This paper presents a soft-CLIL (content and language integrated learning) practice focused on biomimicry, conducted at Japan's National Institute of Technology (NIT). Biomimicry involves solving problems and creating new things by drawing inspiration from animals, plants, and other living organisms to design and enhance human-made products and…

Studies relating to the vocabulary items within EFL textbooks have revealed a divergence from well-researched wordlists such as the New General Service List (NGSL) (Browne et al., 2013), and the BNC/COCA wordlist (Nakayama, 2022; Sun and Dang, 2020). In Japan, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) recently…

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…

There is a lack of research evaluating the effects of digital textbooks and digital apps on learning for early elementary school learners. Therefore, this study conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate how an iPad application for learning English as a foreign language impacted children's grammar understanding, satisfaction, persistence,…

This paper explores how Japan employed language education to justify Japanese imperial surveillance practices by examining the depiction of policemen and military police officers in Japanese language textbooks used by Korean primary students during the colonial period under Japanese rule. The analysis of the Japanese language textbooks used during…

Recent reforms to Foreign Language Activities policies in Japan have highlighted the importance of facilitating multilingualism and multiculturalism in global contexts. However, many of the most recent elementary school textbooks (2018-2020) for Foreign Language Activities classes in Japan are English Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks focused…

This study presents a case study of academic discourse socialization in a Japanese EFL student in a research seminar course to understand the content of a scholarly book in English. Drawn on theoretical perspectives of language socialization and community of practice, an 8-month case study investigated how the participant was socialized into the…

This paper analyzes writing tasks in academic writing textbooks for Japanese university students, focusing on the organization and difficulty of these tasks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). A total of 411 writing tasks from 30 textbooks were coded by two experienced Japanese English teachers. The author…

As vocabulary plays an important part in L2 learning at the beginner level, investigation into vocabulary learning constitutes an essential part of second language acquisition research (Koda, 1989; Laufer, 1992; Meara, 1992). Assuming the case of Japanese, English education can provide a meaningful example. In addition, noting that precise…

This paper examines a remarkable artifact of international business education, a four-book business Chinese language series published in Shanghai from 1916 to 1933 by a Japanese business school. Language-centered business education, they concluded, could break Japanese dependence on intermediaries and provide a significant competitive advantage…

School and university classrooms remain the standard around the world for second language instruction. However, over the past 20 years various methods of language learning have permeated the educational landscape to include self-study textbooks, language learning software and online teachers. Some models are evidence based while others lack…

This paper investigates the differentiated educational ideologies projected during the Japanese colonial era by comparing the Japanese language textbooks used by Korean and Japanese primary students at that time. By comparing the texts and images in "Kokugotokuhon" (Japanese language textbooks for Korean students) and…

An analysis of 44 commercially available English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks found that it is common for textbooks to present learners with exercises on phrasal verbs without first providing relevant input to help them. In these cases, learners are likely to resort to trial and error and are then expected to learn from feedback. The…

The current study examines the perceived naturalness of lexical bundles learned from early-stage teaching materials in Japanese learners of English. Naturalness ratings of 24 native English speakers and 23 non-native speakers with Japanese as their first language were compared in relation to corpus derived frequencies from the British National…

One of the many challenges facing Japanese university students studying English is the multi-word phrase. The English language contains a large number of such multiple-word items, which act as single words with a single meaning. This study is concerned with evaluating the efficacy of yes/no checklist tests to assess knowledge of multi-word units.…