At a time when universities are experiencing a steep decline in enrollment rates, staff retention, integration, and commitment play an important role in the institution's sustainability. Thus, the current study aims to explore the effects of limited-term contracts (LTCs) on foreign language teachers' (FLTs') willingness to integrate on work-related and sociocultural levels. This research adopts a qualitative approach using questionnaires and interviews that focus exclusively on FLTs' LTCs at a university in Tokyo. Key findings are that LTCs do have a direct impact on FLTs willingness to integrate within their institutions at a peer and institutional level as previously highlighted by Chen (2022), Sato and Cotter (2017), Fuisting (2017), and Sato et al. (2015). However, limited effects were found at a classroom level. Additionally, evidence suggests that there is a correlation between sociocultural integration outside of work and willingness to integrate at the work-related level.

It is undeniable that the outbreak of Covid-19 has placed most, if not all, Thai EFL teachers in an extremely uncomfortable situation. While the pandemic may have slowly faded, its legacy still lurks behind the pedagogical practice and policy making in a lot of Thai educational institutes. At King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, online classes continue to be regarded as a practical, convenient and above all, 'safe' mode of learning. The safety net of online teaching, nevertheless, comes with an expensive price for EFL teachers at the university who have lost touch with not only their students but also their work colleagues. To tackle the issue, a series of lunch talk was organized from December 2022- February 2023 to encourage the faculty to discuss, reflect and share their research ideas, anxiety and self-development goals. The topics ranged from casual conversations such as favorite books to serious discussions on professional development, research collaboration and teaching techniques. A total of 22 teaching staff at the Department of Language Studies were then interviewed to mainly see if they had benefited from attending the talks. Findings showed a variety of opinions and interestingly two-thirds of the participants did not find attending the talks useful or impactful. Further inquiry into teachers’ expectations regarding collaboration should therefore be made to ensure the long-term benefits.

The development of Japanese students’ critical thinking skills is being encouraged by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT). Unfortunately, many students at the tertiary level in Japan are still not able to use these skills effectively, and many students lack a basic understanding of critical thinking. In order to develop university students’ critical thinking skills this presenter has combined a variety of different reading techniques including, SQ3R and signposting, in combination with effective questioning techniques, such as Costa’s Levels of Questioning. For this presentation, after a quick description of the scaffolding used to teach students, participants will be presented with the results of a classroom-based project on the implementation of this scaffolding. Examples of students’ improvement on question development as well as the connection to deeper text interaction, will also be presented.

Kakao Open Chat (OC) is a feature of Kakao Talk. OC is a free, anonymous open board that can be password-protected. One presenter employed English-medium instruction (EMI) with international law classes in the spring and fall of 2022. The spring semester was online-only (asynchronous video lectures), and the fall semester was face-to-face. The classes were large (n = 30-60 per class). In such conditions, students often hesitate to interact. We asked, “Will students use OC to ask for the information they need?” and “Will OC proceed in a safe and positive way?” Surveys were conducted after each semester to assess perceptions of OC, OC chats were downloaded and thematically analyzed, and volunteers were interviewed. Results show that using Kakao OC helps students learn course content and overcome the English barrier, and it contributes positively to learning in both asynchronous and face-to-face conditions. We offer suggestions for its use.

Email has become a requisite form of business communication. Effective business email writing means accomplishing a task while maintaining rapport. Therefore, teaching business email writing is not only teaching linguistic accuracy but also linguistic functions and genre knowledge. This study examined the effects of genre-based approach (GBA) and data-driven learning (DDL) to facilitate business email writing. The participants were 40 EFL university learners with elementary (n=20) or intermediate (n=20) English proficiency levels from diverse disciplines. They participated in an 8-hour course to write business emails. The data were collected from the pre-test and post-test, and a semi-structured interview. The findings from the t-test analysis revealed that the participants performed better (p = .000) in the genre aspect after the intervention. Semi-structured interviews revealed that the participants were satisfied with the teaching approaches and found DDL useful for their business email writing in the future.

This study illustrates how Exploratory Practice (EP) prompts teachers and learners to collaborate in gaining mutual understandings about the quality of life in the language classrooms. Participant observations and learner interviews were conducted in two undergraduate English courses in Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology. Learner reflective dairies, post-class learner reflective writings and teaching journals were also gathered in an attempt to understand how motivation is co-constructed by teachers and learners in class. Results of the study reveal that EP plays a crucial role in the circulation of a positive classroom motivation cycle through ongoing teacher-pupil communication and teacher reflection. EP urges effective communication in the classroom and this consequently fills the gap of the motivation cycle and prevents misunderstandings between teachers and learners. Research findings suggest that the adoption of EP can be beneficial to teacher motivation as well as learner motivation through participants' understandings about classroom life.

This study aims to explore ways of enhancing EFL students’ oral skills using task-based language teaching (TBLT) through telling short stories in a classroom environment in Taichung, Taiwan. For this study, 54 students were enrolled in an EFL course titled “English Oral Communication” and “English for leisure and culture” from the Fall semester of 2022 to the Spring semester 2023. All the participants were required to tell a short story according to a set of pictures that the teacher-researcher gave them. To do so, the researcher randomly but not evenly assigned the participants into two different teaching methods. One teaching method, the planning group, allowed students to prepare their short story for 10 minutes. The second teaching method, the no planning group, required students to tell their short story immediately without prior preparation.

This study investigated the impact of overseas internships on the performance of Japanese undergraduates on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) using a control-group pretest-posttest experimental design. Students participating in overseas internships were compared to their counterparts in a nonoverseas internship control group. Using TOEIC data collected in June 2019 and September 2019, we performed t tests and used a difference-in-differences model with propensity score matching estimation of participation in overseas internships, students’ demographic information, family socioeconomic status variables, and self-learning characteristics. The study showed that students’ participation in overseas internships and self-learning activities had significant effects on TOEIC performance. The findings of this study also indicate that aside from the effects of overseas internships experience and self-learning on students’ academic performance, learner autonomy may be important for improving students’ performance. This study sheds light on the association between overseas internships and students’ academic achievement and makes an important contribution to the broader conceptual literature.

Research has shown that academic disciplines exhibit specific ways of thinking and collaborating (Becher & Trawler, 2001; Bradbeer, 1999; Woods, 2007). With the recent proliferation of interdisciplinary university courses in Singapore, the ability to understand and be understood by their coursemates from other disciplines is more important to students now. Little is known about how these students communicate and collaborate in interdisciplinary classroom settings though.

We aimed to describe university students' performance and perceptions of interdisciplinary communication in a first-year university communication course. The data includes 500 student surveys, 12 recorded and transcribed group discussions, and 20 interviews. An inter-cultural communication framework was used in data analysis. Awareness, experience, curiosity, and emphasis on equality between disciplines were highlighted as some pre-requisites for effective interdisciplinary communication.

Participants can expect to gain insights into university students' views on interdisciplinary classroom communication, useful in the design of learning in interdisciplinary courses.

Scholars have long supported the idea that teachers of languages can themselves benefit from learning a language as it can enable educators to reflect on their own pedagogical methods and understand the experiences and challenges that face language students (Cornwall & Kato-Otani, 2013; Ellis, 2006). Additionally, in the highly international modern world, institutions and employers are now highly dependent on standardized language examinations to assess candidates, making standardized testing an almost essential part of modern language education. Logically, this suggests that in order to build mutual understanding and develop classroom methodologies, taking a standardized test in a second language should be a beneficial experience for language teachers. This presentation will introduce the findings of an interview based research project that explores how taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) influenced the teaching methodologies and student empathy of several teachers of English at Japanese universities, and show how taking a standardized test - be it JLPT, TOPIK or anything else - can be an excellent way for language teachers to develop their professional skills.

Drawing on ecological perspectives, this study investigates changes in the bilingual education of ethnic Koreans in China in the context of globalization. Focusing on two Chosonjuk (ethnic Korean in China, 朝鲜族)schools in Northeast China that experienced challenges due to declining enrollment as a result of the increasing popularity of attending Han (ethnic Han Chinese, 汉族) schools, this study discusses the ways in which these two schools repositioned their bilingual programs to leverage the Korean (Chosonmal, 朝鲜话) and Mandarin(Putonghua, 普通话) languages as linguistic capital and the ways in which such repositioning affected the school choices of Chosonjuk families and other student families. Our findings show that these two schools implemented a series of changes, including the provision of individualized instruction to students to meet their specific needs and the enrollment of Han students and international students from South Korea who were interested in learning the Korean or Mandarin languages. These practices increased the attractiveness of the two schools to families with a variety of needs and concurrently created an inclusive educational environment for the students.

This study looked into the pragmatic competence of 320 university ESL students in making requests and apologizing in the assumption that speech acts can be taught and assessed. Using Liu's Multiple Choice Completion Test, results revealed that females scored higher than males on request and apology items. However, their scores failed to reach a 50% rate, with the discrimination and difficulty indices suggesting that the tests' difficulty was an intervening factor. Since males and females had incredibly close mean scores on request items, the difference is insignificant ruling out the assumption that females are more adept at making requests than males. There is, however, a significant difference between their mean scores in apology items. In light of these findings, it is recommended that gender's influence on pragmatic competence be examined, validity of the Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Test be assessed and strategy training be incorporated into speech acts lessons.

This presentation explores the experiences of six educators and course coordinators working within an English for academic purposes (EAP) program at a private university in Western Japan. The presenters leverage an action-research approach to examine their own narratives surrounding the challenges of adjusting to emergency remote teaching (ERT) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The presenters wrote narratives regarding the daunting task of using digital tools to convert face-to-face content into ERT. The authors coded each other’s narratives and then used the auto-hermeneutic approach to analyze the data to find recommendations for improving pedagogy and practice. The chapter offers insight into best practice for those embedded in EAP or other similarly interconnected, multi-faceted content higher education programs. The results suggest educators need to help cultivate greater institutional, faculty, and student competency with educational technologies and to explore evidence-based pedagogy related to online learning to prepare for future instances of ERT.

Research in a variety of contexts suggests that parental involvement is correlated with children’s educational success; however, studies are lacking that evaluate the relationships between English private tutoring (EPT), parental involvement, and students’ academic performance. To address this gap, this paper investigates the effects of parental involvement on the academic attainment of Taiwanese students with a focus on the breadth of EPT. Data from the Taiwanese national college entrance exams in 2017 and 2018 were collected to obtain and design a pretest–posttest control group. Based on the results of a two-stage least squares regression analysis, the findings revealed that parents’ private tutoring (PT)-related activities, parent–school contacts, EPT, and self-learning were significantly associated with students’ increased academic gains in comparison to certain dimensions of parental involvement, such as discussions between the parents and their child/children and the monitoring of the child/children by the parents.

Rhetoric involves utilizing language techniques to persuade or inform an audience (Rowland, 2019). Examples of established rhetorical techniques include, antithesis, metaphors, and tricolons (see Leith, 2019; Herrick, 2018; Lucas, 2015; Toye, 2013). In a world now heavily influenced by global communication, research into modern rhetoric is of critical importance. Research to date though, has primarily focused on how speakers utilize these rhetorical techniques, largely ignoring the audience. Therefore, this study explores the rhetorical awareness of such techniques by members of the audience, comparing university students with previous instruction in rhetoric to students without previous instruction. The study employs a qualitative research design, utilizing thematic analysis, and is framed by the key research question: Can rhetorically aware students collaborate with rhetorically unaware students to foster a mutually beneficial learning experience? The study and its findings will be discussed in the presentation, with an emphasis on pedagogical implications for ESP instructors.

Despite its importance in developing communicative competence, pragmatic awareness is less likely to be addressed in EFL classrooms, possibly leading to misunderstandings and breakdowns when learners are engaged in practical communication in various sociocultural contexts. Unfortunately, this lack of pedagogical emphasis appears to be mainly due to low pragmatic awareness among teachers. The purpose of this study is to explore ways to raise such awareness and promote pragmatic pedagogy by qualitatively analyzing data from interviews with Japanese teachers of English. The results suggest that integrating pragmatics and grammar pedagogy can be an effective and feasible approach. In addition, this integration may become even more compelling when combined with classroom efforts to prepare students for various examinations which can have a major impact in many Asian EFL contexts. It is time to start focusing on what students really need to learn both inside and outside the school framework.

Tandem language exchange consists of a partnership between two learners studying each other’s language. Among the mutual advantages it provides is the opportunity to improve their linguistic and communicative competence and cultural knowledge. Based on reciprocity and autonomy, a self-access center (SAC) may be seen as one of the most suitable places to run this face-to-face exchange program. This ethnographical study collected perspectives from different actors involved in an established tandem program - organisational team and learners - in a SAC, at a Japanese university, through interviews. Findings allowed to gain insights into the program and further understanding of the practices, including benefits and suggestions for improvement. While parallels could be made, findings also showed several differences between the institutions’ initial intentions and the reality of practice. This research may provide other educational settings with ideas to encourage collaboration in outside-of-class exchanges to expand learners' linguistics, communicative, and cultural knowledge.