This poster examines the relationship between foreign language enjoyment and foreign language anxiety among Japanese English learners in a university-level oral communication course. Results from survey data and learner comments on experiences that engendered enjoyment and anxiety are discussed, as well as implications for increasing enjoyment and reducing anxiety in oral communication courses.

This study investigated English teacher motivation in Japanese secondary schools. Participants were two male Japanese teachers of English and their students. Data was collected through interviews, classroom observations, and focus-group interviews with students in one academic year. The findings showed that each teacher had unique motivation, and this was reflected in their teaching. Students also understood what teachers focused on. The study showed that teacher motivation can influence their teaching and their students.

In Japan the Ministry of Education (MEXT) has long focused on expanding English in order to prepare students for the realities of an increasingly globalized world, embarking on an extensive program that integrates native speakers of English into the school system as teachers while offering English lessons at progressively younger ages. To examine changes in international posture, the current study utilizes an extensive data set encompassing grades 5-12 of Japanese learners of English.

This presentation aims to describe how a new college CLIL course combining career education and English learning influenced students’ well-being and happiness. Through the three questionnaires conducted at the beginning and the end of the semester, it was found that the students’ subjective happiness significantly increased. It was also indicated that positive feelings were enhanced. Some fun and happiness-enhancing activities based on positive psychology and cognitive neuroscience will also be presented.

Research in psychology has found that certain types of writing tasks can have a lasting impact on the writers’ overall sense of well-being. This is potentially of great interest to educators, as an individual’s level of happiness also correlates to other benefits that can positively impact student learning. This presentation will share the findings of an empirical study applying these techniques to an EFL classroom to see if these benefits extend to L2 writers.

In this presentation, I will report on a three-year motivational interview study that focuses on two cases of academically-oriented Japanese learners when they were at university, graduate school, and after one of them started a professional career. The study examines the development of motivations to study English and languages other than English and the interactions between them. The results highlight the factors necessary to be multilingual in a context where multilingualism is not emphasized.

This presentation puts Japanese policy on creativity in education in a global context. It examines why creativity is receiving increasing attention in education policies around the world, and how far such policies reflect research on creativity. It assesses Japan’s more implicit strategy for creativity, and in particular, its promotion of foreign language education as part of that strategy. It should be of interest to all in Japanese education seeking to encourage creativity in their students.

When planning a class it is sometimes difficult to predict which activities will work, particularly in online classes. This presentation draws together threads from student interviews and existing literature on student engagement and willingness to communicate, in order to re-interpret learner actions in terms of emotion labor (Hochschild, 1979). It suggests that by taking account of students’ potential emotion labour, teachers can develop trust and increase the chances of successful classroom participation online or face-to-face.

This presentation investigates language learners’ beliefs about error logs which combine uncoded, focused corrective feedback. Participants were enrolled in writing classes at a Japanese university which were conducted both on campus and online using Zoom and Google Classroom. Students were required to complete an error log in which they identified and corrected targeted errors and mistakes. This study gathered data from language learner diaries, interviews, and metaphors to gain an in-depth understanding of learners’ beliefs.

Most studies on motivation and translanguaging have focused on learning L2 English due to its role as a dominant international language of power. In this presentation, we report on two intrinsic case studies (Stake, 1995) of Japanese majors of English who studied in Taiwan for 11 months. Following a survey of their translanguaging practices in Japanese, English, and Chinese, we interviewed them to explore the motivations underlying their language choices.

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.

Having trouble getting up from couches or the floor? Is your balance shaky? Brain hemisphere synchronization not optimized? Then this practical, fun, and low impact online workshop is for you. These exercises, based on the biomechanics of martial science, will help you in your daily life and increase the longevity of your body. You do not have to identify as a senior, so the earlier the start the more benefit you will get.

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.

The brain’s natural tendencies to seek patterns, form emotions, make stories, predict, and obsess on the social world are closely connected to learning. The presenters will invite you to share ideas for using these powerful learning tools. Then, our panel of experts will reveal the reason why our brains have these tendencies—a highly active network in the brain that used to be thought of as just daydreaming! Join the panel in learning collaboratively.

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.

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.

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.

The senpai/kohai (mentor/junior) relationship is one of the core sociological features of Japanese culture, particularly in the context of education. This presentation reports on the positive effects of having three upperclassmen (senpai) volunteer as teaching assistants in a freshman online English class at a private university in Japan. Surveys and interviews indicate that having this important senpai/kohai interaction within the classroom increased learner motivation to study English, and learners’ overall performance improved.

Participants will learn three classroom activities that are based on Japanese Psychologies, along with ideas on how they can be incorporated into face-to-face classes, online (Zoom) classes, and on-demand (pre-recorded) classes. Taken from a pre-study abroad program that contains aspects of both Western and Eastern psychological modalities and that supports students’ mental health while studying abroad, these activities promote self-reflection, cultural awareness, and language skills while also teaching students about the foundations of Japanese Psychology.

This presentation analyzes potential correlations between self-efficacy and causal attributions for a standard speaking test in a public Japanese university. The study was conducted with first- and second-year students that sought to analyze their capability beliefs going into the speaking test and attributions for perceived success or failure upon receiving the result. The presentation will outline the relationships between self-efficacy, attribution, and achievement. Issues of gender and years of study are also considered.

This study examined L2 speakers’ strategies of how to complete an opinion monologue task successfully. The participants were 48 Japanese university students, and they answered a retrospective questionnaire after a task. Among them, four participants also had follow-up interviews. The findings show that the participants prioritized what to talk about rather than grammatical accuracy. Discussion will center on Levelt’s speech model, and how speaking tasks can be implemented will also be discussed.

In this presentation, we will share the results of an end-of-term survey, which explores the impact that our use of teams had on students in online Debate and Presentation classes. This research will consider theoretical frameworks from psychological and pedagogical perspectives to investigate possible relationships between online teamwork, students’ self-reported anxiety, team cohesion, and motivation. At the end of the presentation, there will be suggestions for future research and teaching practice, followed by discussion time.

This presentation will discuss findings from a research project on the generation effect in the L2 university classroom. The study looked at the effects of generating original meaning in isolation from other learning strategies to see if the generation effect alone is effective in long-term vocabulary retention. The study’s findings, using linear mixed effects analyses, did not show efficacy of generation when used in isolation when compared to the control groups.