Reducing gender disparities in Japan is an urgent issue that requires the attention of multilevel stakeholders, including higher education institutions. Under Sustainable Development Goal 4, target 4.7 calls for educational institutions, including universities, to explore innovative approaches to tackle issues such as gender inequality. The…

This article examines how students' subject knowledge acquired in short-term international courses (SICs) developed while engaging in university studies in the year following their SICs. It also explores factors associated with their engagement and disengagement. Two interviews with a 1-year interval with 25 students revealed their transformations…

The current study focuses on an e-learning platform called Furago designed to provide language instructors with exercises complementing activities already implemented in their classes. Its objective was to assess the impact the use of Furago could have on the listening skills of first-year Japanese university students. Statistical analyses that…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of education for sustainable development (ESD) approaches in English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japanese higher education. Design/methodology/approach: A content and language integrated learning (CLIL) University-level course was run over two separate semesters--the first as a…

This book offers a collection of original papers showing how Higher education institutions have coped with changing the language of instruction. It points out that Higher education institutions have undergone radical change in the past decades; of which the shift to English-medium instruction, as well as bi- or plurilingual programmes, is one…

This article outlines a junior high school physical education class which teaches basketball in English using the CLIL framework as a case study. The purpose of the article is to consider how and what students learned from the class through students' class results, basketball skills test, post lesson questionnaire and pre and post lesson teacher…

This book proposes a new paradigm for English language teaching based on concepts from English for Specific Purposes (ESP) research and applications as well as from growing evidence relating pattern recognition to language learning ability. The contributors to the volume argue that learners should not try to become proficient all-around users of…

This study statistically investigates the characteristics of the intended curriculum for Japanese primary science, focusing on the learning content. The study used the TIMSS 2011 Grade 4 Curriculum Questionnaire data as a major source for the learning content prescribed at the national level. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to determine the…

A review of recent literature suggests that, although academics in several countries (such as Japan, Korea and Germany) now allocate more of their time to research, service activities and administration than they had in the early 1990s (Teichler, Arimoto, and Cummings, 2013), the majority of university professors still spend the largest proportion…

This paper examines the status and relevant challenges in Japan's primary geography education system, from the perspectives of curriculum and levels of teachers' expertise. Japanese elementary schools adopted the subject Social Studies in the National Curriculum Standards. These emphasize geographical content and the curriculum structure utilizing…

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has been widely implemented in educational systems in Europe since the mid-1990s based on their multilingual education policy. CLIL integrates acquisition of subject knowledge with language learning, either a second or foreign language, simultaneously. Recently, CLIL in English has been introduced in…

Innovation is essential for the education sector. The ways in which curriculum decision making is organised reflects different implicit approaches on how educational systems pertain to promote innovation in education. Curriculum holds an outstanding place when seeking to promote innovation in education, as it reflects the vision for education by…

To support the review of the National Curriculum, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) was commissioned by the Department for Education in the spring of 2011 to produce a report detailing curricular arrangements in a number of high-performing educational jurisdictions. The principal source of information for this report has been…

Background: Under the impact of globalization and the coming of the Information Age, there is a paradigm shift occurring in the engineering curriculum and academic structure. Apart from the creation of new programs for the emerging fields in engineering, the approach and orientation have also been shifted from objective-based/input-based education…

Curriculum innovations succeed or fail according to the extent to which teachers, and to some extent students, feel that they are meaningfully involved in the process of change. For change to be effective, it cannot be simply imposed from above; rather it depends absolutely on the people who implement it. The innovations described in this book…