The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a multimodal approach in which an additional camera was used to deliver online explicit reading strategy instruction. Targeting 20 Japanese beginner-level EFL college students taking online Zoom lessons during one academic semester, two research questions were investigated: (a) To what…

This study explores the role of an online pre-sessional program in preparing students to matriculate into an English-medium bachelor's program at a Japanese university. The study covers two program sessions, the first of which consisted primarily of international students, and the second comprised mainly of graduates of Japanese high schools. To…

With rapid globalization, it is an urgent task for universities in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context to provide practical English education. Particularly, one that enables students to participate in the global society as well as the global business market. The challenge for these universities is to achieve this goal with limited class…

Language learning activities involving time-pressured repetition of similar content have been shown to facilitate improvements in fluency. However, concerns have been voiced about whether these gains might be offset by reduced levels of grammatical accuracy. This descriptive study tracked the oral proficiency of 32 Japanese university students…

This study investigated L2 learners' perception changes at each stage of online collaborative writing. Previous studies revealed the familiarity of L2 collaborative learning with Information and Communication Technology (ICT), whereas few described at which stage of the learning process L2 learners' perceptions change. Therefore, this study…

This study examined the impact of collaborative pre-task strategic planning followed by rehearsal on the quantity and novelty of content used in task performances when strategic planning is performed in different language conditions in an online classroom. Forty Japanese university students of English as a foreign language (EFL) from two intact…

This mixed-methods study explored the effects of employing a genre-based approach (GBA) to descriptive report writing on the understanding of text structure and ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings among Japanese university students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) over a 15-week course divided into three units. Applied within a…

Effective syllabus document design hinges on an alignment between learning objectives, teaching principles and curricular policy. Much of the work on syllabus design in the English Language Teaching (ELT) context focuses on the implementation of language teaching principles, such as those from the Communication Language Teaching (CLT) approach.…

Motivations-beliefs for learning and their relationship to instructional experiences are a poorly understood aspect of higher education. Notably, interest is an individual difference that both researchers and educators alike believe should be supported. However, this support is too often relegated to the craft of instruction. To be enhanced…

This article adopts a sociomaterial perspective on ELT materials and illustrates how a mandatory textbook is used as a springboard to create decolonizing relations in the classroom ecology. Sociomaterial perspectives view learning as not the transmission but the emergence of knowledge from embodied relations, which shifts the focus from the…

Purpose: Education is widely recognized as a key domain for the promotion of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), prompting an increased focus on sustainable development in foreign language education. Despite increased attention, guidelines about SDGs are often primarily policy-based without concrete guidance, and the integration of education…

This study explores the affective aspects -- willingness to communicate (WTC) and International Posture (IP) -- and speaking skills after using technological tools. Online synchronous meeting tool, Zoom, and the asynchronous tool, Padlet, were used as online learning platforms. Data were collected using an 8-item questionnaire on the WTC and a…

This paper compares direct measures of content knowledge for students studying Chemistry through English Medium Instruction (EMI) and Japanese Medium Instruction (JMI). It also examines a range of contextual differences between the two mediums of instruction. A total of 53 undergraduate students undertook pre-post course content tests at a…

This study explored the role of live transcripts in online synchronous academic English classrooms by focusing on how automatically generated live transcripts influence the learning outcomes of lower-proficiency and higher-proficiency learners and on their perceptions towards live transcripts. The study adopted a 2 × 2 factorial design, with the…

Situated in the domain of Global Englishes research, this study explores a question of how far the issue of the English model for Japanese learners is complicated by the hierarchical coexistence of regular English courses taught by Anglophone English teachers and extracurricular online English lessons taught by non-Anglophone instructors. A…