This seminar will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, June 20, Sunday, June 21, Saturday, June 27, and Sunday, June 28 from 14:00 to 17:00 (JST). Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 18:00 on Saturday, June 20.

The pre sign-up (or course registration for those who are taking this seminar for credit) is required for anybody attending the public session on Saturday, June 20 from 14:00 to 17:00. The sign-up process must be completed through the "Distinguished Lecturer Series Seminar Sign-Up Form" that is available on TUJ Grad Ed website. The sign-up deadline is Friday, June 19 at 12:00 p.m. The public session Zoom link will be provided to those people who completed the online sign-up (or course registration) process by 18:00 on Friday, June 19.

Does practice make perfect? While practice was once dismissed as mechanical drills, the 21st century has witnessed a major reconceptualization of this term. In this seminar, we move beyond mindless “parroting” to a modern and more productive definition of practice as “specific activities engaged in systematically and deliberately” to develop robust knowledge and skills in a second language (DeKeyser, 2007; Suzuki, 2023).

We will explore how this systematic practice leads to automatization. Automatization involves fine-tuning and restructuring of knowledge encompassing lexis, grammar, pronunciation, and pragmatics, which allows learners to progress from effortful processing to fluent communication skills.

The course navigates from theory to pedagogical practice with the following three main research domains:

1. Cognitive Foundations: Examining Skill Acquisition Theory and the interface of explicit/implicit knowledge.
2. Optimizing Practice: Applying principles from cognitive psychology (e.g., desirable difficulty, practice distribution, transfer-appropriate processing, cognitive individual differences) to maximize learning.
3. Teaching Methods: Application: Critically analyzing the role of systematic practice within Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) frameworks.

Finally, we address the research-practice gap. We aim to think of the responsibilities of researchers to produce transparent and relevant work that benefits stakeholders such as language teachers, teacher trainers, and policy makers. Through lectures and discussion of empirical studies, we will explore how to bridge the divide between research and pedagogical practice.

Recommended Reading:
Suzuki, Y. (2023). Practice and automatization in second language research: Perspectives from skill acquisition theory and cognitive psychology. Routledge.
Submitted manuscript of some chapters are available here New Tab.