Nara JALT:

English Teaching in the Japanese EFL Environment: How Efficacious?

Date: Saturday, March 20th, 2010 Time: 5:45 PM - 7:00 PM

Speaker: Rintaro Sato, Nara University of Education

Description:
In the presentation, Rintaro Sato discussed how English can effectively be taught in the Japanese EFL (English as a foreign language) context. In this environment, learners do not often have an actual need for communication in English. It is rare for them to have exposure to English; rather, English is taught as a knowledge-based subject. Some students study it for tests or entrance exams. Thus, Sato believes that teachers should create teaching approaches for this input scarcity in EFL situations. In learning English, the utilization of tasks has been gaining a high profile recently, and the long-established traditional teaching methodology based on the Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) model is now being replaced by Task-Based Language Learning (TBL) in SLA. (Skehan, 1998). However, in the Japanese EFL learning environment, we might be skeptical of the effectiveness of TBL in grammar teaching. In this presentation, the suitability of TBL and PPP in the Japanese school context and the effectiveness of PPP from the point of view of skill acquisition theory will be discussed. Sato also discusses effective teaching from other aspects.

Rintaro Sato is an associate professor in the Department of English Education at Nara University of Education. His research interests include intake and output processing, feedback and negotiation of meaning. Before he came to Nara, he taught English in public high schools in Hokkaido for over 15 years.

Organization: Nara Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (Nara JALT)

Cost: JALT Members: free
Non-members: 500 yen

Venue: Nara Nishibu Kouminkan, above Starbucks at Gakuen Mae Station

Location: Nara City, Nara Prefecture, Japan

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