Following are the lecturers and topics of past seminars of the Distinguished Lecturer Series.

Dr. Kristopher Kyle (University of Oregon, U. S. A.)

Measuring Productive Lexical Proficiency in Learner Corpora

Lexical proficiency is an essential component of effective written and spoken communication, and is commonly measured as the proportion of sophisticated or advanced words a language learner uses to complete a particular task. Most often, a word’s reference corpus frequency determines the degree to which it is considered advanced or sophisticated (e.g., Laufer & Nation, 1995). While frequency is undoubtedly an important feature of sophistication, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that lexical proficiency is most accurately modeled when multiple complementary lexical and lexicogrammatical features are used (e.g., Kim, Crossley, & Kyle, 2018; Kyle, Crossley, & Berger, 2018).

This seminar will first provide an introduction to lexical (e.g., frequency and concreteness) and lexicogrammatical (e.g., the association of word combinations) features that affect perceptions of lexical proficiency from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. The broad implications for pedagogical considerations will also be discussed. In the next portions of the seminar, students will be led through a hands-on workshop in which an analysis of lexical sophistication will be conducted using an open-source learner corpus. Finally, students will demonstrate their understand of theoretical and practical concerns surrounding the analysis of lexical sophistication by independently conducting a preliminary study.

Dr. Alyssa Kermad (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, U.S.A.)

Applied Methods for Researching and Teaching L2 Pronunciation

The overarching aim of this seminar is to develop an awareness of the area of second language (L2) English speech and pronunciation which has received increasingly more attention and importance over the years, especially considering that there are currently more non-native English speakers than native English speakers. This seminar takes a bottom-up approach to the topic, beginning with an overview of the English sound system, including segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech. This seminar will cover core concepts of David Brazil’s (1997) framework of intonation, including the context of interaction, prominent syllables, tone units, pitch, and intonation. Instruction will be provided for analyzing and quantifying speech properties related to fluency, word stress, sentence prominence, pitch, and intonation. Praat, a speech analysis software, will be used alongside this instruction to visually illustrate the physical correlates of these speech properties. The seminar will conclude with discussions on the topics of research and teaching in L2 speech and pronunciation. For research, this seminar will survey recent findings related to L2 speech patterns, especially those with a focus on suprasegmental production. This seminar will also consider important methodological issues in research design. Finally, for teaching, this seminar will explore the applications of Praat for teaching and learning in the language classroom.

Dr. Shinichi Izumi (Sophia University, Japan)

Seeking for the Interface between SLA Research and Language Teaching

In this seminar, the lecturer would like to discuss issues related to the interface between Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research and language teaching (ELT). It is a welcoming thing that SLA has finally become a necessary part of the national teacher license curriculum in Japan, and universities nationwide have thus started to offer courses in SLA to prospective language teachers. However, what is needed is not simply to make SLA a mere “knowledge base” for language teaching, but to actively use such knowledge by critically examining our own learning and teaching in light of what SLA research has uncovered about the intricate processes of L2 development. This may be somewhat similar to the still controversial issues in SLA research concerning the interface between metalinguistic explicit knowledge and communicable implicit knowledge, that is, whether and how the two types of knowledge interact with each other to enable better learning. It is the lecturer’s contention that, instead of an either/or answer, this all depends on how one tries to bridge the two in the course of one’s learning (and teaching)—an issue that he wishes to discuss in some detail as part of his talk in the seminar. In a similar manner, it is incumbent on us to actively seek for ways to connect SLA research and language teaching if the lecturer and attendants wish to create the interface and derive any benefits from it.

In this seminar, the lecturer would like to first start off by introducing what research in First Language Acquisition has revealed about the processes of L1 acquisition, discuss some major theoretical approaches to L1 acquisition, and later use these as a basis for examining and discussing issues raised in SLA research and language teaching. In the latter part of the seminar, the lecturer would like to introduce a Soft CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) lesson for high school in Japan as a way to apply SLA research findings/insights to practical classroom teaching.

No prior knowledge of SLA is required to take this seminar. Anyone who wishes to seek for the interface between SLA and language teaching are welcome to join in.

Dr. Donald Carroll (Shikoku Gakuin University, Japan):

Conversation Analysis and Its Practical Application to Language Teaching

The field of conversation analysis is now into its sixth decade of empirical research into the structure and social order of interaction. The first generation of researchers would be pleased and astounded at how much is now known across such a wide range of contexts, languages, and interaction types, from mundane daily conversation to talk-at-work to pedagogic interaction, both in classrooms and in-the-wild. Yet most of these empirical observations remain unknown to the overwhelming majority of language teachers worldwide, not to mention textbook authors and publishers.

The twin goals of this seminar are to introduce the fundamental orientations and working practices of ethnomethodological conversation analysis and then examine how the resulting observations on interaction are of immediate relevance to the teaching of an additional language, specifically TESOL. The seminar will focus on several broad and particularly well-researched aspects of empirically observable interactional order, aspects that are of immediate relevance to language teachers and language learners and yet often stand in direct contraction to orthodox teaching materials and syllabi.

In addition to an initial presentation, the seminar will include a practical workshop component during which participants can try out practical ideas that can be immediately incorporated into their own teaching and/or language learning.

Dr. Rob Waring (Notre Dame Seishin University, Japan):

The Place of Extensive Reading and Listening in and EFL Curriculum

This session will first outline what a typical EFL curriculum should cover at various ability levels and ages. The lecturer then will investigate how typical courses structure learning tasks and material to attempt to achieve these goals and will reflect on how they often may be underserving the learners. The lecturer then will build up a picture of how extensive reading (ER) and extensive listening (EL) help fill in many gaps in EFL curricula by providing the much-needed input, repetition and recycling needed to deepen and consolidate learning. This review will also look at what needs to be done to prepare learners to read and listen extensively. The lecturer also will discuss the limits of an ER approach particularly for more specialist topics, and at the more advanced levels and suggest approaches and strategies to ensure effective learning.

The session will then review the state-of-the-art of ER and EL research in order to understand the current state of play. Participants will be invited to discuss what the lecturer and they still need to find out by composing a research agenda. The lecturer then look at some examples of ER and EL research to highlight commonly-made pitfalls in research design. Participants will come up with some principles of how to effectively design ER and EL research so as to avoid as many pitfalls as possible. Participants will then select several research questions and propose how these may be examined experimentally, present these to fellow classmates, and submit a paper describing and justifying their proposal.

Dr. Irina Elgort (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

L2 Vocabulary Acquisition, Learning and Processing: Adopting an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Lexical knowledge is foundational. In reading and listening, not knowing a word (or a phrase) is a bottleneck of comprehension. In communication, lexical errors are tolerated to a lesser degree than other types of errors by native and non-native speakers. But, as Virginia Woolf put it, “words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind”. So, how do we store and access L2 word knowledge in the mind?

In this seminar, we will take an interdisciplinary look at the question, “What does it mean to know a word?” (Nation, 2001), as it is posed by L2 acquisition researchers, psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists, applied linguists and language educators. (1) We will consider acquisition, learning and processing of orthographic, phonological, lexical and semantic knowledge components, with a view to optimize L2 vocabulary instruction and contextual acquisition from input. (2) We will reflect on interdisciplinary frameworks that have informed research into word learning and processing, and review studies that combine online and offline measures of knowledge. (3) We will examine instruments and measures used in evaluating lexical knowledge and discuss what may be gleaned from different types of vocabulary knowledge tests, response time tasks, as well as eye-movement and event-related brain potentials measures. By the end of this course, you will have an interdisciplinary appreciation of “what it means to know a word”.

Dr. Mark E. Davies (Brigham Young University, U.S.A.)

Using Large Online Corpora for Research, Teaching, and Learning

This series of seminars will examine the many ways in which corpora can be used to enhance research, teaching, and learning. The seminars will be based primarily on the corpora from English-Corpora.org, which are perhaps the most widely-used corpora currently available. In the seminars, we will consider the following topics (among others):

• Basic corpus linguistics methodologies such as concordances (to examine the patterns in which words occur), collocates (to examine the meaning and usage of words and phrases), and n-grams (highly frequent strings of words). We will also focus on how this data can be used to improve teaching and learning.
• Insights from corpora into word frequency (including variation by genre, dialect, and time period), and how this frequency data can be used in teaching and learning
• Keywords and “virtual corpora”, to focus on the vocabulary of particular domains (e.g. engineering, economics, or sports)
• Insights into English grammar (again, including variation by genre, dialect, and time period), similar to what Biber et al (1999) have done with the Longman Grammar of English.

Dr. Charles Browne (Meiji Gakuin University, Japan)

Developing Lexical Competence: From Theory to Classroom Practice to Online Application

This seminar will consider the development of Lexical Competence from several points of view. Through a review of some of the core research in second language vocabulary acquisition we will first try to dispel some of the “myths” about vocabulary learning that are still prevalent among classroom practitioners and researchers. Keith Folse’s excellent book, “Vocabulary Myths: Applying Second Language Research To Classroom Teaching”, one of the two required books for this course, covers eight such myths including the idea that (1) in learning another language, vocabulary is not as important as grammar or other areas, (2) using word lists to learn L2 vocabulary is unproductive and (3) presenting new vocabulary in semantic sets facilitates learning. After developing a basic understanding of how vocabulary should be tested, taught and learned, we will then move on to consider several corpus-derived word lists for second language learners that I have developed. We will then review a range of classroom vocabulary teaching and testing techniques based on current research. Finally, we will look at and get hands on practice in using a variety of online tools for testing, teaching and conducting research on second language vocabulary acquisition.