Japanese students struggle with confidence when speaking English. Flipgrid is a website that allows students to submit audio and video reports as well as view other submissions. At a university with non-English majors, this study, with a control and a test group, was made to find out if use of the Flipgrid website helped students increase the length of oral responses on oral examinations during the course of one semester.

This study investigated the effect of an authentic practice: using smartphones in L2 on vocabulary acquisition and learning motivation. Participants who had changed their smartphone system language to English and used them in L2 for a one-week period were found to improve their vocabulary knowledge and learning motivation, which indicated the potential of using smartphones in L2 as an effective language learning approach.

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.

This narrative research study explored EFL teachers’ experiences with neurodiverse students (those with dyslexia, ADHD, and autism) at the tertiary level in Japan and their self-efficacy for inclusive practice. Bandura’s (1977) theory of self-efficacy was used as a framework for interpreting teachers’ interview data. Findings indicate that EFL teachers at the tertiary level in Japan lack training and institutional support necessary to create inclusive environments. Solutions and tips for inclusion will be discussed with participants.

Public speaking phobia can have a negative impact on students’ ability to function in the classroom and effectively acquire a second language. This talk will discuss an investigation into the best methods for reducing this anxiety in students, including virtual reality and imagination-based exposure training, mindfulness practice, presentation methods instruction, and more. Participants’ comments from program interviews and surveys will also be presented to explore best practices for classroom presentation activities and assessments by instructors.

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.

When students’ emotional needs are met in the classroom through such strategies as smiling and eye contact, they may be more likely to succeed academically. But how can we nurture positive emotions when teaching online? This workshop will explore the online equivalent of several classroom-based strategies for meeting students’ emotional needs for learning. Attendees will be invited to offer suggestions and the results of the presenter’s own action research in this area will be shared.

The primary purpose of this presentation is to explore the structural relationships among intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and two related concepts that affect global citizenship: namely, rational compassion (Bloom, 2017) and meta-personal self (DeCicco et al., 2007). The questionnaire, prepared based on previous studies, was administered among 200 Japanese university students. The results indicated that meta-personal self predicted rational compassion, and rational compassion predicted global citizenship through ICC. Pedagogical implications will be discussed.

This presentation examines learners' understanding and development of difficult spatial prepositional usages of “at,” “from,” “in,” “on,” and “to.” Results indicate semantic complexity and metacognitive understanding of these prepositions are some of the main obstacles for learners to overcome in order to enhance their learning. This ongoing investigation illustrates that a usage-based approach to the development of learning tasks provides an effective strategy to support learners' language development, confidence, and self-efficacy.

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.

Willingness to communicate (WTC) accounts for learners pursuing communication opportunities and encountering affordances for L2 development. While many WTC factors are known, few studies focus on how learners control their own WTC levels or manipulate WTC antecedents. In response, students in this study used idiodynamic methodology to elicit their peers’ WTC-focused strategy use. Acting as researchers, learners elicited six kinds of strategies which they intended to use for future self-improvement, peer rapprochement, or personal reassurance.

For many EFL students, the places where English is spoken are geographically distant. In this context, a risk exists of their language learning experiences occurring in the form of a non-spatialized bubble. To counter this, maps may be used as a tool to inspire a sense of connectedness. This presentation explores undergraduate perceptions across a range of nodes and examines levels of inspiration derived from interactions with maps.

Are you preparing your students for English interactions in a globalized world? You may consider innovating your teaching practice based on global Englishes language teaching (GELT), which recognizes that English is used as a common language by speakers from diverse lingua-cultural backgrounds. At this presentation, you will learn about GELT and the practicality of GELT curricular innovation according to a study conducted with in-service English teachers. Real-world applications of the research will be discussed.