This course offers an overview of the underlying concepts and skills that are needed for teaching ESL and EFL literacy development at all age and proficiency levels, with a special focus on EFL literacy in the Japanese educational environment. Students will acquire a working knowledge of the current best practices for the teaching of reading and writing in English as a Foreign/Second/Other Language to adults and children. They will also become familiar with the theory behind the various current methods for planning, implementing, and assessing reading and writing instruction for all levels of ESL/EFL students, from preliteracy to academic skills. Students will also acquire a familiarity with criteria and methods in these fields sufficient to enable them to develop and evaluate teaching methods suited to the local needs of their students yet clearly motivated by the best research insights. Specific topics will include reading comprehension, vocabulary development, the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics of reading, the nature of literacy, the writing process, the effectiveness of written feedback, the social and institutional contexts of ESL/EFL reading and writing, and reading and writing assessment.

The development of speaking and listening proficiency are fundamental goals in most foreign and second language teaching environments. Accordingly, the goal of this course is to relate current theories of listening comprehension and speech production to the design, creation, and implementation of pedagogically sound activities within language courses. To this end, students will become familiar with current theoretical models and common pedagogical approaches. They will also evaluate materials and research related to L2 listening and speaking pedagogy. After investigating how listening and speaking skills develop, we will examine a variety of practical approaches to teaching, including the four strands, extensive listening, task repetition, communicative language teaching, peer interaction, task-based learning, and metacognitive strategies. We will also analyze and critique activities designed to develop or assess speaking and listening skills. By the end of the course students will therefore be able to make informed instructional decisions about how to plan, teach, and assess these skills effectively.

The textbook and assigned readings will be used as a basis for discussing a variety of topics related to these themes. Students will be required to actively participate in- and take turns to lead- these discussions. They will also present a teaching activity based on theory or research, take a final exam, and complete a written project in a relevant area of their choosing.

The purpose of this course is to help new students develop the critical academic skills necessary for success in the MSEd TESOL program. The course is focused on how to 1) take notes and organize academic lecture material; 2) read and discuss academic articles in applied linguistics and TESOL; 3) acquire technical vocabulary in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and TESOL; 4) interpret test questions and write appropriate answers to those questions, 5) conduct bibliographical research; and 6) write academic papers using APA style, including the proper use of paraphrasing, citations, and references. The course provides foundational knowledge of the field of SLA, an introduction to the Temple University library system, and experience writing an academic literature review.

This course is designed for students who are new to the MSEd TESOL program, who have little or no experience studying in an English-language university, or who are not familiar with formal academic writing style. Registrants who are not native speakers of English should have a TOEFL score of at least 550 on the paper-based test or 80 on the internet-based test. There will be 13 regular class sessions for this course and in addition to the regular class sessions, students are required to attend one of the Distinguished Lecturer Weekend Seminars (i.e., the 3-hour public session on Saturday) in summer semester 2026. The instructor will provide you with details about the seminar requirement in the classroom.

The acquisition of morphology and syntax (i.e., morpho-syntax) has been at the heart of the field of second language acquisition since its modern inception in the 1970s. The reason for this focus is simple: Acquiring these aspects of a foreign language is extremely difficult for most adult foreign language learners given the complexity and abstractness of many morpho-syntactic forms. This course has three main goals. The first goal is to become more familiar with basic aspects of English morpho-syntax (e.g., the syntax of declarative statements, question formation, negation, and embedding) in order to better understand some of the key morpho-syntactic mechanisms used in the English language. The second goal is to become conversant with a wide variety of empirical studies into the acquisition of English morpho-syntax. This body of research includes theoretical investigations of the cognitive mechanisms held responsible for the acquisition of morpho-syntax as well as classroom applications of various pedagogical approaches used to teach particular aspects of English grammar. The third goal is to give course participants an opportunity to conduct a hands-on teaching project in which they use a pedagogical approach that is new to them for teaching one aspect of English morpho-syntax. In this way, the participants can expand the pedagogical techniques available to them. Other course assignments include weekly readings, sentence-diagramming tasks, leading and participating in small group discussions, and a final examination.

This class is concerned with fundamental questions concerning the relationship of culture to language. It explores the complicated interactions of culture, language, society, and mind as it draws on research from linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, linguistic and cognitive anthropology, cultural and cognitive psychology, and language philosophy. By the end of the semester, the student should understand the roles that language and culture play in the perception of self, others, and world; the role language plays in the transmission of cultural values and perspectives; the role of culture in the creation of durable social institutions (like money); the cultural and linguistic foundations of human cognition; and even how different cultural and linguistic practices are related to different educational outcomes. This course will emphasize the constitutive, normative, and interpretive functions of culture in general, but will elaborate those elements of English speaking culture important to language instruction. This course is intended to help pre- and in-service teachers understand and address cultural issues in the classroom, while providing general insight into the cultural functions of language. Successful students will complete all readings and participate in discussions, finish one individual and one group project, and write a final paper.

Students are required to register for this course in the semester they take the MSEd Comprehensive Examination. This course is a Pass/Fail course. If the student is taking the January Comprehensive Exam, the student must register for this course in the spring semester. If the student is taking the May Comprehensive Exam, the student must register for this course in the summer semester.

This course builds on the foundations laid in the introductory educational statistics course. The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of multivariate statistics used in second language quantitative research. This will initially involve a review of techniques from the first statistics course, including the ANOVA families, correlation analyses, and how these techniques can be extended to multivariate ANOVAs and discriminant analysis. We will then look at other important multivariate techniques, multiple regression, logistic regression, principal components analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis. These techniques lay the foundation for an introduction to multilevel and mixed effects models and structural equation modeling. Students will participate in a variety of activities, including analyzing datasets using JASP and critiquing the research designs and statistical analyses of published studies

*For more details about the schedule, please check the chart below.

Dr. Nemoto’s In-person Class Schedule:

The course focuses on researching vocabulary, both single words and multi-word expressions, in a second language. We will consider a wide range of vocabulary research topics, such as incidental and deliberate vocabulary learning, conducting corpus-based and meta-analysis research, measuring vocabulary level and vocabulary size, word morphology knowledge and measurement, and word recognition processes. The broad areas covered are vocabulary acquisition, measurement, use, and processing. The course is practical in nature and will introduce students to conducting original research on words and multi-word expressions. The course draws on quantitative research in neighboring disciplines, such as applied linguistics, language assessment, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. It covers a range of research methods, such as, tests, corpora, questionnaires, and various behavioral measures. Some attention will be paid to statistical considerations and experimental designs. By the end of the course, members should be aware of the major research issues pertinent to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary vocabulary research, be able to critically examine original research articles involving words and multi-word expressions, and be able to design and conduct an original piece of vocabulary research. Further, by the end of the course, course members should be in a position to submit a paper for review or collect data for an apprenticeship or research paper.

*For more details about the schedule, please check the chart below.

Dr. Nicklin’s In-person Class Schedule:

This course builds on the foundations laid in the introductory educational statistics course. The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of multivariate statistics used in second language quantitative research. This will initially involve a review of techniques from the first statistics course, including the ANOVA families, correlation analyses, and how these techniques can be extended to multivariate ANOVAs and discriminant analysis. We will then look at other important multivariate techniques, multiple regression, logistic regression, principal components analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis. These techniques lay the foundation for an introduction to multilevel and mixed effects models and structural equation modeling. Students will participate in a variety of activities, including analyzing datasets using JASP and critiquing the research designs and statistical analyses of published studies.

*For more details about the schedule, please check the chart below.

Dr. Nemoto’s Online Synchronous Class Schedule:

The course focuses on researching vocabulary, both single words and multi-word expressions, in a second language. We will consider a wide range of vocabulary research topics, such as incidental and deliberate vocabulary learning, conducting corpus-based and meta-analysis research, measuring vocabulary level and vocabulary size, word morphology knowledge and measurement, and word recognition processes. The broad areas covered are vocabulary acquisition, measurement, use, and processing. The course is practical in nature and will introduce students to conducting original research on words and multi-word expressions. The course draws on quantitative research in neighboring disciplines, such as applied linguistics, language assessment, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. It covers a range of research methods, such as, tests, corpora, questionnaires, and various behavioral measures. Some attention will be paid to statistical considerations and experimental designs. By the end of the course, members should be aware of the major research issues pertinent to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary vocabulary research, be able to critically examine original research articles involving words and multi-word expressions, and be able to design and conduct an original piece of vocabulary research. Further, by the end of the course, course members should be in a position to submit a paper for review or collect data for an apprenticeship or research paper.

*For more details about the schedule, please check the chart below.

Dr. Nicklin’s Online Synchronous Class Schedule:

PhD students are required to take two 3-credit Research Apprenticeship courses.

If you wish to take an apprenticeship course, you must first write a 300-400-word abstract of your proposed project (unless you are assisting a professor with one of their studies). This abstract should include basic information such as (a) the gaps in the literature you are addressing, (b) the purpose(s) of the study, (c) specific research questions, and (d) your methodology, including information about the participants, instruments, procedures, and the analyses you will perform. You must then send the abstract to the advisor you wish to work with (consult the list of Apprenticeship advisors on the registration form to see who is available), and if the advisor approves your plan, you can then register for the course with that advisor.

This course is for those PhD students who have passed the Preliminary Examination and working on their dissertation proposal.

PhD students are required to take Culminating Courses (6 semester hours overall, minimum 2 semester hours of EDUC 9999). Culminating Courses: Preliminary Preparation Course (EDUC 9994), Dissertation Proposal Design Course (EDUC 9998) and Doctor of Education Dissertation Course (EDUC 9999).

Minimum 2 credit hours of EDUC 9999 are required for the PhD students.

Students wishing to register for this course should obtain permission from the professor and complete the registration process during the registration period.

Practice and Automatization: Bridging ISLA Research and the Classroom by Dr. Yuichi Suzuki, Waseda University, Japan, 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.

Second Language Pragmatics: Theory, Research, and Pedagogy by Dr. Naoko Taguchi, Northern Arizona University, U.S.A. will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, July 4, Sunday, July 5, Saturday, July 11, and Sunday, July 12, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (JST). Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 13:00 on Saturday, July 4.

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, July 4 from 9:00 to 12:00. 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, July 3 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, July 3.

Pragmatics, an area within linguistics, is concerned with how people use language in a social context and why they use it in particular ways. The aim of this course is to develop awareness of pragmatics phenomena in our everyday communication, as well as to understand opportunities and challenges that second language (L2) learners face when learning pragmatics in L2. The course is divided into three units. The first unit, theory, surveys theories of pragmatics and pragmatic competence drawing on two distinct yet complementary fields, linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA). The second unit, research, examines the application of pragmatics theories to SLA research through critical discussions of recent empirical findings. The third unit, pedagogy, introduces issues related to teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence. We will examine pragmatics-related materials in a textbook and curriculum, major findings from instructional studies, and common assessment methods and their implications. Through critical examinations of the literature in these three areas, the course will help develop an understanding of the role of pragmatics in L2 research and teaching.

A collection of articles and book chapters will be provided as required reading.