Distinguished Lecturer Series at
Tokyo Center for Fall 2011

Eng Ed 8655: Distinguished Lecturer Series (Seminar 1): ESP (English for Specific Purposes) for EFL Environments: Concepts, Convenient Tools, and Challenges

1 credit hour

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) offers an approach that can raise student motivation by showing them how to go from being a language learner to a language user.

ESP is often mistaken as simply being the drilling of technical terms and grammatical structures for science and technology majors or the teaching of business, legal or other types of special English. Others confuse ESP with content-based learning and think that, for example, you need to be a medical expert to teach the language of medicine. ESP is neither of these. It is a multi-disciplinary approach to enable tertiary-level or adult language learners to efficiently acquire a sufficient level of mastery of language forms required for their professional or occupational communication needs. When presented as a method of observing and classifying such linguistic needs, ESP can also equip students with the skills necessary to continue their linguistic development outside the classroom.

In this seminar, we will start with a brief look at the history of ESP and then consider its definition, especially for application to an EFL situation. This will be followed by discussion and consideration of needs analysis in ESP, course design, teacher- and learner-generated materials and assessment. Concepts and practices useful for ESP teaching will be discussed, including genre analysis, task-based language teaching, focus-on-form approach, corpus linguistics and the social construction of knowledge. We will also discuss the possibility of adopting a genre-based language model, rather than a native-speaker model, as the ultimate target.

For hands-on work, participants will be asked to bring in written texts that they would like to use to create ESP teaching materials. Oral texts are acceptable but should be available as transcripts (e.g., customer service telephone calls, service encounters, lectures or conference presentations). The texts should not have been created for English teaching. They should be authentic texts written to fulfill a professional or occupational need, for example, research papers published in a scientific journal, operation manuals, company annual reports (choose a specific section) or business letters. If possible, bring in at least three examples of texts of the same type, e.g., three different business letters written for a similar purpose and audience but by different people. Prepare to see and understand English from an ESP viewpoint.

Professor:

Dr. Judy Noguchi (Mukogawa University and Osaka Graduate School of Engineering)

Schedule:

Saturday, October 22, from 2:00 to 9:00 p.m. and Sunday, October 23, from 10:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.

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Eng Ed 8656: Distinguished Lecturer Series (Seminar 2): Developing Second Language Skills: A Complex Endeavor of Knowledge Integration

1 credit hour

The initial lecture of this course will give an overview of how different theories of second language acquisition (and some areas of psychology) have treated the concept of practice. The next few segments of the course will then deal with the following topics:

1. input to practice, i.e. various kinds of knowledge, learning contexts, and individual learner characteristics;
2. output expected from practice, i.e. accuracy, fluency and complexity of the language output, along with transfer-appropriateness of the knowledge and confidence in that knowledge and the ability to use it;
3. the process of practice designed to get from point 1 to point 2 (how to frame practice for the students, how to sequence practice activities, how to provide feedback, how to think about the relative roles of production and comprehension practice and of meaning-focused and form-focused practice);
4. special cases, such as computer-assisted language learning and study abroad.

Given the intensity of the course, condensed in one weekend, each lecture (except for the initial one) will provide some opportunity for (brief) small-group discussions and activities.

Professor:

Dr. Robert Dekeyser (University of Maryland, USA)

Schedule:

Saturday, November 5 from 2:00 to 9:00 p.m. and Sunday, November 6 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

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Eng Ed 8657: Distinguished Lecturer Series (Seminar 3): Second Language Acquisition Research and Language Teaching: A Functionalist Approach

1 credit hour

In this lecture, I examine the mechanism of grammar acquisition in SLA and explore how linguistic categories can be acquired effectively. Currently, the mainstream second/foreign language teaching approach that second language researchers and applied linguists consider effective is the communicative approach. However, as far as the acquisition of linguistic categories is concerned, the communicative approach is largely based on the 'learning by doing' model, i.e., learners will acquire linguistic categories through input and interaction. Therefore, insights into how individual linguistic items should be taught are still quite limited, and thus the investigation of effective methods of teaching linguistic categories based on second language acquisition research is sorely needed. I examine two linguistic domains (tense-aspect, Andersen & Shirai, 1994, Shirai 2009; relative clauses, Shirai, 2007) of which acquisition process has been uncovered to some degree, and consider how their acquisition can be facilitated, in particular in relation to the projection model (Zobl, 1985) and from the perspective of functional-cognitive linguistics (e.g., Goldberg & Casenheiser, 2007). Group discussions and activities to analyze learner language will be included in the lecture.

Professor:

Dr. Yasuhiro Shirai (University of Pittsburgh)

Schedule:

Saturday, December 10, from 2:00 to 9:00 p.m. and Sunday, December 11, from 10:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.

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