ISSN: 1882-1103
Reflective Writing on Learner Development: Introduction
学習者ディベロプメントに関する省察的ライティング: 序論

page i

Abstracts 要旨

page vii

How Can I Be Myself? The Life Story of a Language Learner from Korea
韓国人留学生のライフストーリーに見る日本語話者としての私探し
Yoshio Nakai 中井 好男

page 1

Reader Responses by Yukari Rutson-Griffiths and Huw Davies

Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn: Pragmatics Instruction by Students
教えることを学ぶ、学ぶために教える - 学生による語用論教育 Jim Ronald ジム・ロナルド

page 10SUMMER 2017 Volume 24
Issue 2

Promoting English-Major Students’ Intercultural Understanding through Active
Learning 英語専修生の異文化理解を深めるアクティブ・ラーニング
page 19
Hideo Kojima 小嶋 英夫

学習の学習

Reader Responses by Elisa Acosta and Sarah Morikawa

Reader Responses by Lee Arnold and Blair Barr

Reader Responses by Shinobu Nakamura and Dominic Edsall

Learning Together across Borders: Correspondence between Hungarian and Japanese
Learners of English
国境を超え共に学ぶ - ハンガリー人と日本人英語学習者の文通page 28
Agnes Patko アグネス・パトコー
Reader Responses by Farrah Hasnain and Adrian Wagner

Emotion and Communicative Competence in English Discussion Class
英語ディスカッションクラスにおける感情とコミュニケーション能力
Nicole Gallagher 二コール・ギャラガー

page 37

Why Don’t They Listen to You? Teaching Sports Students and Challenges in Classroom
Management
どうして学生は聞かないのか？スポーツ学生と授業経営
page 45
Koki Tomita 冨田 浩起
Reader Responses by Peter Joun and Sean Toland

Academic Writing: In Search of Effective Ways of Providing Students with Constructive
Feedback
アカデミックライティング：建設的フィードバックの効果的な方法を求めて
page 53
Alexandra Shaitan アレキサンドラ・シャイタン
Reader Responses by Peter Collins and Martin A. Cater

Uncovering Teacher Assumptions and Developing Intercultural Communication throughHeightened Local Culture Sensitivity 教師の思い込みの発見と現地文化に対する文化的感受性を高めることによる異文化間コミュニケーションの促進
page 61
Satchie Haga サチエ・ハガ
Reader Responses by Maho Sano and Trevor Raichura

Raising Autonomy by Negotiating Rules with Students: An Exploratory Discussion about
Action Research into Learner Development and Autonomy
ルールの話し合いで学生の自主性を高める学習者ディベロプメントおよび自律学習に関するアクション
リサーチについての探索的考察
page 70
Tokiko Hori 堀登起子 & Andrew D. Tweed アンドリュー・トゥイード

Newsletter of the Learner Development SIG

LEARNING LEARNING 学習の学習

Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017

Reflective Writing on Learner Development: Introduction
学習者ディベロプメントに関する省察的ライティング: 序論

T

his special issue of Learning Learning brings together nine short reflective articles byauthors who presented at the Learner Development Forum on Learner Transformation
as Personal Maturation at JALT2016 in November last year or at the informal
afternoon conference Creating Community: Learning Together 3 (CCLT3) held in December
2016 in Tokyo. Presenters were invited to write reflectively about their learner development
work and research within about 2,500 words. Over three or four drafts a small team of
editors worked in pairs with each writer on the reflective quality of their writing,encouraging writers to develop a personal voice, consider different perspectives on the
topics explored, and take a questioning stance. Once finalised, a writer's article was sharedwith two reader responders who each wrote a response of approximately 500 words,
connecting themes, contradictions, questions to their own learning, teaching, or research,and exploring relevant wider questions and puzzles to do with learner development. In thisintroduction, as the co-editors of this special issue, we look back at how we worked withthe contributors to develop the reflective dimension of their writing. We also consider how
our understandings of reflective writing about learner development changed through taking
part in this project.
Before focusing on our approach to co-editing this special issue, we would like to sharewith you a story about the struggles and pressures that many people experience in writing
and presenting about learner development issues.
A colleague was recently talking with one of us about writing about research and reflective
writing. She mentioned she has a block about “academic writing” in general because it feels
distant from her and from her interests as a teacher and as an “aficionado of learnerdevelopment”—or teacher-learner focused on her students’ development. She finds it hard towrite “academically,” but she is passionate about teaching and full of insights that she gains
from talking with others about her students, their development, and how she is learning andalso developing her practices as a teacher.
The colleague connected our discussion to how she has been changing her way of presenting
about learner development issues in the last couple of years. At first her presentations werevery linear and had a uni-direction, expressing a certain view of what she was presenting
about. She then tried to bring in learner voices and learner perspectives to her presentations,so that she started representing the learner development issue from different perspectives—not
just a single perspective as “teacher.” Next she noticed various themes and issues
interconnecting, but these could be interpreted from a range of perspectives, according to the“subject positions” that she introduced in her presentations and in her writing—herself as ateacher, as a researcher, as a learner, as a writer (who had been negatively evaluated in thepast), as an activist (committed to social justice), and so on. She could also see different
positions for her learners—as her students, as learners with histories of being educated inparticular ways, as young women, as future citizens, as future productive members of society,and so on ...
This story made us aware of how thinking about learner development necessarily
involves interdependence and mediation. Writing reflectively about learner development
puzzles and issues may be closely linked to seeing anew one’s own and others’ experience,
activity, interactions, ideological assumptions and positions, within different social worlds,
systems, and arrangements of power. The story also lets us appreciate why it is helpful toSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learning DevelopmentiLEARNING LEARNING 学習の学習

Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017

read and respond to writers’ texts by moving to and fro between different “subject”
positions so that we can discover new discursive spaces and reach deeper, more criticalunderstandings.
In deciding to work on this project together, we each had different histories andperspectives about editing and responding to writers. These included:
Andy: Having worked on the previous special issue of Learning Learning, I felt it was ashame that the co-editors hadn’t talked more together as a group about what we were doingat the time. For different reasons, we had all been unusually busy, which restricted theopportunities for us to reflect on together what we did as editors. I wanted to develop further
my understanding of responding to writers, so I thought that it would be good to aim, fromthe beginning, to develop a more explicit and interactive community of practice together withmy co-editors.
Dominic: All too often in engaging with research, we only ever read the finished product.
One of my goals in joining the other editors was to get a better insight into the processes that
go into writing and thinking about learner development. Interacting with the writers andgetting their responses helped me understand and appreciate how writing and editing is sucha useful part of knowledge construction. Obviously, working online with writers and editors
who have busy working lives presents some challenges to building up an ideal community ofpractice, but I think we have to be realistic about it. For me, the story above of a colleague
struggling with writing “academically” encapsulates that idea—accepting some imperfections
and including a variety of voices often produces better results.
Sean: There were two reasons why I decided to take the plunge into the editing pool. First,
I felt that I could learn a great deal from my more experienced co-editors and get a behind thescenes look at how the editorial process for an English language teaching publication actuallyworks. Next, I thought it would be insightful to examine accounts from front-line educatorsand this could help me enhance the learner development in my own teaching context.
Trevor: As someone relatively new to the field of research and reflective teaching, co-editingpresented me a wonderful opportunity of seeing how other teachers fleshed out their classroom
experiences and problems into a reflective piece. It was like being able to meet (virtually) withother teachers around the country who were in very different situations from my own, listen towhat they considered very important to them professionally, and then help them to draw
conclusions from their thoughts.
At the start of working together, we used some simple guidelines that Arnold, Barfield,
Murakami and Stewart (2016) developed while working on the previous special issue of
Learning Learning. We initially thought that we should aim to encourage writers to try to
make their articles include:•

the author's personal voice•some sense of learning - both the students' and the author's•a clear picture of the context in which the topic is explored•an effort to understand the question/puzzle/issue from alternative perspectives•

a clear interest value (Does the article catch the reader's interest or not? Why?)

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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017a clear sense of audience (Does the article have a clear sense of audience, i.e.,peers interested in learner development issues?)

We also agreed that writing reflectively might involve authors in raising (interesting andrelevant) questions. For example, does the article interpret, problematize, or take aquestioning stance about the learner development issue(s) it focuses on, rather thantending to be descriptive and distant? We were moreover concerned with guiding writers,in the closing part of their articles, to draw out key themes and pose new questions. This
would, we believed, help to engender dialogue with the reader responders and the imagined
readers of this special issue.
From the outset, we decided to work in pairs on writers’ drafts and restrict our initial
feedback to content and structure. On early drafts we would each try to limit our comments
to three or four so that writers would be able to focus on particular areas of developmentin their writing. This limitation also enabled us as co-editors to learn from each other as
we interacted with different writers. Following these guidelines, from February to May
2017, we corresponded with the writers, responding to their drafts and raising questions
for them to consider.
Eight of the articles in this special issue of Learning Learning include two reader
responses that take up issues of interest presented by a particular writer, including thedevelopment of learner autonomy through taking part in social networks, and an inquiry
into how learner emotion impacts the development of communicative competence. The
ninth article involves a written discussion about doing action research into learnerautonomy and learner development. The interactive structuring of each article creates, we
believe, a dialogic quality as well as a sense of shared exploration and questioning between
writers and readers around specific learner development issues.
The first four articles come from the LD Forum at JALT2016, which had the theme of
Learner Transformation as Personal Maturation. In the first article Yoshio Nakai (reader responders:
Yukari Rutson-Griffiths and Huw Davies) explores how a Korean learner of Japanesedevelops learner autonomy and voice through taking part in social networks andconstructing different situated identities for himself. In the following article Jim Ronald(reader responders: Elisa Acosta and Sarah Morikawa) reports on a project in which students
learn about pragmatics, choose and teach a pragmatics topic to their peers, and reflect on
their experiences, including the challenge of teaching itself. The third article by Hideo
Kojima (reader responders: Shinobu Nakamura and Dominic Edsall) explores the possibilities
for helping first-year English majors to develop their intercultural understanding throughactive learning in a flipped classroom. This is followed by Agnes Patko’s (reader responders:
Farrah Hasnain and Adrian Wagner) reflective account of setting up a bilingual
correspondence project in which her students corresponded with students studying
Japanese at a university in Hungary.
The next five articles bring together work by presenters at Creating Community: Learning
Together 3 (CCLT3). Nicole Gallagher (reader responders: Lee Arnold and Blair Barr) looks atlearner emotion in a topic-based discussion class to explore the relationship between
emotional awareness and communicative competence—and the role of empathy in thedevelopment of an emotional communicative competence. In the following article Koki
Tomita (reader responders: Peter Joun and Sean Toland) reflects on an action research projectthat he carried out to address the challenges of teaching an English course for sports
students. Reporting on an exploratory research project, Alex Shaitan (reader responders: Peter
Collins and Martin Cater) then looks closely at different ways of providing feedback tostudent writers based on their needs, learning styles, preferences, and abilities. In the next
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article Satchie Haga (reader responders: Maho Sano and Trevor Raichura) critically reexamines her own cultural ideological assumptions in relation to her students’ worldviews
and cultural expectations as she re-thinks how to promote learner interculturalcommunicative competence in English. This brings us to the final article, a reflective
discussion by Tokiko Hori and Andrew Tweed about their experiences with action
research (AR) and applying AR in order to understand and promote learner autonomy anddevelopment better.
Looking back in this introduction at our collaboration with different writers leads us to
identify certain challenges that we faced and to recognize different insights that we cameto over time.
Trevor: For me it was a challenge to think of the article completely from the writer's
perspective, and then strike a balance between encouraging them to expand on what they had
already explored, and challenging them to look at their reflections from different angles.
Sean: Responding reflectively to a writer's work is definitely something that is much moredifficult than it initially appears. Working with different authors and witnessing their ability
to draw out more focused reflections from the first draft to the final product was truly inspiring.
Dominic: Self-reflection is difficult enough, but responding reflectively to another person’s
writing is even more difficult. However, working together with the authors, it was reallypossible to sense the idea of writing as shared knowledge creation. I really appreciate theopportunity to have had this dialogue with the authors and know my own knowledge has
increased as a result.
Andy: I was intrigued by how we read the same drafts in different ways and came to makequite distinct comments to the same writer. This helped me question why we each made thecomments that we did. I found on several occasions that if, early on in an article, a writerraises questions or uncertainties in a personal voice about what he or she is looking at, therest of the article often has an intuitive flow in the way that it develops. I noticed that I tended
to encourage some contributors to “narrativize” more in different places in their articles. In
what different ways do teacher-researchers use narratives to reflect about learner development
issues? How do we read such narratives? Why?
Once the main articles were more or less completed, the next part in the editorial
process was to provide some minimum guidance for the reader responders. We suggested
they might see their reader response as an opportunity to connect themes, contradictions,questions from the short reflective article to themselves and their learning, teaching, or
research. They might:● use the opening few lines of their response to set up and structure what they will
cover;● make connections to their own work and experiences to do with learnerdevelopment;● "reflect away" from the writer's text to bring in other wider and sometimes
unexpected perspectives;● raise questions or identify issues to do with a particular concern about learnerdevelopment or learner autonomy;● focus on further (learner development?) puzzles for exploration.
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The reader responders were invited to experiment and see what worked for their own
reader response each time. Including reader responses has enabled a large number of SIG
members to participate in this special issue who did not present at the Learner
Development Forum or CCLT3 and who joined the Learner Development SIG in 2016.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to all the writers in this special issue forcreating together a rich reflective and dialogic dimension across the whole collection. We
also wish to learn from the Japanese editorial and translation team about their perspectives
on this special issue:
Chika: The translation team (Yoko Sakurai, Yoshio Nakai, Koki Tomita, Tokiko Hori,and Chika Hayashi) were collaboratively involved in the developmental process of this special
issue, and this created a community of learning for us also. Perhaps most teachers (especiallyJapanese teachers?) hesitate to share their personal experiences, feelings, and the problems they
face. I have to admit that I myself was one of those teachers for a long time, but my turning
point was 2012 when I engaged in a collaborative reflective dialogue with two other writers,
Guy Modica and Yukiko Banno (Hayashi, Modica, & Banno, 2014). This empoweredme and enabled me to reflect on the environment where I was born and raised, and theencounters I had had with various learners and teachers. I came to consider how all of themwere interrelated and had affected me as a person, as well as a learner and teacher. Throughthat dialogic interaction, I embarked on a journey to trace my roots to my profession, as did
Guy and Yukiko (I hope). Likewise, I believe the reflective dialogic structuring of this special
issue, including the way the translation team has worked, has encouraged contributors not
only to explore issues of learner development, but also to realise the importance of collaborating
and developing new insights into our ongoing personal and professional development.
We opened this introduction with the story of a Learner Development SIG member
who struggles with academic writing. We described her as “passionate about teaching andfull of insights that she gains from talking with others about her students, theirdevelopment, and how she is learning and also developing her practices as a teacher.” We
could re-read that person’s story as one of multi-engagement with learner development
issues through dialogue, reflection, and writing. Similarly, from thinking over the multiple
co-constructions of understanding that this special issue involves, we move again fromnarrative to inquiry and end by asking: In what ways do these short reflective articles and reader
responses, and the format that this issue takes, spark you to reflect, talk, and/or write about what you arelearning in your own teaching and what your learners are doing in their learning? Why?

References
Arnold, L., Barfield, A., Murakami, C., & Stewart, A. (Eds.) (2016). Short papers from theJALT2016 Learner Development SIG Forum “Learners as teachers: What teachers
learn from their learners” and from the Creating Community: Learning Together 2
informal afternoon conference [Special Issue]. Learning Learning, 23(2). Retrieved fromhttp://ld-sig.org/2016-autumn-23-2/
Hayashi, C., Modica, G., & Banno, Y. (2014). Co-constructive storying of our journey
toward autonomy. In A. Barfield & A. Minematsu (Eds.), Learner development working
papers: Different cases, different interests (pp. 8-18). Tokyo: The Japan Association for
Language Teaching (JALT) Learner Development SIG. Retrieved fromhttp://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/09adcf_21351c03a5e04965987e9ee85f87a363.pdf

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Special Issue Editor correspondence
Andy Barfield<barfield.andy@gmail.com>
Dominic Edsall<frozenduckrice@gmail.com>
Trevor Raichura<trevor.raichura@gmail.com>
Sean Toland<seanhtoland@gmail.com>
Japanese editorial and translation team coordinator correspondence
Chika Hayashi<c-hayashi@hotmail.com>

Learning Learning
Our pre-publication deadline for putting together Learning Learning 24(3), the preconference issue, is 30 September. LL24(3) provides PanSIG 2017, JALTCALL 2017 and
JALT International 2017 presenters a great opportunity to share their research and practicewith members unable to attend this year’s conferences. We also invite reflective articles
from conference participants. What presentations made an impact on your understandingof learner development? Why? Did you return home with new ideas, puzzles, or researchquestions?
For more information, please see http://ld-sig.org/information-for-contributors/
or contact us at learninglearning.editor@gmail.com.
Many thanks and we look forward to working with you!
LEARNING LEARNING PUBLICATION TEAM
Arnold F. Arao
EditorLayout & Design
Members’ Voices
Andy Barfield
Members’ Voices Coordinator
LD Grants
Yoko Sakurai
LD Grants Coordinator

Translation
Chika Hayashi
Translation Coordinator
Yoshio Nakai
Translator
Koki Tomita
Translator
Tokiko Hori
Translator
Eriko Uno
Translator

Special Issue: Reflective Writing on Learning Development

Webmaster
Hugh Nicoll

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ABSTRACTS 要旨
How Can I Be Myself? The Life Story of a Language Learner from Korea
韓国人留学生のライフストーリーに見る日本語話者としての私探し
Yoshio Nakai 中井 好男

Reader Responses by Yukari Rutson-Griffiths and Huw Davies
Abstract

In this short paper, I discuss from an ecological perspective the learner autonomy of a Korean
overseas student, “Kim,” learning Japanese at a university in Japan and navigating his social world
and identity in Japanese. I analyze the development of Kim’s learner autonomy holistically andcontextually (Aoki, 2009) by using a life story interview approach. The research reveals how Kim’s
learning experiences and knowledge of Japanese impede his social interactions and constrain his
sense of self. It also illuminates his struggle to find a way to become “his true self” as a Japanese
language user. Kim’s learner autonomy story can be seen as an account of acquiring his own voice(Bakhtin, 1986) in his construction of social networks and identities (Riley, 2007). This ultimately
enables Kim to adapt and achieve his own intentions and purposes, subject to the restrictions ofsocial context that he faces.

要旨
本稿では、言語生態学の観点から、日本の大学で学ぶ韓国人留学生のキムさん（仮名）の第二言語社会と第二言語アイデンティティの構築を方向付ける学習者オートノミーについて考察する。分析にはライフストーリーインタビューを用い、学習者オートノミーを歴史や文脈の中に位置付け(Aoki, 2009)、その変遷について考察を行った。キムさんの学習に関するライ
フストーリーには、キムさんの学習経験や日本語に関する知識が日本語でのインターアクシ
ョンと彼らしさの表出の妨げになっていること、そして、日本語使用者としてのキムさんが「本当の私」を構築していく際の苦悩が描き出された。このストーリーは、社会的ネットワ
ークと社会的アイデンティティ(Riley, 2007)の構築をもたらす「声」(Bakhtin,1986)の獲得の過程を示しており、学習者オートノミーは、彼が直面する社会的文脈からの制約への適応とともに、その環境下で彼自身の意図や目的の達成を可能にしていることが明らかになった。

Keywords: learner autonomy, voice, social network, social identity, ecological perspective,complex adaptive system
学習者オートノミー、声、社会的ネットワーク、社会的アイデンティティ、言語生態学、複雑適応系

Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn: Pragmatics Instruction by Students
教えることを学ぶ、学ぶために教える - 学生による語用論教育 Jim Ronald ジム・ロナルド

Reader Responses by Elisa Acosta and Sarah Morikawa
Abstract

This paper is a report of a near-peer pragmatics teaching project and the creation and presentingof the poster through which the project was introduced. It is also a report of student and teacher
reflections on the project. Further, it is a report of the roles the poster has played in introducing
the project to students and in facilitating teacher reflection concerning both the project and theteaching of pragmatics as part of English speaking classes. Finally, this paper is a reflection on thevalue of written teacher and student reflections to challenge our own beliefs about language
teaching and, consequently, to impact that teaching itself.

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要旨
本論文は、英語スピーキングクラスで学年の異なる学生がお互いに語用論を教えあうプロジ
ェクトおよびそのプロジェクトに関する学生と教師の振り返りに関する報告である。このプ
ロジェクトを通して学生・教師が行ったポスタ制作が、学生にプロジェクトを紹介し、またプロジェクトやスピーキングクラスで語用論を教えることに対する教師の考えをまとめるのに役立った。また学生や教員の振り返りを文字化することが語学教育に関する我々のビリー
フ、また教育そのものに影響を与えるかについて論じる。

Keywords: reflection, pragmatics, learner development, teacher development, peer
teaching
リフレクション、語用論、学習者ディベロプメント、教員ディベロプメント、ピアティーチ
ング

Promoting English-Major Students’ Intercultural Understanding through Active
Learning
英語専修生の異文化理解を深めるアクティブ・ラーニング
Hideo Kojima 小嶋 英夫

Reader Responses by Shinobu Nakamura and Dominic Edsall
Abstract

Today, many teachers in Japan are involved in education reforms promoted by the Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports and Technology (MEXT) which, taking 21st century skills andcompetencies into account, encourage teachers to develop students’ generic skills as well as theirsubject knowledge and skills through Active Learning (AL). In this article, I report on a study where
I aimed to examine to what extent I could help my first-year English majors to develop theirintercultural understanding through AL in a flipped classroom. The students, who would like tobecome primary or secondary school English language teachers after graduation, continued to learnautonomously and collaboratively in an Introduction to Intercultural Understanding class. Throughquantitative and qualitative analysis, I found that they tended to raise their intercultural andprofessional consciousness as teacher learners. Reflecting on this study, I conclude that we needto promote innovation in teacher education, critically exploring different issues around AL andlearner autonomy.

要旨
今日、21 世紀型スキルやコンピタンシーを意識した文部科学省主導の教育改革が進展し、これに関わる多くの日本人教員が、アクティブ・ラーニング(AL)を通して、教科の知識・スキルと同様に学習者の汎用的スキルを育むことを奨励されている。本稿では、教育学部英語専
修の 1 年生を対象とする「異文化理解概論」の授業で、反転学習を含む AL を通して本研究者がどの程度受講者の異文化理解を深めることができたか、を研究の目的とする。大学卒業後に小・中・高の英語教員になることを志望する専修生たちは、自律的・協働的に学び続けた
結果、ティーチャー・ラーナーとして異文化理解や教職専門性への意識を高める傾向が、量的・質的データの分析により認められた。本研究を振り返って、AL や学習者オートノミーに関する様々な問題点をクリティカルに探りつつ教師教育の刷新を図ることが必要である、と結論づけられる。

Keywords: Active Learning, intercultural understanding, flipped learning, teacher-learnerautonomy, teacher education
アクティブ・ラーニング、異文化理解、反転学習、ティーチャー・ラーナー・オートノミー、
教師教育Special Issue: Reflective Writing on Learning Development

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Learning Together across Borders: Correspondence between Hungarian andJapanese Learners of English
国境を超え共に学ぶ - ハンガリー人と日本人英語学習者の文通Agnes Patko アグネス・パトコー

Reader Responses by Farrah Hasnain and Adrian Wagner

Abstract
Many foreign language learners I have met in Japan feel they do not have enoughopportunities to practice English. They often do not like to read and write in the target
language. Although learners would like to improve their communication skills, a great
number of learners are afraid to speak because they are anxious about their mistakes. As aresult, they lack confidence. I targeted the above challenges by setting up a bilingual
correspondence project in which my students could experience authentic communication
in English and act as native speakers. Corresponding with a foreign student of the sameage was interesting and motivating to my students. In addition to improving their English,
my students gained confidence and started to form a more positive opinion about theirown language learning.
要旨
日本では英語を使う機会が少ないと感じる外国語学習者は多いように思われる。英語での読書や文章を書くことが好きではない人も少なくない。コミュニケーション能力をより高めた
いが、間違えることが怖いためになかなか話せないという学習者も多い。これらの課題を踏
まえて２言語使用の文通プロジェクトを立ち上げた。結果、プロジェクトの参加者は英語で確実なコミュニケーションを取り、母語話者のように振る舞うことができた。また、プロジ
ェクトを通して語学能力向上だけでなく、自信をつけ、自分の外国語学習についてより肯定的な意見を持つこともできるようになった。

Keywords: language exchange, bilingual correspondence, writing skills, authentic
communication
ランゲージエクスチェーンジ、２言語使用の文通、ライティングスキル、確実なコミュニケーション

Emotion and Communicative Competence in English Discussion Class
英語ディスカッションクラスにおける感情とコミュニケーション能力
Nicole Gallagher 二コール・ギャラガー

Reader Responses by Lee Arnold and Blair Barr
Abstract
Drawing on discussions I had with participants during my Creating Community: Learning Together 3
poster presentation, in this short reflective article I reflect on the role that emotion plays inclassroom language learning and use. I begin by describing how the emotional dimension oflearning has informed my approach to teaching a university English discussion class. In order toimprove my own understanding of emotion in learner development, I then inquire whether there
is a relationship between emotional awareness and communicative competence, and, assuming
there is, how empathy might play a role in the development of such an emotional communicativecompetence. I conclude by looking at how engaging in these extended reflections has served as acatalyst for me to think about aspects of emotion in language learning more deeply, and has led me
to identify areas to explore further in future classroom research.

要旨
本稿は、Creating Community: Learning Together 3 のポスターセッションで参加者と共に行ったディスカッションから、教室における語学の学習、使用の中で感情が果たす役割についての振Special Issue: Reflective Writing on Learning Developmentix

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返りをまとめたものである。まず、大学の英語ディスカッションクラスで授業を行うにあた
り、学習において感情という側面をどのように自分のアプローチに含めていくかについて説明する。次に、学習者の成長における感情に関する理解を深めるために、感情のアウェアネ
スとコミュニケーション能力との関連性があるのかどうか、また、それらの関連がある場合、共感が感情的コミュニケーション能力の発達においてどのような役割を果たすのかについて検討する。最後に、この振り返りにおける取組みが、語学学習における感情の側面について理解の深化と今後の授業研究で探求していくべき分野の特定に寄与したことを述べ、本稿のまとめとしている。

Keywords: emotion, empathy, communicative competence, oral discussion, classroom
research
感情、共感、コミュニケーション能力、英語ディスカッション, 授業研究

Why Don’t They Listen to You? Teaching Sports Students and Challenges inClassroom Management
どうして学生は聞かないのか？スポーツ学生と授業経営

Koki Tomita 冨田 浩起
Reader Responses by Peter Joun and Sean Toland
Abstract
This article highlights the challenges in class management that emerged while teaching an English
course for sports students at a university in Tokyo. When major classroom management issuesrose to the surface, the author conducted action research to analyze the causes of the conflicts that
he was facing. Four consecutive lessons were videotaped for analysis. Carefully examining thevideotaped lessons, the author determined possible causes of the classroom management issues
and re-thought the pro-learner autonomy approach that he had been trying to follow. After making
changes to the way he taught the course, the author tried to gauge the impact of the modifications
on himself and the students in the course. The article includes reflection on these questions, as well
as discussions shared at Creating Community: Learning Together 3, particularly with respect toscaffolding learner autonomy over time and the need for greater educational support for university
sports students.

要旨
この論文では、「スポーツ学生のための英語」を指導する中で起こったクラス経営に関する問題を取り上げる。問題の表面化に伴い、アクションリサーチを用いてクラス経営に関する問題の原因が調査された。調査を行っていく中で、4 回の授業がビデオ録画され分析された。
ビデオ録画された授業を詳しく調査した結果、クラス経営に関する問題の根幹が、教員の指示の出し方、授業内容にあることが明らかになった。問題の解決方法として、指示の出し方の変更や授業内容の簡易化などの教育的介入を用い、その効果が調べられた。最後に、Creating Community: Learning Together 3 において交換されたリメディアル教育に関する教育現場の意見のうち、特に学生の自律性向上に必要な足かけ、およびスポーツ学生に対する教育的支援などが紹介される。

Keywords: remedial education, learner autonomy, action research, English for SpecificPurposes, class management
リメディアル教育, 自律性, アクションリサーチ, 目的別英語, クラス経営

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Academic Writing: In Search of Effective Ways of Providing Students with
Constructive Feedback
アカデミックライティング：建設的フィードバックの効果的な方法を求めてAlexandra Shaitan アレキサンドラ・シャイタン

Reader Responses by Peter Collins and Martin A. Cater

Abstract
In this short reflective article, I explore the issue of teaching academic writing skills at auniversity in the Kanto area of Japan. In particular, the article focuses on different means
and modes of constructive feedback I deployed while teaching an academic writing course
to second-year university students. Further, I will briefly describe what problems I
encountered and how I tried to address them by exploring different ways of providing
feedback to students based on their needs, learning styles/preferences and abilities.
要旨
本論では日本の大学生を対象にしたアカデミックライティング指導における問題点を取り上げ、大学２年生のライティング指導実践を踏まえた建設的なフィードバック方法に関して考察する。さらに、学生のニーズ、学習スタイル・好み、能力に応じた建設的なフィードバッ
クの方法とその導入方法も紹介する。

Keywords: exploratory practice, academic writing, feedback, student-teacher conferencing
探究的実践、アカデミックライティング、フィードバック、学生-教師間のセッション

Uncovering Teacher Assumptions and Developing Intercultural Communication
through Heightened Local Culture Sensitivity
教師の思い込みの発見と現地文化に対する文化的感受性を 高めることによる異文化間
コミュニケーションの促進
Satchie Haga サチエ・ハガ

Reader Responses by Maho Sano and Trevor Raichura
Abstract
The recent official shift towards communicative approaches in English education may be seen as
favouring popular pedagogies such as active learning, task-based discussions, and debate. In so far
as these pedagogies embody Western linguistic and ideological beliefs, they may sometimes beapplied to EFL classrooms without teachers deeply considering students’ local cultural andcommunicative practices. In this short reflective article the author questions her “Western”
teaching practices and re-examines them in relation to typical stumbling blocks that constrainintercultural communication. She then explores differences between her own cultural ideologicalassumptions and her students’ worldviews and cultural expectations. In the final part of the article
the author provides some practical suggestions about how to recognize local values and teachintercultural differences in order to promote students’ intercultural communicative competence inEnglish.

要旨
文部科学省主導による日本の英語教育は、近年コミュニカティブ・アプローチへ移行しており, アクティブラーニングやタスクを中心としたディスカッション,さらにはディベートといった教授法が好まれる傾向にある。これらの教授法は, 欧米の言語やイデオロギーを具体化したものであり、英語教育が行われている現地の学生の文化やコミュニケーションにおける慣習を深く考慮することなく EFL の授業で用いられていることがある。本稿では, 異文化間コミュニケーションの妨げとなる典型的な障害という点から, 自身の「西洋的な」教授法に疑問を投げかけ, 再検討する。加えて, 自身の文化的イデオロギーにもとづく思い込みと, 学生の世界認識や文化的期待との間における違いについて考察する。最後に, 学生の異文化間コミュニケ

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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017ーション能力を養うため, どのように現地の価値観を認め, 文化間の違いを指導するかという実用的な方法を提案する。

Keywords:
stumbling blocks in intercultural communication, teacher cultural
ideological beliefs, student worldviews, student cultural expectations, interculturaldifferences, intercultural communicative competence
異文化間コミュニケーションにおける障害、教師の文化的イデオロギー、学生の世界認識、
学生の文化的な期待、文化間の差異、異文化間コミュニケーション能力

Raising Autonomy by Negotiating Rules with Students: An Exploratory
Discussion about Action Research into Learner Development and Autonomy
ルールの話し合いで学生の自主性を高める: 学習者ディベロプメントおよび自律学習に関するアクションリサーチについての探索的考察

Tokiko Hori 堀登起子 & Andrew D. Tweed アンドリュー・トゥイード
Abstract
In this discussion, we reflect on our experiences with action research (AR). In particular, we focus
on the application of AR in relation to promoting learner autonomy and development. We examine
an AR project at a Japanese university in which Tokiko involved her students in negotiatingclassroom rules. Drawing on theories of autonomy and motivation, we then discuss how theincreased level of organizational autonomy in the class may have been related to positive changes
in students’ behaviors. In closing, we briefly describe two AR projects that we would like pursue
in the future, one in a classroom context (Tokiko), and one in a self-access center (Andrew).

要旨
本対談は、両著者のアクションリサーチ（AR）体験について振り返るものである。なかでも、学習者オートノミーの推進および支援に関連した AR の事例について考察する。両著者は、Tokiko が日本の大学で行った「教室内ルールを学生と話し合う」AR について、自律学習およびモチベーションに関する理論を紐解きつつ、組織内の自主性の増加が学生の学習に取り組
む姿勢にどのようなポジティブな影響を及ぼし得たかについて検証した。結びに、２つの異なるコンテクスト――１つは教室内（Tokiko）、もう１つはセルフ・アクセス・センター（Andrew）――で、今後我々が取り組みたいと考えている AR プロジェクトについて簡潔に述べる。

Keywords: action research, learner autonomy, motivation, negotiation of classroom rules,
self-access centers
アクションリサーチ、学習者オートノミー、モチベーション、クラスルールの話し合い、セルフ･アクセス･センター

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How Can I Be Myself? The Life Story of a Language Learnerfrom Korea
韓国人留学生のライフストーリーに見る日本語話者としての私探し

Yoshio Nakai 中井 好男
Doshisha University 同志社大学
Email: yonakai@mail.doshisha.ac.jp

This presentation in the Learner Development Forum at JALT 2016 explored thelearner autonomy of a Korean overseas student in Japan by using life story
interviews. The story I introduced in the forum focused on the learning
experiences of a 19-year-old Korean overseas student, Kim (pseudonym), who came to
Japan in 2015 after graduating from high school in Korea and who has since been studying
at a university in the Kansai area. Kim started learning Japanese as a second language inhigh school and studied it for three years. In the final year at high school, having decided
to study abroad in Japan, he took the entrance exam for a university in Japan. At
university, Kim was one of two students in my Japanese language class. As I got to know
Kim, I decided to ask for his cooperation as a research participant in a life-story study
because I saw specific changes in his behavior, such as his becoming more talkative,
friendly, and relaxed in the class over one year.
My goal was to situate and interpret the development of Kim’s learner autonomy in thesocial contexts in which he took part. Following Holec’s (1981) definition of learnerautonomy as “the ability to take charge of one’s own learning” (p. 3), research on learnerautonomy has been largely conducted and discussed from the meta-cognitive,
psychological aspect. Other researchers have revealed how learner autonomy is influenced
by the learner’s emotion, learning space, and social environment (Murray, Fujishima, &Uzuka, 2014; Nakai, 2016). Learner autonomy leads to the development of second
language proficiency, which contributes to achieving a higher degree of personal autonomy
because it enhances a second language user’s agency (Aoki, 2009).
In my own research I have done three time-scale case studies of Japanese language
learners in different contexts to understand learning processes in home countries, learning
experiences in Japan, and life experiences in Japan using Japanese as a second language(Nakai, Ou, & Wakisaka, in press). The research reveals that for those who learn Japanese,learning often occurs when trying to build a relationship with people such as learning
partners, classmates, and individuals they want to interact with. This indicates theconstruction of “social identity” (Riley, 2007, pp. 122-123) that the individual realizes byrelating to others through Japanese in the different communities/sub-groups/social
networks they are part of (or wish to be part of). Learner autonomy is fostered andconstrained by many kinds of factors surrounding learners, so we need to investigate not
only learning processes, but also the whole social context surrounding learners.
In this short reflective paper, written from an ecological perspective (Palfreyman, 2014),
learner autonomy is defined as socially mediated agency (Toohey & Norton, 2003)
involving authorship of one’s actions and one’s own words (van Lier, 2004) relating tosocial identity.

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Research Context
A life story is the story a person chooses to tell about the life he or she has lived, told
as completely and honestly as possible, what the person remembers about his or her history
and what he or she wants others to know of it, usually as a result of a guided interview by
the researcher. It includes the important events, experiences, and feelings of a lifetime(Atkinson, 2002).
Seeing learner autonomy as socially mediated agency to achieve authorship of one’s
actions, voice, and an enhanced second language life, my aim was to use life story
interviews to better understand:• what the Japanese language and language learning mean to Kim;
• how Kim develops his learner autonomy but is constrained in Japanese society;• how the development of Kim’s learner autonomy is socially mediated and involves
authoring his own actions to construct a second language identity.
I interviewed Kim three times between November 2015 and January 2016, audiorecording and transcribing each interview. In the first interview, I focused on his learning
experiences to understand how his learner autonomy was situated in different social
contexts. In the second and third interviews, I showed him the life story I had written andexplored further with Kim his perspectives on this reconstructed biographical narrative.
Interpreting Kim’s Life Story
The first part of Kim’s life story shows how he feels himself to be different from theperson he used to be in Korea.

“What is learning Japanese to me?”I started learning Japanese in high school because I wanted to learn social welfare in Japan
where it has developed most among Asian countries, and I will not need to worry about
discrimination against Asian people. I loved learning it in high school. My Japanese
language proficiency is not enough, but I can often make up for it by using a dictionary andthe internet. Now I’m living in Japan and have a chance to talk Japanese with members of
my club and sometimes with some girls in order to look for a girlfriend. Hahaha, I needthese kinds of language lessons. Because now I’m feeling something weird when talking
Japanese. It is definitely different between who I am now and who I used to be in Korea. I
am originally very naughty and have a sharp tongue in Korean. I thought I was such afunny guy. I can communicate with everyone in Japanese, but how I talk in Japanese sounds
too serious to me now. I feel really strange. I have no difficulties to live my life here, such as
buying something. I think that it is more important for me to be able to express myself evenin Japanese.
The meanings of Japanese language and learning changed for Kim after coming toJapan. He learned Japanese as a tool to enter university when he was a high school student,
but after coming to Japan, the Japanese language became a tool to steer school life in the
direction he wanted it to go. Living in Japan, he found that he couldn’t realize what hewanted to do with the Japanese he had learned in high school. Because of this, learning
came to mean acquiring Japanese phrases to express himself. In my class Kim became very
talkative, funny, and entertaining as time went by, but he also thought of himself as aserious person speaking Japanese and wanted to become more of who he really is. His
Japanese proficiency was high, but he was missing something to express his true self.

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In the second extract from his life story Kim reveals how he tried to develop his learnerautonomy in order to fill this gap, but was constrained in specific interactions that he facedin his expanding social world.

“Why can’t I say ‘No’?”
This faculty staff offered me one Japanese tutor who supports my school life. He was almost
the same age as me, and was very friendly so I felt I was able to be me, and open up to him.
One day, he took me to his friend’s house, I thought we would have a party something like
that, but it was a kind of religious meeting. After that he became persistent in inviting me
to some events related to international affairs. I guess these events also had something to dowith his religion. I know it is my fault that I haven’t been say “No” to him. I can say“No” in Korea without any hesitation. But in Japanese, I can’t help thinking saying “No”
is rude because I learned it from language teachers. I tried to refuse invitations by saying “
ちょっと…,” but it doesn’t work at all and he kept inviting me to events I don’t want
to go to. If I don’t need to take care of our relationship, I can refuse his invitation by using
various Japanese expressions which may sound rude to him.
What Kim’s story shows here is that he tried to create networks in Japan by taking
advantage of the opportunity to have a Japanese tutor, but this failed against his will.
Through talking with him, I came to understand from his angry face and voice that he felt
betrayed by his tutor. To make matters worse, Kim couldn’t say “No” to his tutor’s
invitations although he actually knew many expressions to do so in Japanese (and he knew
how to do so without hesitating in Korean). According to Kim, this was because he felt
strongly affected by Japanese language education practices and textbooks which teachlearners not to deny directly but use “ちょっと” to refuse someone’s invitation to avoid
face threatening acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987). In fact, I have seen many textbooks
recommending learners use ambiguous expressions to refuse indirectly. Japanese language
teachers are likely to teach learners the sociolinguistic norms where indistinct expressions
are preferred to clearly declining an invitation from a person with low intimacy. Kim wasrestricted by the simplistic nature of textbooks, as well as by the institutional relationshipwith his university-assigned tutor. This made him hold back his feelings of wanting to
express himself. In this case, Kim’s tutor kept inviting him by using the Line messaging
app after a first invitation, and Kim chose to ignore his messages to overcome thesebarriers. Their stilted relationship caused him to avoid building networks with others. Here,
Kim’s learning experiences and knowledge of Japanese language norms prevented himfrom acting.
The next episode from Kim’s life story reveals what he has been doing and trying to do
to become who he wants to be by using Japanese language through adapting tocomplicated social situations.

“Why can’t I be a university student as I imagined?”
Before I came here, I had an image of myself as a university student. Like my friends in
Korea, I wanted to not only study but also lead an exciting campus life. I have played theguitar for many years, so I thought it is good for me to make friends who have the same
hobby as me. That’s why I participate in the music club and play music in a band. We
have good relationships and can enjoy only playing music itself but I still feel something
empty. There are many Japanese students on this campus and almost all of them are engaged
in playing some sports because they are in a faculty related to sports. I am not this kind of
person and find it difficult to make friends here. Now I often go out with my Korean friend
in Japan. Living in Japan means nothing if I spend time with Koreans. I don’t want toSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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have any relationship with Koreans here, but I expect to make my network outside of uni
with his tutor because he is an outgoing person and knows so many expressions to pick up
girls… I want to enjoy school life in Japan like Japanese students as I watched them on
TV in Korea. To do this, I think I need to develop contacts to know how students talk inJapanese relating to my concerns.
This extract shows how the affordance of space influenced Kim’s actions. He didn’t
expect this atmosphere at university, and it is different from what he wanted to be part of.
He joined a music club and made networks outside of university to become the university
student whom he wished to be. In other words, he exercised his agency to realize his social
identity as his imagined self in Japan.

“Changing classroom into his space where he can be himself”
We have only two language lessons a week at this university. Here, I can meet my classmate
from overseas and the language teacher. I feel like that this class is only the place wecommunicate naturally. We, students and teacher, are very close, so I can say anything I
want. No one denies me. This is my space where I can feel safe and come out of my shell. I
talked nonsense and asked how to say something in Japanese and how to act with people inJapan. I really enjoyed this, which made me feel that I was myself.
In this short episode from his life story, Kim seemed to feel safer in the language classthan the music club. He enjoyed the music club, but didn’t have his own place as hedescribed it as “empty” in the previous extract. This might be because classroom
interaction differs from interaction in the music club, where there is a classmate who canunderstand him and relate to him as an overseas student. “No one denies me”’ indicates theimportance that Kim attaches to having his own place, even in a good relationship withothers.
According to my observations in the Japanese language class, Kim really behaved
innocently without affectation as a result of being treated as a younger brother by his
Chinese female classmate. It is conceivable that the reason why he describes therelationship with the club members as good but empty is that he probably tried to be on
his best behavior in the music club in the same way that he had done near the start of thelanguage course. In my teaching I had emphasized a positive relationship with learners in
my class and invested a lot of time in having dialogue with them; at the same time I taught
them Japanese following a curriculum that aimed at the improvement of their performancein Japanese. This was because I had found it unpleasant to be judged only by exams byteachers when I was a student. I believe that language is a tool of communication. It
develops through real communication and affects people’s relationships. Talking with hisclassmate and me in the classroom may have allowed Kim to find that over time in thelanguage class he could be his true self. This let him make good use of the language classto learn how to express his true self.
Discussion
From his life story, learning Japanese for Kim means finding a way to have his own
voice in constructing and using appropriate utterances or “speech genres” (Bakhtin, 1986)
to achieve his intentions. He joined the music club to play music and get acquainted withpeople he could talk with about music in Japanese. Apart from that, Kim tried to find aJapanese girlfriend with the help of a Korean friend of his who had lived in Japan longer
than him, even though he didn’t want to have any Korean friends in Japan. In this way, heautonomously got acquainted with people, learning and using Japanese to imbue it with

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his own intentions to construct a range of social identities (Riley, 2007) to be himself. He
also had the opportunity to develop his voice in the dialogic environment of the classes
that he took with me and his peer international student from China.
Learner autonomy is exercised in a complex adaptive system that can acknowledge themutual constitution of social and historical contexts and individuals as a complex system(Sade, 2014). A complex system continually evolves internally and affects the environment,in that it is composed of interdependent components and sub-systems which continuallyinteract with each other (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, 2008). Kim’s learning has
occurred in the context of a complex system that includes the people and the environmentof the university, such as his tutor, a Korean friend, the members of the music club, andthe sports-oriented atmosphere of the university. In this context, Kim tried to realize his
imagined social identity. However, as his case indicates, not all factors always help him tofoster learner autonomy and construct his social identities for himself. For example, hekept a good relationship with his tutor whom he expected to support him, but his tutor
couldn’t help Kim in his life in Japan. As another example, Kim’s learning experiences
prevented him from refusing directly even though he knew the expressions to refuse inJapanese. These conflicts led him to generate further actions on his part to adapt to the
new environment around him. Thus, the complex adaptive system consists of factors thatare related in non-linear ways and are not in simple cause-and-effect relationships. In sucha system, events and phenomena are not simply understandable and predictable; rather,factors collaboratively create their functions and dynamically generate themselves. Kim isautonomously searching for possibilities to realize his imagined self as a university student
in Japan through trial and error. His learner autonomy helps him adapt to the constraintsof the ever-changing environment that he is situated in.
Continuing Puzzles
Kim’s life story suggests that he needs to acquire his own voice to construct his social
identities, and that this is just as necessary as learning content, resources, and language
knowledge. Kim also needs learner autonomy in pursuit of his own voice, which fosters
language learning and helps to situate himself in L2 society.
From Kim’s story, the following questions arise: What is learner autonomy? and What should
language teachers do? Following Nakai, Ou and Wakisaka’s (in press) claim that learnerautonomy is shaped and developed by social relationships, learner autonomy can be seen
as a metacognitive ability for learning language to construct identity through adapting toever-changing social situations. In order to foster learner autonomy, it is important forteachers to support learning itself through learning content and learning processes; it isalso necessary to focus on the language proficiency that learners need in their living world
beyond the boundaries of the classroom, as the classroom is an enclosed place
disconnected from the social environment.
From this discussion, we can see that learner autonomy generates language learning toconstruct social identity in a complex adaptive system. Meanwhile, teaching might be also
affected and generated in this system as well because the teacher is also one of the factors
in the learner’s social context. Thus, it can be said that the practice of learning and teaching
are mutually interdependent phenomena related to the environment in which learners andteachers are involved. The people who support learners as one factor in a complex adaptive
system need to listen to their narratives and try to bear them in mind when teaching
language that will enable them to get the second language identity that they really want.

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References
Atkinson, R. (2002). The life story interview. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.),
Handbook of interview research context & method (pp. 121-140). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications.
Aoki, N. (2009). Where learner autonomy could fail a second language user: Three-level
analysis of social context. In F. Kjisik, P. Voller, N. Aoki, & Y. Nakata (Eds.), Mapping
the terrain of learner autonomy: Learning environments, learning communities and identities (pp. 236261). Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. (V. W. McGee, Trans). Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987) Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holec, H. (1981). Autonomy and foreign language learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Murray, G., Fujishima, N., & Uzuka, M. (2014). The semiotics of place: Autonomy andspace. In G. Murray (Ed.), Social dimensions of learner autonomy in language learning (pp. 8199). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nakai, Y. (2016). How do learners make use of a space for self-directed learning?
Translating the past, understanding the present, and strategizing for the future. Studies
in Self-Access Learning Journal, 7(2), 168-181.
Nakai, Y., Ou, L., & Wakisaka, M. (in press). Rethinking learner autonomy from learners’
perspectives. In Autonomy Within and Beyond the Classroom, Proceedings of the 7th International
Conference of the Independent Learning Association (ILA 2016). Hubei, China: Huazhong
University of Science and Technology, Wuhan.
Palfreyman, D. (2014). The ecology of learner autonomy. In G. Murray (Ed.), Social
dimensions of autonomy in language learning (pp. 175-191). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Riley, P. (2007). Language, culture and identity: An ethnolinguistic perspective. London, UK:
Continuum.
Sade, L. (2014). Autonomy, complexity, and networks of learning. In G. Murray (Ed.),
Social dimensions of autonomy in language learning (pp. 155-175). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Toohey, K., & Norton, B. (2003). Autonomy as learner agency in sociocultural settings. In
D. Palfreyman & R. C. Smith (Eds.), Learner autonomy across cultures (pp. 58-72).
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
van Lier, L. (2004). The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A sociocultural perspective. Boston,
MA: Springer.

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Reader Response to “How Can I Be Myself? The Life Story of aLanguage Learner from Korea”
Yukari Rutson-Griffiths
Hiroshima Bunkyo Women's UniversityIn this article, Yoshio Nakai explores how one language learner tries to find his
own voice in the social groups he is a part of or wishes to be a part of and to
uncover the roles of learner autonomy in the process. Although more focus
now has been paid to learners or learning itself, more practical studies on what
successful language acquisition takes and how learner autonomy contributes
to it from learners’ perspectives are yet to be seen. What interested me in thisarticle was that it gave insight to those questions with a real-life example bylooking at Kim’s case both inside and outside the classroom setting. In
particular, it attempted to place the development of learner autonomy withinthose social contexts by taking the learner’s social network and perspectivesof the world around him into account.
Conducting three life story interviews, Yoshio showed how a Japanese
language learner, Kim, sought ways to become his true self within thesurrounding social contexts and eventually found a place (i.e., Japanese
language class) to realize it. For any teacher, it is rewarding to see positivechanges in students and their success in language learning. Ideally, we want
to see more learners like Kim succeed, so investing in uncovering the “secrets”
behind the scenes is worthwhile.
Following Yoshio’s interviews and his interpretation of the student’s account,however, I was left with a further question. The realization of both autonomy
and identity is complex in nature. Examining Kim’s situation within a complex
adaptive system, Yoshio explains how small factors such as one’s own
experiences (e.g., instruction given by teachers) or the surrounding
environment (e.g., a sports-oriented university) can influence one’s actions(e.g., declining invitations to events, trying to make friends with the same hobby,
and creating a network outside university) and at the same time create othersituations for one to adapt to and take actions in. Voice is something Kim is
struggling to find in these complex contexts, but is essential for realizing his ideal
self. Kim becomes closer to his true self in his Japanese class but not anywhere
else, and this can be interpreted as indicating that acquisition of voice canhappen at different paces depending on the social space (e.g., class, club,
relationship with a tutor). If so, how do learners like Kim develop learnerautonomy and find their voice outside class?
One possible way to find answers to this question is to conduct longitudinalstudies as they allow teachers and researchers to observe how learnerautonomy develops or stagnates over time and to examine to what extent
learner autonomy contributes to the acquisition of voice—and ultimately to
successful language learning. It is remarkable that Kim opened himself up in hisclass in just one academic year, but it would also be interesting to see how alearner’s growing repertoire of voices gradually goes beyond such limited
spaces over the course of a few years. As individual learners take different
courses, one case may be arguably different from another. More case studies

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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017like this would provide a holistic view of voice acquisition, which would bevaluable for the growing body of learner autonomy research, as well as
informative for language learners who could learn from the exemplary paths
taken by different individuals.
Lastly, as a learning advisor who provides students with one-on-one
consultation sessions about their language learning, it was interesting for me tosee the deep level of reflective dialogues in the interviews that Yoshio
conducted. The stories that Kim told entail his exploring his beliefs andexperiences. Yoshio also presented his interpretation of the stories to check his
understanding, and this, I believe, led to Kim’s further reflection. Extended
reflective dialogues are what learning advisors use to foster learner autonomy,
and in agreeing with Yoshio’s last remark “[t]he people who support learners…
need to listen to their narratives and try to bear them in mind when teaching
language…,” I do also hope more learners’ stories are heard in this attentive
manner for the learners themselves and for us as educators to learn more about
our learners.

Reader Response to “How Can I Be Myself? The Life Story of aLanguage Learner from Korea”
Huw Davies
Kanda University of International StudiesI

am very happy to respond to Yoshio’s short reflective article. On first reading
there seemed to be nothing for me to say, with my own views on autonomy
closely matching Yoshio’s. The story he tells seems to give credible answers
to the questions he leaves us with (“What is learner autonomy?” and “Whatshould language teachers do?”). However, in looking at how Yoshio answers
these two questions, I hope I can add some fitting insights that will link
theoretical perspectives connected to autonomy with demands learners may
experience on a practical level.
Before thinking about what autonomy signifies in the field of language
teaching, it is worthwhile considering why it is important in education in general.
Brighouse (2006) has suggested that autonomy is essential for a productive andworthwhile life, and that it should be fostered by the education system:
The deeper principle is the idea that education should aim at enabling
people to lead flourishing lives, and the argument that education should
facilitate autonomy depends on the idea that autonomy plays an importantrole in enabling people to leave flourishing lives. (p. 15)
Autonomy is a state in which people are able to flourish, to live a valuable
life they identify with. In the context of language education, being able toflourish means being able to communicate and express oneself in the target
language in order to do something personally meaningful. Therefore, a key
concern for language educators is for their students to each develop their own
voice. Voice can only flourish in a social environment. According to Brighouse(2006), “Individuals do not flourish separately from others; their interests are
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bound up with those of other people, and their reflection takes place within agiven social context” (pp. 19-20). As Yoshio suggests, learner autonomy
develops in a complex system, where language learners such as Kim negotiate
their place and identity with other people. Developing one’s voice is therefore
not a linear process, but is a struggle that requires support, self-awareness andreflection.
If language learner autonomy is viewed as the development of voice, then
one role of language educators is to provide a safe space in which learners
can develop their own voices. Students need to be given the freedom toexperiment, and need professional support to help them reflect on the learning
process and their personal development. Yoshio highlights dialogue as being
central to his approach to promoting learner autonomy in his class, anddialogue offers opportunity for both experimentation and reflection.
It is worth pointing out that the alternative to dialogue is a one-way“narrative” from the teacher (Freire, 1996), which is epitomized by the “Why
can’t I say no?” section in this short reflective article. Kim is unable express his
agency having been trained not to say “No” by his previous textbooks andteachers. Having followed similar Japanese courses myself, I can fully
understand Kim’s frustrations. Classroom practices that promote learning
through dialogue are beneficial in two ways: they situate the linguistic content
in a context which is relevant for the learner, and they create an arena where
deeper self-reflection by the students can be encouraged. To facilitate thedevelopment of voice the classroom should be both personalized and social.
What is striking about the voice that Kim develops during this study is that it
sounds different than what he had expected: It is “too serious” and at odds
with who he feels he is or who he wants to be. The gap between Kim’s selfimage and ideal self is something that would be worth exploring further, to see
if the two converge as Kim develops as a Japanese user. What makes this areaeven more fascinating is the disparity between Kim’s self-image and Yoshio’s
observations, where Kim is seen as “very talkative, funny, and entertaining.” I
am sure both interpretations of Kim are entirely valid, but reading this again
makes me want to dialogue with my students about their self-image and how
they are perceived by others. The views and voices of others profoundly help
learners to co-construct their own voices and identities.
References
Brighouse, H. (2006). On education. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (2nd ed.). (M. Bergman Ramos,
Trans.). London, UK: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1970)

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Learning to Teach, Teaching
Instruction by Students

Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017

toLearn:

Pragmatics

教えることを学ぶ、学ぶために教える - 学生による語用論教育 -Jim Ronald ジム・ロナルド
Hiroshima Shudo University 広島修道大学
Email: jmronald@gmail.com

J

ALT’s current slogan is “Learning to teach, teaching to learn.” From a teacher’s perspective,these words remind us that we can keep learning and developing, and that part of ourjob is the promotion of learner development. My poster for JALT 2017’s Learner
Development Forum used the same slogan, but with primary reference to the learner rather
than the teacher: language learners learning to teach and, through teaching and reflecting
on their teaching, learning about the subject matter they are teaching, the importance of
their chosen topic, and the challenge of teaching itself. Although this project was conceived
only as a vehicle for learning and learner development, it has given me as a teacher much
more than I expected. Over the past 18 months of reflection, starting with preparation for
an in-house Active Learning poster session at my university, followed by the JALT 2017
Learner Development SIG Forum, and now this report, I have had a real opportunity toexperience afresh both halves of this slogan.
In this short reflective article, I will begin by describing the project, with the help of theposter shown at the LD Forum. I will also address these questions: How, one year later, did afurther class of learners perceive the value of the project? and What may be the value of learner and teacher
reflections on a project such as this?
The participants in this project, 3rd year English Department students at a provincial
Japanese university, were in the second semester of a two-year seminar course, or zemi. In
terms of English proficiency, these students would probably be in the top third of theyear’s 120+ English Department students, with TOEIC scores at the time between 500
and 800. They had chosen one of the two “English-medium” zemi classes, and wererelatively confident English users, but only one or two planned to become teachers, andall were understandably nervous about this teaching project.
In the first semester, these 3rd year students had studied some aspects of sociolinguistics,
focusing mainly on language varieties and choices. In their fourth year they would bechoosing a topic on which to focus, conduct research, and write a graduation thesis. In thisin-between semester, there were two main objectives:
1. For students to gain a general understanding of the focus, scope, and importance ofpragmatics, both with respect to their native language and culture and to Englishspeaking cultures;
2. For students to gain experience and ability in writing a fairly long, structured academic
paper in English.
From 2011, working as co-editor of the Pragmatics SIG publication, Pragtivities: Bringing
pragmatics to the second language classroom (Ronald, Rinnert, Fordyce, & Knight, 2012), I
received a real flood of pragmatics-focused teaching activities that needed looking at,editing, and maybe trying out. Many of these were tested with this class as a way of
introducing various aspects of pragmatics to the class and of demonstrating the relevanceof pragmatics to the students’ lives as language learners and as language users. Three years
later, with the book published and well used, much of this teaching had moved from me

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to them, becoming a peer-teaching project. In pairs, students bought the book and selecteda chapter from this book of 64 pragmatics-teaching activities. They studied the aspect ofpragmatics treated in their chapter, and then prepared to teach the activity: first to theirclassmates, then to a class of 2nd year students, typically one year younger than they were.
As the peer teaching project developed, so too did the report writing side of the project.
As part of the two-year zemi class, each student spends much of the final year working onan original language-focused research project, which is then written up as the student’s
graduation thesis. Prior to that, by writing a similarly structured, but more scaffolded,
report of their teaching project, the students gain useful practice in preparation for writing
their graduation theses.
Figure 1. Learner Development SIG Forum Poster, JALT2016

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Student Reflection
Student reflection has been an important part of this project. Working in pairs with aclassmate, typically a friend, gave opportunities for supportive discussion and reflection
throughout the project. Three times during the students’ preparation and teaching, eachpair receives feedback: first, from zemi classmates following their teaching; next, from theirteacher on their teaching plan and materials as part of the preparation to teach; and finallyfrom the 2nd year students straight after teaching them. This teaching-related feedback wasamong the many opportunities for participant reflection through the project. Their
reflections on the teaching project as a whole were recorded in the conclusions of theirreports.
Reflecting on teaching.
Many of the students’ comments focused on what they learned about teaching. Hereare three:First, I thought this pragmatics teaching would be easy because I just have to speak andmake the students understand, but this was really difficult. (Makoto)I could learn how to make which the classmate can understand easily and teaching isinteresting because I could share my opinion with others. (Moe)
After this class, I can get confidence to explain pragmatics, especially how to apologize inEnglish. (Chinatsu)
These three comments are of particular interest for the way the reflections, in different
ways, went beyond reports of the activities. In Makoto’s case, he reflects on the unexpectedchallenge of “teaching to do”: finding a way for students to understand, and to be sure enoughof understanding to respond. For Moe, learning to teach was equated with a skill beyond
teaching: learning to express her thoughts in English. Chinatsu, too, reports how doing
this teaching activity gave her the ability to explain and illustrate the topic of her zemi,
something that students may well be required to do when job hunting.
Reflection on pragmatics.
Other comments focused on what the students learned about pragmatics through the
project:
Through our teaching activity, I felt our utterances support our friendship… (Aika)
For example, most students also had trouble refusing in English. I knew that and I thinkthat this topic is an important field to learn for students who are studying English like us.
(Ruka)
Here, too, the responses reflect an increased awareness, and appreciation, of thepractical value of studying pragmatics not simply as an academic subject but as a guide to
the maintenance of good relationships.
Preparing the poster with a class of students going through each stage of the
project.
Finally, there were also comments from students on the value of teaching as a way forthem to learn what they were teaching:
I learned the important things from this teaching class. At first one is the ability ofunderstanding. If I don’t really understand pragmatics, I can’t teach it to the students. And

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if the students ask me about pragmatics or contents of teaching, I need to answer which iseasy to understand. (Chinatsu)
In addition, through this activity, I thought when we had what we wanted to learn or
understand, it was a good way to teach them to someone. To teach someone, first we have toresearch and understand it. Next we consider how we should teach so that they canunderstand it. Then, we actually teach and get the feedback. (Ruka)
Both these students realized the value of teaching as a means of learning andsynthesizing what was taught, and of the motivating imperative to understand the topic
well that is contained within this activity.
Teacher Reflection
As a language teacher, specifically one concerned both with learner development andwith the teaching of aspects of pragmatics as foreign language education, the whole project
has continued to be a worthwhile venture for me. I will conclude by considering what I
have learned from the whole process, stage by stage:(a) preparing the poster over the months as a class of students went through each stageof the project;(b) one year later, using the poster as a resource to introduce the project to a new classof students, and to serve as a guide for me as we proceeded with the project;(c) bringing the poster to the Learner Development SIG Forum, and writing up thisreport, pushed and prodded by readers’ comments as the report was expanded andrevised.
Preparing the poster as students go through each stage of the project.
Putting together the poster as a class of students and I went through each stage of it 18
months ago rendered it a much more reflective and memorable experience than the project
had been the previous year: It required more verbalized reflection on the part of thestudents, it had to tell a story beyond describing the project, and, to be worth doing, it had
to inform the future conducting of this project. For this reason, not only were the stagesof the parallel tracks of teaching and writing up recorded as part of the project description,
but so too were the students’ reflections on these, and my own practical recommendations
for future conducting of the project.
Using the poster as a learning resource and teaching guide.
One year later, the poster served as a very useful aid for introducing the project to thefollowing year’s class: demonstrating the steps and the flow of the two sides of thestudents’ project—the teaching of pragmatics, and the writing up of the report. It also
helped from the perspective of face validity: Although most students were nervous aboutteaching, the poster gave them confidence, to see that the project was well prepared, thatthey themselves would be well prepared before their experience of teaching, and that aprevious class of students had experienced, survived, and valued the experience.
Presenting, writing, responding about the project.
With the project having been already conducted and reflected on, and a poster
produced, the recommendations at the foot of the poster were now “advice to self” that
could be taken for this year’s project. The advice was taken in most cases: More guidance
was given to help students choose activities that were not too difficult; and there was more
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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017support for writing the literature review. The suggestion, recorded on the poster, that moretime and guidance should be provided for reflection was overlooked, although this could
easily have been addressed, and will be the next time.
The distance served another important role in my own education as a teacher ofpragmatics. It gave me the opportunity to realize that, however good the teaching may
have been, a single teaching session encounter with the target pragmatics topic would not
be sufficient for the students to learn it adequately. To give an example, learning how toapologize in a foreign language involves various types of knowledge: realization that “sorry”
alone is no more adequate as an apology than its equivalent in the students’ first language;
realization that the “contents” of an apology can be identified and listed (admission of fact,
concern for the “victim,” offer of compensation, and expression of intention to not repeat
the accident); learning that—in this case—the contents in their first language and English
are broadly the same; and learning the language to express these contents appropriately inEnglish. This realization resulted in my continuing the students’ topics in subsequentclasses, and even—at the students’ request—including three of the topics in the final exam
for the course.
To bring the poster to the LD Forum, and then to write this report, has provokedfurther reflection on this project, and on the poster as a product of, and instrument for,reconsidering the project. There was, unfortunately, not as much discussion at the Forumas I might have hoped, in part because I had another presentation that coincided with thesecond half of the Forum and I was not able to be present for this. I did, however, receive
two comments that have had a significant impact on this report.
The first was a suggestion to compare the two years of the project, and this has been
done above. In fact, as stated earlier, these two years do not report the birth of this project;
there was at least one complete cycle of the project prior to these. However, the first time
the project was just done, with no written reflection, and only a handout outlining thestages of the project for the students’ benefit.
The second comment received at the Forum is worth reproducing in full, because thiswhole reflective report is a response to that comment:
An extremely interesting project involving students in major extended activities with theirpeers and juniors. It would be interesting to see a meta-reflection by Jim on the first twogroups to undertake, reflect upon, and report on these activities.
Finally, the preparation of the poster and the writing of this report have both been
“pushed reflection,” with extra prods for further reflection from the two readers of this report.
This pushed reflection was also a part of the students’ teaching reports, and were all thebetter for it. Such reflection on practice may seem to be a luxury—there’s often hardly
time to prepare for class, to do the homework, or whatever—but this experience has beena valuable reminder of the importance for both teachers and learners to not simply teachand study, but for both to be reflective practitioners.
Reading through this report and looking forward to conducting this project with thiscoming year’s class, I’ve come to realize that while some students do share valuablereflections on the project (which are included in this report), others do this very little. In
order to help those who are slower in verbalizing their reflections, it may be worth
preparing questions for consideration before the project, to help the learners give focusedconsideration of the value of what they are doing. This might reduce the impact of
discovery, realizing through experience and reflection the value of what was done, but, formany of the learners, it may provide a useful framework for reflection. Questions such as
the following may be useful:Special Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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In what ways have you been a teacher so far in your life?

•

In what various ways can you imagine that you may be a teacher in the future?

•

Do teachers learn through teaching?

•

How could the amount learning gained through teaching be increased?

•

What do you imagine is easy about teaching pragmatics? What is difficult?

If these questions are printed out, the students could answer these questions at the
beginning of the project, then return to these at the end, as they reflect on the value ofwhat they have done.
Finishing this report with a list of questions may give an impression of unfinished work,
yet it is appropriate that it does give this impression: The report is finished, but the project is stillwork in progress. We are still learning to teach, teaching to learn.

Reference
Ronald, J., Rinnert, C., Fordyce, K., & Knight, T. (2012). Pragtivities: Bringing pragmatics tosecond language classrooms. Tokyo: JALT Pragmatics SIG.

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Reader Response to “Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn:
Pragmatics Instruction by Students”
Elisa Acosta, Asia UniversityT

he project as a whole is a great idea especially for students who want tobecome teachers. It lets them notice how much preparation it takes to beable to explain topics to another person. It also enhances students’awareness of the topics they have chosen, as well as providing chances forstudents to practice giving feedback to each other and work together as agroup. The project is multi-dimensional and serves as a way for students to learn
as they teach.
One particularly positive feature of the project is that it makes students
aware of what goes behind a pragmatics topic or event. Jim gives theexample of apologizing and how it involves more than merely just saying “I amsorry.” These events are not easy to explain. In some cases, students as teachers
might have to provide extra examples to be able to make other students
understand their topic. Students also need to make connections between thesociolinguistic norms of their culture and those of Anglophone cultures forapologizing. They need to understand the content very well to be able topresent it successfully to their classmates. I also like the idea that the students
present twice as this gives them opportunities to develop their ideas and/or
add extra examples. Students give each other feedback and can makechanges to the project without it affecting their final grades.
Jim, you mentioned students having problems coming up with their own
reflections, especially with verbalizing their opinions. You suggested using
questions. I thought it might also be helpful to have students keep a journal tocollect their ideas, emotions, sources, and opinions all in one place. Anytime
they work on the project students could be encouraged to take five minutes
to reflect on what they did, did not do, and/or what they want to accomplish
during the project. By keeping a journal students can document and visualize
more easily the progress of their project. They could keep all their ideas in one
place and keep track of things that worked or did not work. If the students everfelt they were stuck and needed some form of help, they could write theirthoughts down and look at them later. They could also share the ideas with aclassmate and get other opinions than the teacher’s. The journal might evenhelp students in the future when writing their graduation theses after they finish
the pragmatics project. This could benefit both you and the students. As ateacher, you can keep track of their progress and the students can keep trackon the development of their ideas. It may not be easy to implement, but if it’sdone with third and fourth year students it might work. I would like to hear how
you and the students feel before and after the project is completed. It would
also be good to know about what changes you will implement for future
projects. Thank you for sharing this project with us, Jim.

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Reader Response to “Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn:
Pragmatics Instruction by Students”
Sarah Morikawa, Chiba UniversityIn his short reflective article, Jim Ronald describes a project in which students
need to research one aspect of pragmatics, and teach other students aboutthat aspect. During the process, the students receive feedback from bothstudents and teacher, then write a paper on their experiences of learning andteaching. In this cycle of preparation, action, and modification, reflection is an
essential ingredient at each— stage both for the teacher and the students.
Through reflection, teachers can revise goals and improve their input, whilestudents can review their performance, identify paths towards improvement,
and increase their motivation.
As a teacher, I would like to reproduce this type of “zemi,” particularly in our
English Support Centre (ESC) where workshops and classes are elective anduncredited. For this reason, two points in the article were of special interest tome. Firstly, practical information and ideas, such as using a poster as a tool for
explanation of the course, are very helpful. I have developed courses andworkshops over a number of cycles, modifying the contents and aims at theend of each semester, but have not used an introductory poster before. As Jim
says, it would be very effective to show the students, in visual form, how thecourse or project will proceed. I was also interested in details about the students
that were not mentioned in the article, such as the number of students in theclass; the aspects of pragmatics students chose; and types of input andfeedback. It would be interesting to find out whether/how the project could
be developed in different situations, for example, in cases in which
participation is entirely voluntary.
Related to this is the issue of motivation. When students use teaching as ameans of learning in a university context, what motivates them? For some, it
may be that they have to do the task in order to earn credits, while, for others,
this may involve a sense of responsibility or the anticipated feeling ofsatisfaction when they have communicated successfully. Some of Jim’s
students appeared to be motivated to learn about their aspect of pragmatics
in order to teach it to others effectively. It would be interesting to investigate
the combinations of different influences on motivation, as this would be an
important factor if students were not on a credited course. When it comes toreflection, Jim mentions that some students were more motivated to reflect,
whereas others were less so. Jim’s idea of providing a framework with questions
relating to teaching in other areas of life is useful, as this would bridge the gap
between class and “real life.” I would tentatively suggest some more specificquestions or prompts to elicit more specific information e.g., “What did you
learn by teaching pragmatics that you might not have learned if you had only
studied by using the textbook?” and “Why do you think so?”In the ESC at our university, students form groups, in order to study for exams
such as IELTS or TOEFL iBT. Usually these study groups decide on a group aim forthe week such as improving their reading speed or increasing their spoken
accuracy, work individually toward that aim during the week, then reflect on
their study methods and results, before reporting back to the group. One
finding from a study that I did of questionnaires completed by students is thatSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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students in study groups do not like to spend much time on reflection about
their own study methods or strategies even if they find their group members’
reflections helpful. Many comments on reflection feedback sheets from ourstudents are practical and basic, e.g., “I could improve my speaking using
these materials.” Further comments on how or why s/he improved were notincluded. Students may have kept reflection basic because they lacked theEnglish to write specifically, or did not want to spend the time needed to do so.
For this reason, bilingual feedback may be more productive, and clear
guidelines or prompts should help students to add depth to their reflections.
All in all, responding to Jim’s project has led me to consider trying out a more
systematic way of encouraging students to learn by teaching on a wider scalein our centre and to investigate to what extent teaching activities impact on
the students’ motivation.

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PromotingEnglish-Major
Students’
Understanding through Active Learning

Intercultural

英語専修生の異文化理解を深めるアクティブ・ラーニング

Hideo Kojima 小嶋 英夫
Bunkyo University 文教大学
Email: deokoji@koshigaya.bunkyo.ac.jp

In my presentation at JALT 2016 LD Forum, I shared my work in assisting Englishmajor students to develop intercultural understanding through Active Learning (AL).
Taking into account skills and competencies needed to survive in the 21st century, theCentral Council of Education (2015) expects teachers to develop not only students’ subject
knowledge and skills but also their generic skills. The Japanese Ministry of Education,
Culture, Sports, and Technology (MEXT) is currently revising the Course of Study,emphasizing the integration of the three elements of true scholastic ability: (a) knowledge
and skills, (b) ability of thinking, judgment, and expression, and (c) attitudes towards selfdirected learning and willingness to collaborate with others. For this innovation in school
education, MEXT (2016) encourages all teachers to implement AL (self-directed andcollaborative learning for problem solving) in the classroom.
AL is now a popular buzzword in Japan. As a teacher educator, I have developed
collaborative, autonomous, and reflective approaches (Kojima, 2012, 2013) where selfdirectedness and collaboration are essential like AL. Although I do not feel that the official
line taken by MEXT is completely appropriate, I am for educational change and haveintroduced AL into my teaching practice.
In line with AL, I would like my first-year English major students to experience flipped
learning in my “Introduction to Intercultural Understanding” class. A flipped classroom
describes a reversal of traditional teaching where “students gain first exposure to newmaterial outside of class, usually via reading or lecture videos, and then use class time todo the harder work of assimilating that knowledge, perhaps through problem-solving,
discussion, or debates” (Brame, 2013, para. 1).
At the beginning of the semester, the students and I discussed the significance ofintercultural understanding in English language education and how to carry out AL andflipped learning effectively. In this study, I aimed to examine to what extent I could help
my students to develop their intercultural understanding through AL in a flipped classroom.
MethodParticipants.
The class involved 32 first-year university students (English majors) in 2016, with lowintermediate to high-intermediate levels of English (STEP, TOEIC). The class met for 90
minutes every week during the first semester. All of them would like to obtain a teaching
license to be an English language teacher in primary or secondary schools after graduation.
Materials.
In order to answer my research question “To what extent could I help my students to promoteintercultural understanding through AL?” I used quantitative and qualitative materials: aquestionnaire to survey the students’ self-evaluation of their learning experiences, their

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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017reflective comments on intercultural understanding and AL, as well as my observations
and reflections.
Procedure.
Before class, as flipped learning, the students read the textbook on English language
education and culture (Shiozawa, Yoshikawa, & Ishikawa, 2010) at home, and made areport on their findings. In class, based on individual reports, the students had group
discussions about their findings and questions. They were encouraged to use English indiscussion and to play various roles (chair, recorder, reporter, and monitor). As a facilitatorof group dynamics, I advised them to consider the five key elements of collaborative
learning: positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face promotive
interaction, social skills, and group processing (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991). Aftergroup work, each group reported the results to the whole class, and then the students
exchanged their ideas freely. They continued their self-directed and collaborative learningwith the same textbook during the semester. Finally, I assigned them short papers to workon various topics of their choice, requiring research and some analytical thought based on
the textbook or their own materials. Two-thirds of the students completed their papers in
English.
Results and Discussion
In order to answer my research question, I analyzed the following quantitative andqualitative data. (I translated the students’ Japanese responses into English.)Summative self-evaluation.
For the end-of-semester course evaluation, students at my university are usually asked
to answer about 15 questions the university made. Then, we teachers are allowed to add
several question items of our own to each course questionnaire. This time, I focused on
the following macro statements in light of intercultural understanding and AL.
Question items.
1. I could recognize the importance of intercultural understanding in English language
education.
2. I could recognize teaching practice to promote intercultural understanding.
3. I could consider the future of English language education in light of intercultural
understanding.
4. I could work on self-directed and collaborative learning positively.
Table 1. Summative Self-Evaluation (N=32)
5Strongly
agree (%)

4
Agree
(%)

3
Neutral(%)

2
Disagree(%)

Question 1

18 (56)

14 (44)001Strongly
disagree(%)
0

Question 2

11 (34)15 (47)6 (19)

00

4.2

Question 3

20 (63)9 (28)

3 (9)

0

0

4.5

Question 4

12 (38)19 (59)

1 (3)

0

0

4.3

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x̅
4.6

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Students’ ratings in response to each statement were marked on a five-point scale. Table
1 shows that the majority of the students were in agreement with the positive aspects of
their learning experiences in my class. The mean scores of the four questions were all over4.0. The question that the students claimed to have the strongest agreement with was
Question 1 (x̅ = 4.6), which stressed the importance of intercultural understanding in
English language education. They enhanced their intercultural understanding in light ofvarious issues: language and culture, intercultural communication, international
understanding, language policy, the Japanese and English, and teaching culture in language
classrooms.
As for Question 2, six students’ responses were “neutral.” This might suggest that it
was rather difficult for them to imagine integrating intercultural understanding withpractical teaching methods and materials. First-year students have not done any teachingpracticums yet. Moreover, in high schools, many students mentioned that they had studied
English only to pass entrance examinations mostly through translation, grammar drills, androte memorization of words and phrases. In other words, they had had limited prior
opportunities to develop their intercultural awareness within the exam-driven
memorization-focused preparatory system for university entrance exams.
Concerning intercultural understanding, 91% of the students agreed that they could
consider the future of English language education (Question 3). They understood the close
connection between language and culture, and would like to teach English in the future,taking this into consideration.
Regarding AL (Question 4), almost all the students agreed that they could work on AL
positively. Their positive attitudes towards AL would help them to understand theeducational effect of AL on learner development and how to implement AL in their futureclassrooms.
Students’ reflections on intercultural understanding.
In their short research papers, the students also reflected on their intercultural
understanding more deeply from general perspectives. They critically commented onJapanese people’s general tendencies and today’s English education in Japan. Theircomments are briefly summarized as follows:• Japanese people tend to emphasize only English and lack multicultural perspectives. We
need to accept different cultures and different values.
• English teachers should help students to develop intercultural competence, which makes it
possible for students to communicate with people from diverse cultural backgrounds.
• Teaching materials should be designed to promote students’ intercultural understanding andautonomous growth as whole persons.
• It is necessary for Japanese students to have more opportunities or experiences to promote
their intercultural understanding inside and outside Japan.
• The languages offered in educational institutions should be diversified, taking sociolinguistic
or sociocultural differences into account.
• Japanese people should develop their original Japanese English to communicate with native
or non-native speakers and to express their ideas and values more effectively.

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Most of the students criticized exam-oriented English language instruction in Japan.
Considering the close relationship between language and culture, they pointed out thesignificance of teaching with a multicultural perspective and developing interculturalcompetence. They also mentioned that as teachers in the future they expected to redesignteaching materials so that teachers could foster students’ autonomous growth as whole
persons as well as their intercultural understanding.
With regard to intercultural experiences, the students enjoyed exchanging different
information with each other. They would like to enhance intercultural understanding in avariety of contexts inside and outside Japan. Most of them also expressed an interest in
studying abroad in the near future.
Worrying about the domination of one language over all others, the majority of thestudents agreed that a variety of foreign languages should be offered in Japanese
educational institutions. Today, English is spoken by more non-native than native speakers.
Some of the students claimed that they wanted to develop original Japanese English tocommunicate with both native and non-native speakers.
Students’ reflections on Active Learning.
For further application of AL to my university classes, I needed to analyze the students’reflective comments on AL. Thus, as an open-ended question, I asked them what they
thought about AL. Only one student preferred knowledge-based instruction to AL partly
because he lacked confidence in his English knowledge and skills. In contrast, all the otherstudents’ responses were positive as follows:• Through flipped learning before class, I could raise my intercultural awareness. This was agood preparatory stage for group work in the classroom.
• AL helped me to consider the contents of the textbook critically and to enhance bothintercultural understanding and technical knowledge through positive interdependence.
• I enjoyed listening to different groups and sharing different ideas about a variety of topics
in the textbook.
• As a teacher trainee, I need to develop teacher-learner autonomy through self-directed andcollaborative learning.
• I would like to improve my pedagogical skills so that I can apply AL to my English
language classes in the future.
Many students thought of flipped learning as an essential preparatory stage to support
AL in the classroom, through which they raised their intercultural awareness. They were
not used to this type of self-regulated learning, but they gradually understood how toengage in this stage for themselves.
As for AL, the students worked on group activities designed to provide them with adeeper understanding of the topic at hand. Classroom activities were followed by someform of whole-class synthesis facilitated by me, such as discussion or a mini-lecture. Thisapproach seemed to enhance the students’ abilities to work in a team, to consider the topicsof the textbook critically, to make decisions and solve problems, to plan, organize, andprioritize work, to communicate verbally with each other, and to obtain and process
information. Structured discussion and debates allowed the students to examine different
perspectives of a controversial issue and to formulate effective arguments to support a
stance.

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The students’ professional consciousness also seemed to be raised through AL. As
teacher trainees, they will be more involved in various pre-service teacher education
programs. They are expected to develop teacher-learner autonomy throughout their
university lives, and to improve their technical knowledge, pedagogical skills, interpersonal
skills, as well as personal qualities. These programs will help them to promote theirprofessional growth and to carry out AL in the classroom more effectively.
Conclusion
In this study, I have examined to what extent I could help English-major students topromote intercultural understanding through AL. By analyzing quantitative and qualitative
data, I found that the first-year English majors tended to raise their intercultural andprofessional consciousness as teacher-learners, who are expected to continue learning how
to teach.
The majority of the students recognized the significance of intercultural understanding
in English language education. They claimed that language and culture should be taught
simultaneously and interactively. They also criticized exam-oriented instruction and thedomination of English over all others in Japan. The specific textbook we used was rather
difficult, but very useful for them to enhance intercultural understanding from various
viewpoints. This would motivate them to consider 21st century skills and competencies,
the integration of the three elements of scholastic ability, and the growth of school-age
students as whole persons.
The social context of teaching and learning could be a key mechanism for how AL
produced the positive effects on the students’ experiences and on their learning outcomes.
AL created opportunities for the students to act as a teacher, such as reciprocal teachingand peer learning. Each student occupied an instructor-like role with respect to his/her
fellow students. I hope that my students will continue to learn autonomously andcollaboratively, keeping in mind that the importance of relationships among students andbetween instructor and student is potentially meaningful for AL.
Innovation in English language teaching should be promoted from primary throughtertiary levels of education. Thus, considering the different teaching contexts in different
institutions, we teacher educators should collaborate with each other and promote
innovation in pre- and in-service teacher education, critically exploring different issues
around AL and learner autonomy.
References
Brame, C. J. (2013). Flipping the classroom. Vanderbilt University, Center for Teaching.
Retrievedfrom
http://cft.vanderbilt-edu//cft/guides-sub-pages/flipping-theclassroom/
Central Council of Education (2015). 論点整理 [Summary of issues]. Retrieved fromhttp://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2
015/12/11/1361110.pdf
Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Smith, K. A. (1991). Active learning: Cooperation in thecollege classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company.
Kojima, H. (2012). Positive interdependence for teacher and learner autonomy: The caseof the CARTA program. In K. Irie & A. Stewart (Eds.), Realizing autonomy: Practice andreflection in language education contexts (pp. 167-181). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kojima, H. (2013). Developing autonomy in EFL learning and teaching: A portfolio
program under collaborative and reflective supervision. In M. Menegale (Ed.),

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Autonomy in language learning: Getting learners actively involved (pp. 60-70). Canterbury:
IATEFL.
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, and Technology (MEXT) (2016). 次期学習指導要領等に向けたこれまでの審議のまとめ[Summary of issues for the new
Course of Study]. Retrieved fromhttp://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2
016/09/09/1377021_1_1_11_1.pdf
Shiozawa, T., Yoshikawa, H., & Ishikawa Y. (2010). 英語教育と文化:異文化間コミュ
ニ ケ ー シ ョ ン 能 力 の 養 成 /English education and culture: Developing crosscultural communicative competence. Tokyo: Taishukan Publishing Company.

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Reader Response to “Promoting English-Major Students’
Intercultural Understanding through Active Learning”
Shinobu Nakamura
Musashi UniversityOn seeing the title “Promoting English-Major Students’ Intercultural
Understanding through Active Learning,” I thought the article would
focus on how Kojima Sensei educates his English major students who
would study abroad in the future about intercultural awareness. However, as I
finished reading this article, I noticed that he was trying to promote intercultural
understanding to the students who are in the teacher-training course. Kojima
Sensei was concerned not only with teaching intercultural understanding
through Active Learning (AL), but also with conveying to his teaching license
course students the importance of learner autonomy through carrying hisclasses out using an AL method. As an English teacher at a university in Japan,
I am familiar with AL. Since my higher education was earned in the UnitedStates, I had realized that teacher-centered learning is not effective anymore,
especially in foreign language classes. I myself prefer teaching my language
classes more student-centered and allocating more time for students to discusswith their peers. However, I have never managed to run a well-organized
Active Learning class as the author of this article did, so I was able to learn agood example of how to carry it out such as giving each student in the groupa role in discussions.
As explained in the procedure section of this article, students do the reading
assignment at home and write a report on their findings and questions. Then, ingroups, they share what they found and talk about their questions with eachother. Each group reports what they discussed in the group to the entire class.
And finally, students exchange their opinions freely as a class. It seems a very
autonomous classroom to me because of the author’s clear and repetitive
instruction. Kojima Sensei is not only successful implementing his teaching
method, but his students also react very positively to his teaching content andstyle. For example, some of the students stated that they would like to apply AL
into their teaching when they start teaching English. However, Kojima Sensei
doesn’t mention how he integrated intercultural understanding into teachingpractice. He states that his students’ reaction to questionnaire item 2— “I could
recognize teaching practice to promote intercultural understanding —wasrather neutral.
I myself sometimes refer to how I was taught in schools when I havedifficulties teaching in classes. How people were taught greatly influences theway they teach. Therefore, promoting the importance of implementing
intercultural understanding and AL in language classes in the early stage ofEnglish teacher education and changing teacher trainees’ mind of improving
the way they were taught English in junior and high school could have a lasting
impact on future English education in Japan. Although the participantsreceived their English education in a rather traditional way in public schools,
they are fortunate to have these kinds of opportunities to learn and experience
new ways of teaching and learning. Now that the participants have beenSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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exposed to a new way of teaching, I would like to see how these students
preserve the teaching/learning method they acquired through Kojima Sensei’sclass and utilize it in the future teacher training courses or in their own English
classes they will teach in the future.

Reader Response to “Promoting English-Major Students’
Intercultural Understanding through Active Learning”
Dominic Edsall
University College London,
Institute of Education, LondonAs Hideo Kojima mentions, Active Learning (AL) is the current buzzword inJapanese education and Kojima offers a definition covering a verylarge area of pedagogy: self-directed and collaborative learning witha focus on problem solving. Whenever I hear the term “Active Learning,” I am
reminded of a poster for a recent conference in Kyushu about AL in thephysical sciences. The poster showed a photo of a group of teachers sitting in
fixed rows of seating listening intently to a professor. The irony of the photo is
the passive way in which we as teachers often learn about AL, and this mirrors
the irony of MEXT dictating that teachers should teach students to work
collaboratively and with self-direction.
Like the teachers in the photo, many of us who attempt to implement AL
have to work around physical and social barriers within the classroom, such as
those rows of bolted down seats in the photo, student and teacher
expectations, and the exam-orientated education system here in Japan.
Kojima mentions this last barrier as being an important factor in student
reflections on AL and the flipped classroom. In my own teaching, I have foundthat students are not inclined to prepare for a lesson and I think many teachers
hesitate to flip their classrooms because of this, so I would like to know more
about how to prepare students for this shift in focus from homework being proofof knowledge acquisition to being self-directed knowledge exploration.
Other reflections included student recognition that as future teachers theyneeded to understand and develop approaches to AL and student autonomy.
As experienced teachers who have worked in the real world, I am sure we haveall met (or been) teachers who just pay lip-service to AL. In the extremely busy
working lives of teachers in the Japan, many find themselves teaching in waysthat they do not prefer for the simple reason that they are too busy to
overcome all the barriers. How might these ideal methods be adapted for such
everyday high school realities? Initially, teachers and teacher educators need
to work together on making AL more accessible as an everyday teaching
method, thereby bridging the divide between theory and real practice.
The final question that I want to raise relates to the one student who did notprefer AL. Was his preference really just because of a lack of confidence? Associal animals, we all like to say what is expected of us—what pleases ourSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017teachers. I wonder if this specific student stated a lack of confidence in his skills
because he did not want to be seen as being critical of his teacher. There issomething reassuring in fixed answers that are obtained by a specific method.
This question goes to the very heart of Active Learning because AL requires acertain level of discomfort and risk-taking, which are keys components ofproblem solving and self-direction. This one student might provide a wealth offurther information by being a rare outlier in the data and is worth exploring
further.

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Learning Together across Borders: Correspondence between
Hungarian and Japanese Learners of English
国境を超え共に学ぶ - ハンガリー人と日本人英語学習者の文通-

Agnes Patko アグネス・パトコー
Kyoto University of Foreign Studies 京都外国語大学
Email: a_patko@kufs.ac.jp

T

he Learner Development Special Interest Group’s Forum at the 2016 JALTInternational Conference was a very positive experience for me. As always, it wasorganized in a friendly and welcoming way, so members as well as first-timers could
join easily. The title of the forum, Learner Transformation as Personal Maturation, invited us torecollect our own memories of learner transformation and maturation and called ourattention to our learners as individuals, each of whom have their own needs, goals, andchallenges, as well as ourselves as learners who always find new puzzles that keep us busy
after classes. My presentation focused on a bilingual correspondence project that I set up
with my students, but before coming to that, let me start from a bit far, with my own storyof transformation and personal maturation.
A Story of Transformation and Personal Maturation
The situation of English language education in Hungary is similar to that of Japan:
English is seen as a foreign language, even though there are minorities whose mothertongue may not be Hungarian, 99.58% of the population speak Hungarian (Kozponti
Statisztikai Hivatal, 2011), and there is no obvious daily need for most people to speak aforeign language. However, contrary to Japan, Hungary is surrounded by land and has
seven neighbouring countries (Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, andSlovenia). Whichever direction one may take, one will be out of the country within threehours’ drive, so it is effortless to travel abroad. Although there are many Hungarians in theneighbouring countries, the official language is different in all of them, so it is easy toexperience the need for foreign language competence.
I had been learning English for at least five years before I ever had a chance to use it.
Back in Hungary where I grew up, I was a member of a folk-dance group and we wereinvited to participate in an international folk dance festival in Germany. I was about 12
then. All the participants in the festival were around this age, and we had a few events
where we could meet each other. I was mature enough to know people from othercountries do not speak Hungarian; however, I am not sure now whether English was adeliberate choice for communication or I simply tried to answer in a language that others
were using to talk to me. Whichever the case was, I ended up talking to people in English.
When we did not know how to say things in English, we tried to use gestures and bodylanguage. Trying to communicate was amusing. We also taught songs to each other anddanced together. At the end of the festival, we exchanged addresses and started
corresponding. When I received the first letter from Finland, I was amazed by the beautiful
handwriting. It was different from Hungarian cursive writing. I loved receiving letters, andI always spent a lot of time choosing the paper and envelope, and writing my letters neatly.
Sometimes we sent pictures to each other.
Corresponding was a means to learn and practice English. My pen friends’ English wasmuch better than mine. I clearly remember looking up words so that I could understandSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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their letters and express my own thoughts. Reading and writing letters also helped me tokeep up my language learning motivation. I wanted to be as good as they were and to
become able to write about everything that had happened to me. I often introduced myeveryday life and topics that interested me then. I was also very curious about their lives.
Due to my pen friends, I became interested in foreign cultures and languages.
All in all, corresponding with foreign people of the same age had a huge impact on me
as a person, as well as a learner and later as a teacher. It taught me to try hard, concentrateon what I can do, be persistent, and not be afraid of making mistakes.
A Correspondence Project with Students in English and Japanese
Remembering the good times of having pen friends when I was a teenager, I wanted
to provide an opportunity for my students to experience something similar to what I had
done when I was young. So, I contacted my teacher from my university in Hungary andasked him if he would be interested in a correspondence project between our respective
students. He was, and so together we set up a correspondence project for our students.
The participants were nine of my second-year students at Meisei University with preintermediate level English; eight Hungarian students with beginner level Japanese andintermediate or higher level of English; and a British-Belgian adult, a colleague of mine
who agreed to help out as there were not enough participants from Hungary. Participationin the project was voluntary. The correspondence was bilingual: English and Japanese. My
students wrote their letters in English first, then translated them into Japanese. This is how
I could make sure they did not use overly complicated vocabulary items or sentence
structure in their mother tongue. The Hungarian students, whose target language wasJapanese, read the Japanese letters first and checked the English only when they needed
help to understand a writer’s specific meaning. Whenever my students got a reply fromtheir Hungarian pen friends, they first read the English letter and then wrote their replies
in English. In most cases I only gave them the Japanese after they had written their reply
in English. This provided the opportunity for meaningful communication in the foreign
language. They could experience the struggle of understanding someone`s letter andreplying to it. Reading the Japanese at the end ensured they did not rely too much on theirmother tongue, and allowed them to check their understanding and make changes in their
reply letters if they had misunderstood something or used too complicated language in theJapanese version of their letter.
Questions and Puzzles
Before the project, my teacher and I had to think about how to execute it. The firstproblem we faced was the differences in the academic year in Japan and Hungary. In Japan,
the school year starts in April, and the first semester ends at the end of July. The second
semester is between mid-September and the end of January. However, in Hungary theacademic year starts in early September and classes finish before Christmas, with thesecond semester running from February to the end of May. Therefore, the time during
which both countries’ students attend classes, especially in the Spring semester, is short.
Finally, we managed to finish three rounds of correspondence in each semester. However,I have to mention that in the Spring semester, the Hungarian students continued their
participation in the project until July, even though they had finished the school year. The
Autumn semester was easier to coordinate as the overlap is longer between the two school
years.

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Time difference and online translation programmes.
Another question we faced was whether to use e-mail, chat programmes, or offline
language exchange. These days a large number of online chat programmes andcommunication software offer the possibility of real-time language exchange; however,with a time difference of 7-8 hours and set timetables, it would have been hard for bothof us to use such technology in class. As a result, real-time chat was discarded. There isalso e-mail, which would expedite communication. However, especially with Japanese
students, the risk of using online translation programmes instead of creating their own
sentences and texts was high, I therefore decided to ask my students to handwrite their
letters, many times in class. Their first reactions to this were not utterly positive, but theyquickly realised that it also provided them with a chance to decorate and personalise their
letters more easily.
Pairing.
A third issue was to do with pairing the students. As we did not know each other`s
students, and I had just started teaching mine, we decided to pair them on the basis of theirinterests, which students introduced in their first letter. My Japanese students wrote thefirst letter, so the pairing was done by my colleague in Hungary. He had known his students
for at least half a year by then, so after reading my students` letters, he knew which
Hungarian student had the same interests or hobbies. Pairing this way helped to ensurethat there were topics which were mutually interesting to the students.
Late response – absences.
Another question was how to deal with absences and late responses. Although students
agreed to keep the deadlines for writing their letters, in reality, this did not work out
perfectly. During the Spring semester, it was the Hungarian students’ participation during
their summer holiday that kept the correspondence alive until the third round. Originally,
we planned to give two weeks for students to write their letters and hand them in to theirteacher. However, when a student was absent and received the letter after a delay, thisoften resulted in a late submission of the reply letter. Delays also happened when someone
missed the class of the submission deadline or lost their letter on their way to university.
Consequently, the two-week response period could not be kept. There were delays on bothsides, which meant that the semester had ended and the examination period had alreadystarted in Hungary when we finished the three rounds of correspondence at the end ofJune.
How to keep the conversation going.
The most serious issue we had to work through was how to keep the correspondence
going without too much intervention or too many adverse effects, such as losing theauthenticity of communication or students losing interest. It is not easy to correspond withsomeone whom one has never met. It is all about sharing and inquiring. Some people liketo talk about themselves and easily ask questions, but others need time to develop the bondand talk, or here write, about themselves with ease. Some of the pairs turned out not tohave much in common, which hindered communication. In addition, some of theparticipants were not good responders, that is, they did not react to or were not interested
in what their partner wrote about, so some students did not write about or continue a topic
proposed by their partner. Asking questions seemed to be difficult for many of my students
also. They simply wrote about something and expected their partner to ask for more

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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017details, but they did not try to facilitate the communication by asking questions themselves.
The length of the letters varied, probably affected by the topic and the amount of free timethey had. Naturally enough, when students had tests, they tended not to spend much time
writing their letters.
As a result, by the time the summer holiday started here, most pairs had reached a point
where they did not know what else to write about. To solve this problem, in the second
semester I decided to impose topics for the letter writing. This was easy to do for mystudents, as I chose from the textbook that we were using. One of the most interesting
topics was superstitions. First, students collected information and ideas about Japanesesuperstitions using the Internet. They then shared and discussed what they had found. A
few students even tried to test some of the beliefs in their free time. They chose thesuperstitions they liked the most and introduced them in their letters, asking what theirpartner thought of them and what superstitions they believed in. When the replies camefrom Hungary, my students had a good time reading about Hungarian superstitions (forexample, if one accidentally bumps their elbow on something hard, it means they will get
an unexpected visitor soon) and checking if they worked. (Try to imagine how students
attempt to bump their elbows on the desk by accident.) This way, they had the opportunity
to learn about the topic in class, discuss it with their classmates, learn new words andexpressions, and only then write to their Hungarian penfriend. This helped to keep thecommunication going and introduce new perspectives regarding the issues.
The question may arise here, “Where is learner autonomy if the topic is set by theteacher?” Obviously, I did not restrict the whole letter to be about the topic I set eachtime. Students were still free to add other things and continue ongoing conversations aboutother topics, I simply asked them to add another topic too. As a result, students not only
managed to write more, but they also became able to use more complicated vocabulary
items and grammatical structures.
Student Feedback on the Project
My students wrote their last letter before the winter holiday. In class, we talked about
Christmas traditions around the world and what they were planning to do for Christmas.
As it was the last letter, I did not tell them what to write about; however, most of themwrote about their plans for Christmas and included their reflections about corresponding.
Here are a few quotes from their letters:“(…) Thank you for exchange letters with me. I was glad to talk with you J, I want totalk to you more (…)”“(…) This is a last letter. So sending letter is very good experience for me. Thank you
J(…)”“(…) This is the last letter I send. I`ll miss you so much …!! I enjoed and learned a lotof things to write letters for you. Your Japanese is very good! So, you will be good speaker
more than now! (…) I hope you spend lovely life! Thank you so much!!! (…)”“(…) This is my last latter… I was glad to talk with you J© I’m interested in learn
about other country’s culture, so I learned about Hungary. I want to keep talking with you.
(…) I hope you spent great holidays. (…)”
Interestingly some of the extracts from the students’ letters resemble oral conversation.
They use phrases that make us feel as if they had been actually talking to each other. I see
this as a positive result, as students had started to bond directly with their penfriends.

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During the project, they got to know each other and learnt about each other’s cultures. My
students sometimes drew pictures to illustrate their letters. These all helped them gradually
feel closer to one another. In addition, the fact that they included their personal reflections
without being told to do so seems to indicate that they enjoyed the project.
Learner Transformation as Personal Maturation
The very first letter in the Spring semester and the last letter in the Autumn semester
were written in class. It was a task for all students in the classroom. Project participants
addressed their letters to their partners, while the rest of the class wrote to each other, toa friend, or Santa Claus. The speed of production was measured on both occasions, and acomparison showed that those who participated in the project increased their speed ofproduction more and could make decisions about the content more quickly than those
who did not participate. The structure of students’ letters also improved: They had
introductions, body texts with at least two paragraphs, and closing paragraphs.
Comparing the letters in the Spring and Autumn semesters, there was some increase inword count, namely from an average of 130 words, to an average of 140. Normally,
students wrote their letters at home so they had as much time as they needed. The styleremained friendly all through the year. The letters in the second semester also displayed
the use of more complex grammar and an increased number of language functions, which,on the other hand, resulted in more mistakes. While there were very few mistakes in the
Spring semester, most of which were spelling mistakes, in the second semester most ofthem became grammar related.
The post-project survey revealed that students enjoyed the project and felt their English
had improved. Compared to the results of the pre-project questionnaire, they reported ahigher willingness to strive to use the language learnt in class, rely less on automatictranslation software, and look up words in the dictionary more often. Their letters showed
the use of more complex language structures and vocabulary items in the second semester
compared with those of students who did not participate.
The project also provided the opportunity for my students to act as native speakers, andas a result they discovered a new self. As native speakers of Japanese they wanted to bemodels, and they tried to use correct and easy-to-understand language. Even though the
Hungarian students made mistakes, my Japanese students did not mind them, as they
concentrated on the meaning. In addition, they appreciated their partners’ efforts to learn
and communicate in Japanese. Consequently, my students gained confidence, which I
consider the greatest positive effect of the project. They now understood that one does
not need to speak—or write—perfectly to be understood and they were much less anxious
about their mistakes even in oral communication. Their attitude to their own L2 learnerself changed and became more positive.
At the Learner Development SIG Forum, I managed to talk to people from various
universities about this project. They all seemed interested. A few teachers who came fromoverseas institutions reported they had implemented similar projects in their beginner-level
English course curriculum and had observed similar results. Although the correspondence
took place between the students, we all found that teacher assistance, such as setting topics,
fostered student communication.
I believe that projects like this can enrich the curriculum. Students get the opportunity
to use their target language in authentic communication, learn about other cultures,
discover their own culture from new perspectives, and make friends with someone
thousands of miles away. Students’ attitudes to language learning may change as they see

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the usefulness of the foreign language, and their motivation may also increase. Collecting
and distributing the letters, as well as encouraging students to keep the deadlines creates
extra work for the teachers; however, it is very much worth it. I would love to continue
the project at my present workplace as well and extend the project to oral language
exchange also.

Reference
Kozponti Statisztikai Hivatal [Central Statistics Office] (2011). Nepszamlalas 2011.
Demografiai adatok [Population census 2011. Demographic data]. Retrieved fromhttp://www.ksh.hu/nepszamlalas/tablak_demografia

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Reader Response to “Learning Together across Borders:Correspondence between Hungarian and Japanese Learnersof English”
Farrah Hasnain
Higashi Senior High SchoolThe voluntary pen-pal program that Agnes Patko initiated allowed her
students to communicate with English speakers abroad and motivatedthem to use English to maintain their relationship with their partners. In her
reflection on the letter exchange, Agnes empathizes with her students’potential limitations by drawing on her own experiences with exchanging
letters after her trip to Germany. Since she had had a parallel English as a
Lingua Franca (ELF) experience, she was able to avoid many potential mishaps
and ensure that her students would receive many benefits from this letter
exchange.
The students’ previous education may be strongly related to why they findwriting in English difficult. As an ALT in a public high school, I notice that English
writing assignments are generally not assigned as often or are as long as they
are in other countries. The Ministry of Education’s policy for secondary English
education does not provide specific guidelines for writing assignments, so theamount of prompts would vary depending on the school. I imagine that Agnes’
students probably had a wide range of writing experiences. Public high school
English instructors usually assign 2-3 writing prompts on average per semester.
Each assignment would be only one paragraph long for low-level schools, twoparagraphs long for intermediate schools, and 2-3 paragraphs long at thehigher-level schools.
Although my students had the opportunity to write in English under mysupervision, I did not know at first how to motivate them to write on topics
beyond self-introductions. I decided to assign topics for their writing prompts.
The topics would range from rhetorical questions (e.g., “If you had a super
power, what would it be?”) to responses to short foreign videos with English
subtitles (e.g., a response to a Buzzfeed video featuring non-Japanese people
trying Japanese food for the first time.) The prompts would flow as if they wereconversations, and the theme would change every 2-3 weeks. Like Agnes, I
also had them peer-review each other’s prompts and write comments in
English. By the end of the year, the students were able to express their thoughts
more clearly and confidently. Based on these assignments, I learned that
continuity is one of the main aspects to learner development.
By providing different topics for the students, instructors initiate theconversation for the students, but also allow room for progression. There was asense of continuity in Agnes’ pen-pal project and students could use English to
expand their own insights on the assigned topics. This is mainly because they
were exposed to different views and were able to familiarize themselves withthe person reading their letters. My students’ experiences were similar in thatthey were anticipating a response from someone else, and used that as a main
motivator to develop their skills in the target language.

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There are many features of this project that can be easily adapted tosupport the development of students’ reading and writing abilities in othereducational contexts. Introducing topics/themes and continuing themthroughout the semester can help students retain and reflect on information.
Instructors can also be more hands-on in the beginning to help students branch
off into more complex themes and concepts. ELF could be utilized between
teachers and students so that the students would come to use English as a toolfor communication more actively. Since Japan is relatively close to othercountries in Asia, I wonder if it would be possible to implement a similar pen-pal
project using ELF with an Asian partner school or university. I am also curious
about how these objectives could be adapted for larger classes as well.
Interactive assignments such as Agnes’s support the students’ development by
providing the key element to communication: a response. Knowing thatsomeone is genuinely listening to and reading a learner’s work can motivatethem to express themselves as naturally as possible.

Reader Response to “Learning Together across Borders:Correspondence between Hungarian and Japanese Learnersof English”
Adrian Wagner
Momoyama Gakuin UniversityT

he first thing that struck me in this short reflective article was the author’s
memory of her own language learning history, “I had been learning English
for at least five years before I ever had a chance to use it.” Connecting ourown learning experiences to those of our learners is a pertinent starting point
for considering learner autonomy and language education in general from theperspective of both learners and educators. The differences and connections
between language learning and language use are certainly matters that weall should consider.
As educators endeavouring to support the development of our learners,
perhaps we feel that we are creating opportunities for students to use thetarget language in our classroom. We design communicative activities, giveassignments, and facilitate discussions. Of course though, from the perspectiveof learners, this can be seen, and often is seen, as merely study or practice.
Perhaps it is never real language use when it is only in the “safe space” of aclassroom. It is using the language for the purpose of learning. Perhaps, only
when language use has a purpose beyond the goal of language learning,outside of the confines of a classroom does it really become use in the eyes ofsome learners. Students are often told about globalisation and theinternational community without being given opportunities to participate in it.
The author of this short reflective article had a wonderful opportunity at theage of 12 to communicate with people from different cultures in a sharedsecond language. It is clear that this shaped her perspective of language
learning and instilled the value and opportunities that come with being able touse another language. Now as a teacher, in facilitating this exchange program,Special Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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the author creates a similar opportunity to the one that she had. Furthermore
she has her students physically send their language outside of the classroom,
forcing a transition from language learning to language use.
For me, an outstanding and completely unexpected aspect of this project
was the use of both Japanese and English. Of course this added benefit for the
students of Japanese in Hungary, while also ensuring the complexity oflanguage used in either language was controlled so as not to be daunting or
demotivating to participants in either country. From the perspective of theJapanese students, communicating with foreigners in Japanese would alsobroaden perspectives on the journey of second language acquisition. They
could understand that even if an individual’s skills in a second language were
not advanced, if there is a willingness and effort to communicate, then valid
exchange of ideas and information is possible.
I also appreciated the way the author dealt with two questions that I often
struggle with while setting up autonomous learning programs for my students.
Whenever assigning homework, research projects, or anything requiringsubmission of writing, I am in constant battle with the temptation translation
software poses to students. The “old school” back-to-basics approach to letter
writing by hand employed in this project was a neat side-step.
This project also successfully negotiated another tricky aspect of trying tofoster autonomy; as facilitators, how much should we scaffold or steer the
students in their choice of learning materials or output content? While it seems
the author was somewhat reluctant about imposing topics to be written about
the selection from the class textbook of the theme, superstitions, was a great
choice as it could stimulate broader cultural as well as individual responses andwas an effective way to both keep the conversation going, and shift thelanguage use of the students away from the textbook and out of the classroom.
Overall, I was inspired by this short reflective article. It has encouraged me
to think from the perspective of language learners and consider the differences
between language learning and language use. Furthermore, I believe it shifted
the perspective of the participants as it allowed Agnes’s students to engage
meaningfully with peers in a different country in both their native language ofJapanese, and in the shared second language of English.

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Emotion and Communicative Competence in English
Discussion Class
英語ディスカッションクラスにおける感情とコミュニケーション能力

Nicole Gallagher 二コール・ギャラガー
Rikkyo University 立教大学
Email: gallag01@rikkyo.ac.jp

Every day we experience a range of emotions in our interactions with different
people and from the stories we see in the news. We all implicitly understand tosome degree that these emotions can affect our moods, motivation, and actions.
When it comes to the language-learning classroom, however, not much attention has been
paid to how emotions may affect classroom learning (Benesch, 2012). At Creating
Community: Learning Together 3 (CCLT3), I had an opportunity to reflect on the emotional
dimension of classroom learning and its connection to interactive oral communication.
While my classroom experiences have informed my belief that an emotional dimension tocommunication is always present and plays a role in how learners were communicating in
my classes, I was unsure of how to frame my own practice-derived ideas of emotion andcommunication to wider understandings in the English language teaching (ELT) field. In
my poster presentation at CCLT3, I talked about my own classroom experiences withlearner emotion and the approach I have taken to incorporating my own understanding of
it in my teaching practices. I was especially interested to hear what other participants
thought about the following puzzling questions: “How is emotion connected to oral communicationin an English language learning context?” and “Is being empathetic a good way to frame an emotional
communicative competence?”
In this short paper, I describe my own classroom observations of learner emotion andhow it has altered my approach to teaching in my current context. I then present theframework of communicative competence and empathy that I looked at in the poster
presentation. I also discuss some of the ideas that other participants put forward at CCLT3.
Observing Emotion in Classroom Learning
My recent interest in the relationship between emotion and communication originatedwhile teaching a university course dedicated to developing English discussion skills for L2
learners in Tokyo, Japan. The curriculum of this English discussion class aims for students
to be able to share their beliefs with others in English (Hurling, 2012). Each class lesson isorganized around a given discussion topic and communication skill, with the course
emphasizing output and interaction to encourage fluency and communication skill
development. The course has a unified curriculum, and so each weekly discussion topic is
determined by the syllabus described in the in-house textbook. While instructors canmodify discussion questions, and learners have some choice as to which questions theywant to discuss, each lesson is expected to adhere to the topics established by the course
curriculum.
After a year of teaching the course, however, I recognized that in some classes, students
were better able to manage certain topics over others, and that discussion topics evoked arange of emotional responses from students. I have observed learners looking happy,
interested, and excited to discuss a particular topic, while other times they seemed reticent,unhappy, and sometimes even annoyed, frustrated, or dismissive. In other words, learners
sometimes displayed emotions that suggested they were comfortable, and at other times,

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they displayed feelings of discomfort. It seemed that less controversial topics such asuniversity life, or university entrance examinations typically evoked the former emotions
listed, while more challenging topics, such as those that intersected with identity, social
position, and power, would sometimes evoke the latter. For example, several of the morechallenging discussion topics focus on marginalized individuals in society, such as
hikikomori (reclusive individuals who withdraw from social life), or the homeless. In a few
sections of the course this year, some learners reacted by being dismissive or annoyed when
discussing these topics, while others showed discomfort or frustration with theirclassmates’ dismissive attitudes or ideas. These expressions of emotion were importantbecause however students felt in a given lesson affected class interaction and environment.
Learner emotion interacted in the class to create many different kinds of atmosphere andinteraction patterns, and would colour ensuing discussions, affecting class dynamics. Afterobserving various kinds of emotion displayed in learner interaction, I wanted to deepen
my understanding about how learners can manage these scenarios better, and what I can
do to facilitate a more meaningful exchange of ideas between learners.
Incorporating an Emotional Understanding in my own Teaching
Hargreaves (2000) argued that teaching and learning are “always irretrievably emotional
in character, in a good way or bad way” (p. 812). Therefore, it seems vital to have aconsideration of emotion reflected in our teaching practices. From my perspective, there
are several reasons to consider learner emotion in my teaching, the most obvious one beingthat the classroom should be a comfortable space for learners. Second, by trying to grasp
learner emotion, teachers will be better able to perceive learner experiences and develop
the background information required to aid them in their learning goals. Piccardo andAden (2014) suggested that emotion “helps us understand the depth of personal andcultural implication involved in language use and in the process of language learning” (p.
240). By reflecting on learner emotion in my own teaching context, I can learn from mystudents how to acquire a more robust understanding of language learning in my classroom,
which in turn can inform a more nuanced approach to teaching. Third, incorporating an
understanding of emotion in the classroom can help to further the stated aims of the course
by creating more meaningful, rich discussions, and helping learners develop theircommunication abilities in English.
Recently, I have been adapting two aspects of my teaching practice based on myobservations of emotion in the classroom: discussion topic presentation and materials, andlearner skills development. In order to encourage learners to engage in a more criticalanalysis about a topic, I try to expose them to relevant information that can help learners
develop balanced opinions. For instance, if I predict that some learners may not be awareof some knowledge on a given topic, like homelessness in Japan, I provide somebackground information as scaffolding. As well, I usually brainstorm with my colleagues
about how to present topics in ways that encourage learners to have a more holistic
understanding of social issues. The classroom materials might include information in theform of evocative images, short fictional narratives, or pertinent facts and statistics. The
end goal of this scaffolding is that learners can reach well-informed opinions and achievea better understanding of a range of positions possible on various issues. Presenting
adequate scaffolding can reduce anxiety towards unfamiliar topics, and will give learners
the tools to discuss a range of perspectives more effectively. Emotionally, this would likely
reduce discomfort and make some learners less dismissive of unfamiliar perspectives.
Learners also need opportunities to improve their ability to manage difficult discussions
effectively. I often try to encourage learners to understand opinions that differ from theirown. In class, we talk about the importance of clarifying ideas by using follow-up questions
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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017as a means to understand each other’s ideas more deeply. We also exchange views on why
it is useful in discussions to demonstrate active listening through reactions and bodylanguage. Sometimes everyone in the class will share ideas about what makes for a good
discussion, and usually they find it easy to distinguish between good and bad discussions.
Another useful activity is to have learners consider various points of view on an issue. For
example, in a class on crime and punishment, we discuss what is the appropriate
punishment for murder. In that case, I will have the students brainstorm different
perspectives that would be important to consider in the discussion. Sometimes I will
suggest viewpoints that I think are missing, such as the executioner’s point of perspective,or the innocent person’s point of view. By implementing activities that focus on building
communication skills in a discussion context, I can guide learners on how to manage theirown feelings towards different ideas or behaviours in class through providing tools tonavigate discussion more effectively.
The Emotional Dimension of Communication Skills
Reflecting on the students in my classes, I have often thought that there is an elementof emotional awareness inherent in good communication. While it is clear that there arecertain learners who are quite skillful at expressing their opinions on challenging topics,
there may be other learners who demonstrate a strong interpersonal awareness, exhibiting
an ability to communicate well in group communication settings like discussions. For
example, some learners exhibit a willingness to try to understand others’ ideas, are open to
considering different perspectives, or are good at listening to others. Considering thoselearners who are especially skillful in interactive communication and discussion, it often
seemed that their actions reflected an emotional awareness of others. While I have foundthis challenging to explain theoretically, I am interested in understanding how a learner’s
emotional awareness may be connected to communicative competence in an ELT context.
This is what I was interested in discussing at the CCLT conference, which I outline in thenext section.
Theorizing Emotion’s RelationshipCommunicative CompetencetoCommunication:

EmpathyandDuring the poster presentation, I spent a lot of time discussing the idea ofcommunicative competence and how it connected to emotion. I asked other participants,“In what ways might emotion interface with communicative competence?” Some participants hadinteresting comments about alternative ways of framing communicative competence toinclude an aspect of emotional awareness. A couple of suggestions included strategiccompetence, or sociolinguistic competence as aspects of learning a second language.
Another idea that emerged was that emotional awareness could be better framed as partof a general academic literacy. In other words, the idea that emotion may not only interface
with language learning itself, but may be part of a larger cognitive skill that is both included
in and transcends the second language learning context. I find this idea particularlycompelling because it suggests that such a definition of communicative competence could
be developed by drawing on other related fields, such as psychology or education studies,
which examine relationships between communication and emotion in the classroom. It
may also be useful to isolate differences between second language learning and otheracademic subjects, where student interaction and communication is emphasized. While I
have not arrived at any conclusions about how emotion informs communicative ability inlanguage learning, my poster presentation suggested ways to explore these notions moredeeply.

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One idea that has intrigued me since I started to think about emotional awareness andcommunication is the idea of empathy. When I reflected on learners who were adept at
handling a range of topics and worked well with others, I often thought that their successcould partly be attributed to empathy. They were empathetic listeners and communicatorsand could tolerate a variety of opinions. Despite this, one puzzle I have faced is how toteach empathy and whether it can necessarily be taught. It is also unclear how it connects
to a learner’s communicative competence.
During the presentation, I provided two ideas about empathy from Piccardo and Aden
(2014). These ideas were interesting to me because the authors conceive of empathy asboth an attitude and an ability, which could potentially connect empathy with the idea ofa communicative competence. They describe empathy as an attitude that can be taken
when there is a breakdown in communication. By being empathetic, “one must put oneself
in the place of the other, essentially taking control of one’s emotions” (Piccardo & Aden,
2014, p. 247). This suggests that empathizing involves a conscious decision to foregroundthe experience of the other, and so the “empathetic learner” is enacting a kind of selfcontrol. In other words, empathy may help learners to manage their emotional reactions
in order to communicate more effectively. Piccardo and Aden (2014) also describe
empathy as an “ability to analyze a situation by accepting another’s point of view, at the
moment when this point of view is experienced or considered, which in turn may change
one’s reaction to the situation” (p. 247). The ability to accept another’s point of viewsuggests a willingness to be open to changing one’s opinion. Both of these ideas suggestthat empathy requires learners to make decisions about how they will react to difficult
situations and opinions that differ from theirs.
During the poster presentation, other participants agreed that empathy perhaps played
a role in good communication in the language-learning classroom. It seemed that everyone
could imagine this relationship between being a good communicator and being empathetic.
However, there were no strong arguments about whether empathy would be theappropriate way to frame an emotional communicative competence. In discussion withseveral participants, I expressed my frustration with the difficulties of defining learneremotion and empathy in concise, concrete ways that connect it to other ideas in the fieldof ELT. One participant commented that he thought this is the nature of emotion in theclassroom; it is inherently difficult to pin down. This comment was useful for me in that it
reminded me that the difficulties of emotional description, including deciding on
appropriate terminology or definitions, reflect the complex nature of emotion itself and its
relationship with language and learner experience. While I need to do a more in-depth
literature review on emotion, empathy, and communication in the classroom, it seems
possible that empathy could be one aspect of a more global communicative competencethat attends to emotion and the emotional dimension of learning.
Looking Forward: Future Classroom Research on Emotion
Presenting at CCLT3 provided a valuable opportunity to hear different opinions fromother conference participants on how to connect emotion to communication. The
experience has encouraged me to think about the relationship between learner emotion
and communication more deeply. Next, I intend to explore the ideas of empathy andemotion in the communicative language-learning context through conducting in-classresearch. To deepen my understanding of this dynamic, it would be fruitful to gain a richer
description of learner emotion, which I intend to research by looking at reflective in-classwriting. Following an action research model, students will have a chance to write
reflections on their feelings and experiences at the beginning and end of every class as areflection paper. I have called this in-class activity “The Before and After Paper.” I will
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collect the student papers every class and provide them again at the end of the semester
for students to reflect on their progress. By examining student self-reflections on theirclassroom experiences, I hope to improve my understanding of the complexity ofemotional experience in the language-learning classroom. I also hope that the activity
provides opportunities for students to become more aware of their emotional states bygiving them an opportunity to reflect on their feelings on classroom involvement. I lookforward to sharing my classroom research and engaging in an exchange of ideas about
emotion and communication with other members of the Learner Development SIG in the
future.

References
Benesch, S. (2012). Considering emotions in critical English language teaching. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Hargreaves, A. (2000). Mixed emotions: teachers’ perceptions of their interactions withstudents. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16, 811-826.
Hurling, S. (2012). Introduction to EDC. New Directions in Teaching and Learning English
Discussion, 1(1), 1-10.
Piccardo, E., & Aden, J. (2014). Plurilingualism and empathy. In J. Conteh & G. Meier(Eds.), The multilingual turn in languages education (pp. 234-257). Bristol, UK: Multilingual
Matters.

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Reader Response to “Emotion and Communicative Competence inEnglish Discussion Class”
Lee Arnold, Daito Bunka UniversityT

his was interesting to read as you’re raising some crucial questions that go
beyond language learning and into psychological areas of maturationand the impact such areas have on communication. It chimes in withmuch of my interest—the subjective side of language learning and acquisition.
In my response, I’d like to focus on two points you focus on in your shortreflective article—the development of communicative competence, andempathy.
In relation to observing emotion in the classroom, you noticed how topics
that center around questions of identity, social position, and power may makesome learners uncomfortable. I’m wondering if this is because such topics may
be hitting too close to home about their emerging identities and particularsocial positions. The discomfort may come from a sense of powerlessness given
the array of socio-economic forces affecting them and their futures. They are
doubtlessly aware of these realities but perhaps are not yet able to articulate
or fully grasp them.
These realities impact learners’ lives and will have a bearing on how muchthey are willing to engage in discussion, perhaps in the L1 as much as the L2.
But is all this together the only answer? Is it also possible that students mightwant to avoid dealing with the discomfort of others about these issues? Somelearners may be ready to face these “heavy” issues, but are also aware thatsome of their classmates may not be.
If this is the case, what you are seeing may be the growing pains ofcommunicative competence as a whole in the L2 and possibly the L1 as well.
You seem to intuit this where you say “the idea that emotion may not onlyinterface with language learning itself, but may be part of a larger cognitive
skill that is both included in and transcends the second language learning
context.” So, in broader terms, you may also be seeing how the emergence of
these communicative competences is tied into a larger ontological framework,in which learner language development is one part of a scheme of maturationthat is transforming them as whole beings with nascent adult selves. Perhaps
the resistance to certain topics in discussion is evidence of a conflict within thatchange, a realization of a departure from adolescence into an “adult” life
condition that does not necessarily confer power in dealing with harder socialand economic realities.
This reaches to the point of empathy. Is it possible that what you’re observing
in your learners is an empathetic emergence out of concern towards theirmore sensitive classmates? They perceive that some are not ready to grapple
with these issues, and where you discuss emotional understanding in your own
teaching, you seem to touch on the possibility of an empathetic pedagogy.
This term might be a useful way to characterize an approach to matureclassroom learner engagement that reviews content that some learners may
be uncomfortable with. It could also include broaching difficult issues andengaging with learners who may not seem to be ready for engagement, but
who also may break through to such topics within an empathetic peer-andteacher environment.

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I would be very interested in what you explore further and what approaches
you decide on, which, as you show, will require nuance and a gentle
persistence.

Reader Response to “Emotion and Communicative Competence inEnglish Discussion Class”
Blair Barr, Tamagawa University

H

aving had a chance to talk with Nicole during her poster presentation, I
really felt that I could empathize with her motivation as a teacher trying
to facilitate discussions on complex topics that trigger emotional
restrictions to speaking. Several years ago, in an adult discussion course basedon events in the news and media, I had issues engaging learners with topics
such as hikikomori, the homeless, and other political and social topics. However,I felt that I was successfully able to change the teaching approach to help
learners discuss these complicated issues of identity, society, and power withgreater engagement by giving them more time to prepare with guided tasks.
In this reader response, I will attempt to summarize the changes that I madewhile also considering Nicole’s use of empathy as a part of communicativecompetence.
Regarding the students’ feelings of annoyance and frustration whenapproaching complex topical discussions in real time, there are at least threereasons why university-aged English language learners might experience these
emotions. For one, they must deal with a cognitive load that is difficult to discuss
for any speaker, regardless of their first language. In fact, learners may havenever even considered some of these topics in the past, so their lack ofknowledge prevents them from carrying on a discussion with a peer even in
their first language. Second, as language learners, they may also lack thelexical knowledge to express their thoughts on the topic. Thus, they would need
to be primed with some of the language required to carry out the task. Finally,
there may also be social or empathetic barriers to discussing complex topics
about society and power with peers. Outside of class, these learners may
typically discuss softer topics such as holidays and popular culture. Expressing
strong views on society and politics could potentially affect relationships
outside of the class as well, so learners may ultimately choose to remain neutral
or disinterested. Although this last issue may be more complicated to resolve, I
have found that we can successfully help learners with the cognitive andlinguistic restrictions.
For myself, my own motivation to change the approach to complex
discussion topics came from Willis and Willis’s (2007) approach to what theyclassified as problem-solving tasks (pp. 93-99). For them, they suggested that
there is a need for an extended priming stage to manage complex discussions.
Nicole certainly makes a great effort to prime learners with images, narratives,and facts; however, learners also need the benefit of time, and some directed
priming work to help them deeply engage with the topics independently
before they can confidently carry on discussions. Much in the same way ateacher will often research their topics more deeply before presenting

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materials in the class. My own approach involves research tasks assigned forhomework that are often based on targeted yes-no questions that force
learners to consider supported reasoning for opposing viewpoints. Once
learners complete the homework, they generally return to class with a great
deal of content to discuss, and they have primed not only their language, butalso their opinions regarding the topics. In the end, the learners have improved
their competence to deal with the subject matter and language. However,Nicole’s concern still stands as not all learners come to empathize entirely with
their peers or participate in discussions.
The approach is not a magic solution for all learners, as the social barriers to
discussing certain issues may remain for some people. Despite the increased
engagement and interest from many learners after an extended priming stage,
I still find that some learners are reluctant to participate or do research. This
may relate to Nicole’s concern about an inability for some learners toempathize as a part of communicative competence. For these learners,
perhaps the experience is crucial for true empathy. Lacking the personal
experience to empathize, they would rather express disinterest in complex
topics, and generally prefer to stay silent. This disinterest and silence may result
from a cognitive and linguistic barrier, but it could also be a defence
mechanism to avoid social and political conflict in their own real worlds.
However, from my own experience teaching adults, a few people evenblamed their inability to engage with topics on a lack of time, thereby
reinforcing my belief that time is a crucial factor needed for learners to reflect
on and engage with complex discussion questions. In the end, I have foundthat the majority of learners can alleviate their cognitive and linguistic
frustrations with these topics when they have been given the time toinvestigate the topics independently, but certainly more work needs to bedone to understand the emotions of those who continue to resist.
Reference
Willis, D., & Willis, J. (2007). Doing task-based teaching: A practical guide to taskbased teaching for ELT training courses and practising teachers. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

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Why Don’t They Listen to You? Teaching Sports Students andChallenges in Classroom Management
どうして学生は聞かないのか？スポーツ学生と授業経営

Koki Tomita 冨田 浩起
Tamagawa University 玉川大学
Email: ktomita.koki@gmail.com

In participating in the Creating Community Learning Together 3 (CCLT3) event hosted by
Learner Development Special Interest Group (LD SIG) in December 2016, I was very
curious to see how my audience would react to my teaching experiences with 25
students in the baseball team. The presentation itself went relatively well. Some people
were interested in the teaching practices and what the results of my action research offeredto overcoming the challenges that I had faced in teaching the course. However, in closing
the presentation, I was feeling a slight contradiction about what I had just presented.
Let me begin my story by explaining what I had felt before taking part in CCLT3. Before
the 2016-2017 academic year started, I strongly believed in (and still do) the importance ofremedial education offering level-appropriate learning for those students in sports teams.
Sports students’ low academic profiles shape their feelings of incompetence and turmoil
while they are in class; hence, they tend not to attend classes, sleep during the lectures, anduse mobile phones, for example. I hoped that I would be able to get agreements fromother university teachers to do something about this at my university.
For a number of teachers, instructing a mixed level class is a big challenge. Often,
athlete-students are mixed up in a class with students who meet the academic standard of
the university; hence, the sports students are supposed to be “equally” taught and graded.
Luckily, the students in my course were all in the baseball club, and I did not have suchparticular teaching or grading issues. Plus, I had a great deal of teacher autonomy indesigning this course, so it was possible for me to set up the course level appropriately.
Over the 2016 academic year, I had to invest quite a lot of time in designing this course.
The course development process was not as easy as I had expected because I had to makethe curriculum motivating for the students with low academic profiles. As a former soccer
player myself, I had failed entrance exams because of my devotion to three years ofintensive high school soccer practice. Based on my own experiences of academic failure, I
wanted my students to at least find the meaning of being in the class and experience thejoy of using English at most. So, I decided that the themes for the course would be
motivating and interesting, and these are the two keywords that I kept in my mind indeveloping the course.
Course Structure
I had two main concerns in creating the course. The first was improving students’English proficiency to allow them to talk about baseball in English. Based on the precourse questionnaire, many students wanted to learn baseball-related content which would
improve their motivation to learn English. Second, given that they would have a chance to
use English outside of the baseball field in an English-speaking country, general English(still related with baseball) had to be taught.
Speaking of their English proficiency, I need to take into serious consideration the wide
range among the students. In broad terms, they were at junior high school graduate level.

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Misuse of basic grammar expressions could often be found in their answers. They had
many spelling errors that emerged from discrepancies between written and spoken
language. There were a couple of students who couldn’t spell their name using thealphabet. However, as far as I observed, their willingness to communicate was very highcompared to “normal students” at the same level of English proficiency. The onlybaseball-students situation worked to reduce their anxiety and stress about speaking infront of the class and making mistakes. This emotional advantage allowed me to include
more communicative aspects in the course in the end.
Addressing Challenges in Classroom Management
The biggest problem for me in teaching this course has always been classroom
management. This was the very reason why I joined my department’s Action Research(AR) group although this project started when almost half of the final semester hadfinished. (And this is how I came to present on my struggles and practices to solve theissues at CCLT3.) There were four members in the group which was formed after Anne
Burns—a specialist in action research—conducted a Professional Development (PD)session at my university in early November. In the PD session, Anne talked about theunderlying principles and logistics of conducting AR and shared concrete examples of AR
conducted in different contexts. At the end, she encouraged the PD participants to form
an AR group and test it out by exploring the challenges that they were facing in theirdifferent courses. Following her suggestion, we formed a group to grapple with the uniqueclassroom issues that we each had. AR is usually conducted with the sequence of “planning,”“action,” “observation,” and “reflection” (Burns, 2010). For this project, I videotaped four
lessons and had two project members observe two lessons in the course to go through theaction research process. This became the major turning point for me to reflect on my wayof teaching the course.
Before participating in this project in November in 2016, I was sure that something
was not going well in managing the class. Students’ energy level, attention span, and lesson
tempo were far below what they used to be, but I wasn’t able to detect the causes of theuneasy feeling growing in me.
Moving the clock a little further back to May 2016, my biggest classroom management
issue through the year had been students’ constant chat during lessons. I do not agree with
the idea that the typical teacher-oriented learning environment in Japan—the teacher
serving as a purveyor of knowledge, with students merely listening to what the teacher
says—is effective in language education. As a researcher of learner autonomy, I believethat students can learn from each other once they work in a group where students share
their strengths to cover each other’s weaknesses (Murphey, 1989).
According to this principle, I created groups of four and had the students work on
activities for a couple of lessons. The result was a big failure because they were too
comfortable with being in the groups made up of familiar faces and couldn’t stop chatting.
Eventually, I lost control, ended up breaking up the groups, and made the traditional“everyone-looking-at-the-teacher” setting. This surely worked in controlling the class, and I feltthat I had overcome the chatting issue, but I was feeling guilty about using this method forthe peace of the class because this was not a teaching principle that I believe in. After a
few lessons, I started looking at the bright side. I realized that I had succeeded in making
an environment in which actually language learning could finally take place rather than achaotic uncontrolled classroom. I also remembered that autonomy is a continuum,
meaning that I can start from a teacher-centered classroom and transform it over time toa more learner-centered classroom where students can exercise their autonomy.

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Participating in the Action Research Group
Participating in the AR group, I watched the videotaped lessons to analyze my teachingpractices and students’ attitudes during the lessons. I became aware of the causes of myworries that I had constantly felt while instructing the course in November. Probably I had
paid too much attention toward getting things done during the lessons and taking care ofthose “good” students who finished the given tasks or activities. In other words, some ofthe students had been left behind in the classroom and had gradually lost their motivation
to learn proactively. What I had witnessed in the recorded lessons was that students withlower proficiency were chatting, fooling around with each other, and falling asleep while I
was giving instructions. Not only that, but the partners sitting next to them also got
affected. Seeing this, I realized that this was the source of my unpleasant inner feeling
during each lesson.
I started analyzing the causes that led them to behave in that way by using Classroom
Observation Tasks (Wajnryb, 1992), which offers different points of view to examine lessons.
I also began searching for solutions by asking AR group members to observe my lessons
and look at the videos. The main reason for my students falling asleep during the classes
was their devotion to baseball practice. The students were physically tired because of theireveryday baseball practice. They nearly always came to my lessons after finishing fullbaseball practice and some classes for other registered courses. To solve this issue, I
confirmed with them a policy that they could move their bodies during lessons or even gooutside to get fresh air. During the class, I talked to those sleepy students to make surethat the series of options were available for them to take.
Second, I realized that the baseball-related English dealt in the course was beyond theirability to work on. This might have resulted in reinforcing their sense of failure and taken
away some of the students’ willingness to participating in the lessons. Because baseballrelated English was context specific, it required them to remember and utilize unfamiliar
baseball specific vocabulary and phrases on top of basic English structures and vocabulary
items that they should have learned in the first place.
Specifically, the biggest demotivating factor for some students probably was theconversation tests taking place at the end of each lesson. I set up this 1-minute test toassess their performance in producing conversation structures they had learned in theprevious lesson. I often shifted lessons to the speaking test three-quarters of the way
through a 90-minute lesson. This was part of the autonomy-enhancing elements that I
wanted my students to develop while taking my course. It leads to a learning cycle wherestudents leave the class, check their strengths and weaknesses in producing the target
conversation structures, and spend their own time practicing the structures. In this way, I
thought that students could prepare themselves for the test based on their needs.
The pitfall that I didn’t expect (or should have expected based on my experience) wasthat the lower students’ proficiency level was, the less often they prepared for the speaking
tests. Well-prepared students came to me to take the test and left the class early. As far as
I had observed the behaviours of the lower proficiency students, they did not prepare forthe test while they were waiting for their turn to come. Thus, they stayed the whole 90
minutes in the class but left the classroom without taking the test.
Acting on advice from my colleagues, I made two new changes to the baseball related
English section although the changes took place right before the end of the semester. First,
I took longer for scaffolding each activity. Second, I made baseball-related conversations
way easier and simpler. Both more proficient and less proficient students benefited fromthis revision to the course. After the change had been implemented, the number ofproactive lower proficiency students increased. In the meantime, the number of “non-test
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takers” decreased in the last few weeks of the Fall semester. Higher-level students had
previously kept their heads just above the water. Now with the change in the content, they
had some room to help less proficient learners.
The third cause of the classroom management issues was my failure in getting theirattention before and while I was giving instructions. Some of the lower proficiency
students were not able to keep up with the pace of the lessons due to the difficulty of theactivities. On the other hand, higher proficiency students started chatting or fooling aroundwith other group members because they had finished their tasks already. Thus, theclassroom was very noisy as the end of each activity was approaching. Observing thevideotaped lessons with my AR group, I could realize how soft my attention grabbers were.
Before watching the videos, I thought that I was making good transitions from one activity
to another. However, the reality was that half of the students were not following me.
As for the solutions to this issue, I started using a microphone to make sure my voicereached all the students. With the videotaped observation, I was bewildered that my voice
was not loud enough to be heard by the students sitting at the back of the class. Anothersolution I tried was to make a long pause to give a sign that the lesson was transitioning to
the next phase. This solution was proposed by a project member because she noticed that
I often gave a weak attention grabber and started instructions without stopping students’conversations.
After the Educational Interventions
After applying all of the educational implementations discussed above, I started feelingthat my emotional burden was gradually fading away. The rhythm of the lesson becamemuch smoother as the number of proactive and disciplined students was growing in eachlesson. After a while the number of the “non-test takers” dropped over the weeks, andsurprisingly some of them came to me to finish the speaking tests that they hadn’t finishedat that point.
The educational interventions were successful in two ways. First, students were able toboost their confidence in working on activities. I witnessed this through the level ofstudents’ attitude toward working on activities and willingness to share their answers withclassmates. As each student built up their successful experience by completing the activities
that were slightly higher than their levels, every successful moment led to pushing up thegroup confidence level. Second, I contributed to nurturing their attitudes toward taking
English lessons. Compared to mid-November, I felt in December that they are more
focused, responsible, and hence prepared for taking English lessons. With the different
classroom management issues that I have experienced in teaching this course, I can pass
the record on to the teachers who teach those baseball students in the next school year.
CCLT3 and the Future of Remedial Education
Now, I would like to address the reasons for that sense of contradiction that I felt as I
finished my presentation at CCLT3. First, I was happy because my struggles in classroom
management and proposed solutions had gained participants’ attention. In the reflection
circle that followed the presentations in my room, the classroom issues in my baseball classsparked heated discussions regarding struggles when we teach students with lower
proficiency.
The greatest challenge shared in discussion was keeping the balance of “disciplining”
students’ behaviours in the classroom. We all agreed that university is not a place like
Japanese junior/high school where teachers control the class with absolute power, andstudents follow the given rules. More likely, university is a place where students canSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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exercise their autonomy to learn because we expect our students to behave as adults andwe treat them in that way. But the truth of the matter is (and my next claim might sounda little biased) is that a majority of the discussion participants reported the connection
between lower proficiency and reduced accountability for students’ behaviours. What I
learned from this sharing was that teachers need to clarify their expectations andconsequences for misbehaviours in the beginning of the semester and gradually loosen up
rules as time goes. Such a statement might sound a bit naive for autonomy-promoting
educators who try to push the idea of students taking responsibility forward. But again,
learner autonomy is a continuum, and students who have grown up in a Confucian culture
need scaffolding to take their own responsibilities in language learning.
My frustration—and this is the source of the contradiction that I felt in closing thepresentation—was the limited amount of educational support offered to sports students
in Japanese universities. The discussion group members agreed that Japanese universities
should reach out more to sports students who are struggling from falling behind in class.
Universities need to put more human capital and resources into academically supporting
sports students in the same way that US universities, for example, have been doing for
baseball, basketball, and American football students.
In closing this short reflective paper, taking part in CCLT3 gave me so many
opportunities to look back on my teaching practices and philosophies. As I mentioned, I
experienced the use of teacher power to bring peace to a vulnerable class situation in
exchange for giving up the promotion of learner autonomy. I still don’t know whether mydecision was right or not, but I will try to look for ways of learner autonomy-enhancing
classroom management which raise students’ awareness toward their progress in language
learning, foster a sense of ownership toward the content, and establish learning
communities where students can learn together.

References
Burns, A. (2010). Doing action research in English language teaching. New York, NY: Routledge.
Murphey, T. (1989). Sociocognitive conflict: Confused? Don't worry, you may be learning!
Et cetera, 46(4), 312-315.
Wajnryb, R. (1992). Classroom observation tasks: A resource book for language teachers and trainers.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Reader Response to “Why Don’t They Listen to You? Teaching Sports
Students and Challenges in Classroom Management”
Peter Joun
Meiji Gakuin University

A

group of student-athletes in one’s classroom can potentially be thegreatest gift one could hope for (well, in any case athletes can be asource of positive activity—more on this later), or one’s worst nightmare.
Student-athletes are often “the boss” in secondary school, and other students
have often been conditioned to make way for their robust counterparts. An
instructor who is outwitted, or worse, intimidated by student-athletes willinvariably lose both control of and the respect of the class. Indeed, Tomita
Sensei confessed that his biggest issue was classroom management, and that
he did indeed lose control of his class, which led him to join an action researchgroup at his university formed to address issues instructors were having with theirclasses. Videotaping and then observing the lessons with his colleagues
allowed him to zero in on the core problems which led to the usual hiccups,i.e., tilting the presentation of the lessons in favor of the stronger students.
Luckily, with the support of his colleagues, Tomita Sensei was able to admit that
he was neglecting his student-athletes, and therefore made adjustments whichbrought dramatic improvements even though they were introduced after
more than half the semester had elapsed.
Specifically, this included adding more scaffolding to his activities, making
classroom tasks easier and simpler, and using a microphone in order toestablish the authority of his voice and focus the students’ attention. He thereby
succeeded in addressing the student-athletes’ hidden fear of being
embarrassed on account of not being able to complete tasks beyond theirlevel of understanding, while simultaneously legitimizing his leadership. For
those of us who have participated in team sports, one of the unstated rules isthat respect is only garnished to those who demonstrate courage and thewillingness/ability to make others shine. By implementing the steps outlined
above, Mr. Tomita was able to demonstrate he was an authentic leader, one
who was capable of doing whatever it takes (even admitting he was wrong)in order to include all the students in the flow of the classroom activities, andmaking this imperative the strongest voice in the class.
His experience resonated with my own experiences in dealing with “problem”
students over the years. Upon reflection I have found that invariably the root of
the situation usually resided in students’ anxieties at being shown up or losing
face in front of others. After realizing this is generally the case, I have made it apoint to structure the class in such a way as to include the lowest member inthe flow of the class activities, even if this means using the student’s native
language when doling out activity instructions so that every student canparticipate on a level playing field in a timely manner. Regarding studentathletes, I have found that they can be a huge asset if their sense ofcompetitiveness is tapped into. Creating quizzes and activities with points
awarded to the winner has on more than one occasion resulted in transforming
once motivation-challenged/“English class=sleeping time” third basemen andshortstops into vocabulary-devouring maniacs hell bent on stomping theSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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opposition, with the upshot that the so-called “good students” (often used to
cruising in mixed-level classes) have on more than one occasion been moved
to “up their game” to deal with these unexpected developments.
Where I once sought to minimize damage, I now look forward to working
with lower-level students and affirming the great strides they are capable of if
given the chance and the appropriate support, and my faith in that proposition
has on more than one occasion been rewarded. Of course it needs to bebalanced with a willingness on the part of the teacher to be firm if challenged
by the insolence of youth, as well as with the ability to bring to heel theoccasional saboteur. In Japan it is still largely the case that the instructor is thecentral figure in the classroom. Embracing this role and leading lower-level
student-athletes to a place of security and mutual respect can be an enrichinglearning experience, a sentiment which perhaps Tomita Sensei would now also
subscribe to.

Reader Response to “Why Don’t They Listen to You? Teaching Sports
Students and Challenges in Classroom Management”
Sean Toland
Nanzan UniversityT

his reflective article provides readers with a realistic window from which toview your struggles to create and teach a communicative English
language course to a group of disenchanted Japanese university student
athletes. While your reflection is situated in a higher education context, it will
nevertheless resonate with teachers working in a wide variety of learning
environments. My response will focus on the following three important themesthat emerged from your article for me: the role of genuine critical self-reflection
for teacher development, the concept of control, and the powerful effects ofa group-based Action Research (AR) approach.
Many English language instructors would agree that examining their own
actions under a critical spotlight is not an easy thing to do. Carefully scrutinizing
your own teaching performance takes time, and it can generate a significant
amount of discomforting friction. Perhaps that is why many teachers have atendency to downplay any thorny situations they encounter in theirprofessional practice. In contrast, you have embraced critical self-reflection
and used it to look closely at yourself as well as areas that can be enhanced
in your classroom. There were a number of striking similarities between thelearning environment you described and a class of university athletes that I
previously taught. Like you, I also had to devise strategies to deal with theconstant chatterers, slumbering students, clandestine texts and tweets, as wellas competing comedians, so your experiences were most insightful.
Your reflection raises the issue of control (i.e., “Eventually, I lost control …”;“This surely worked in controlling the class”; “a chaotic uncontrolledclassroom”). Do educators put too much pressure on themselves to keep theirstudents on a tight rein? If a teacher relinquishes control, will a classroom turnSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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into a chaotic circus? How can educators provide guidance without assuming
control over the students’ decision-making and learning? Can language
learning take place in a controlled chaotic environment? Undoubtedly, many
people would respond to these questions by focusing on an instructor’s
personality and teaching style. For example, “a teacher who does not mind ahigh-energy atmosphere with noise, kinetic movement, and group synergy willbe less concerned with control than someone who appreciates a morestructured classroom environment.” While this explanation may sound rational,
it is nevertheless simplistic as it sidesteps the most important issue, which isfinding ways to enhance students’ control over their own language learning.
You addressed the problematic pitfalls you encountered in your professional
practice by joining an Action Research group. Are group-based AR projects
common in Japanese universities? Why or why not? You did a great job ofhighlighting the advantages of this collaborative research approach. Did you
encounter any unforeseen problems? Was trust an important element amongst
the members in your research group? It is obvious that the video-supported self
and peer reflective feedback helped you tackle a number of significant
classroom management issues and improve the quality of your teaching. How
did your learners react to a video camera tripod or cameraperson being
present in their classroom? Was it difficult to provide critical feedback after
watching your colleagues’ videos? I thoroughly enjoyed reading yourreflection and would be very interested to learn more details about yourfascinating AR project.

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Academic Writing: In Search of Effective Ways of Providing
Students with Constructive Feedback
アカデミックライティング：建設的フィードバックの効果的な方法を求めてAlexandra Shaitan アレキサンドラ・シャイタン
Gakushuin University 学習院大学
E-mail: alexshaitan@yahoo.com

W

hat is exploratory teaching? Who is the exploratory teacher? Research shows that
it is not a new concept, but the one that has been around for a long time. The
book “Focus on the Language Classroom” by Allwright and Bailey (1991) promotes
the concept of exploratory teaching as a practical reality that mirrors what goes on in theclassrooms. The authors define exploratory teaching as “teaching that not only tries out
new ideas but that also tries to learn as much as possible from doing so” (Allwright &Bailey, p. 197). This book focuses on three basic points pertaining to exploratory teaching:• there is a great deal to be learned from the results of the research that has been carriedout so far;
• there is even more to learn from the procedures of classroom research;• teachers, researchers and learners have a lot in common and therefore can learn agreat deal from each other.
The main tenet of exploratory teaching is that “the teacher is the researcher’s link withlearners, and also the learner’s link with research” (Allwright & Bailey, 1991, p. 197). This
book served as a trigger for my exploratory teaching practice in search for effective waysof teaching academic writing skills to Japanese university students.
Teaching Context
I teach academic writing to second-year students at the tertiary level at a number ofuniversities in the Kanto area. While the requirements at each university vary, I will focus
on one class in particular at a university in the Tokyo area where students are required towrite their graduation thesis in English. For such students, knowing the mechanics ofEnglish academic writing is essential for graduating.
The overall aim of the academic writing curriculum at this university is to help students
develop their academic writing skills in English, (i.e., by being able to utilize English for
expanding their knowledge in critical thinking, research skills, as well as the developmentof logic and cohesiveness). Students are asked to research topics including social, political,
and global issues, and present their critical understanding in writing. Teachers are to help
students develop their ease and confidence in using English, mastery of the research
process and content, clarity in expressing ideas in speaking and writing, and criticalevaluation and comprehension of issues. To better develop academic literacy, key activities
are usually reinforced through repetitive cycles, (i.e., individually, in pairs, or in groups ofthree). These include but are not limited to:• explaining notes• brainstorming• outlining• mind mapping• identifying issues and questions for researchSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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• presenting key points and issues from research• paraphrasing and summarizing information sources• making and re-organizing notes on information sources• writing journals.
Throughout the 2016 academic year, students were required to produce two wellresearched academic papers of different genres (e.g., persuasive, argumentative,
comparative) of approximately 1000-1200 words in length. The topics that students choseto research and write about ranged from English education in Japan and Korea, refugees
in the EU, nuclear energy in Japan and Germany, voting age in Japan, women’s rights in
Saudi Arabia, the gender gap, and so on. The students’ finished products (two academic
research papers) were further exposed to multiple reading audiences: peers and the
instructor. To sum things up, the process approach to writing lies at the heart of thiswriting course and curriculum: Prewrite, Organize, Write, Evaluate, Rewrite.
Working Puzzles
All of the 24 students enrolled in the 2016 academic writing course described in thisshort reflective article were second-year undergraduate students. During their first year of
university studies, they had taken a writing course that focused on the development of
academic writing skills. At the start of the second year, most of the class members could
be ranked as upper intermediate to advanced in general English proficiency.
While I have usually aimed to create an effective learning environment for students
enrolled in an academic writing course, I have often found it challenging to provide themwith feedback based on students’ needs. This may mainly be attributed to my assumptionthat students would be properly equipped with academic writing skills from theirexperiences as first-year university students. However, this is a myth rather than the reality.
So, my main puzzles with this class were: (a) identify students’ abilities and types of training,(b) identify the most effective way(s) of providing students with constructive feedback on
their drafts/final academic paper, and (c) explore means and modes of feedback students
felt most comfortable with. In this short reflective article, I will briefly describe how I tried
to use feedback as a teaching tool to support students’ academic writing development.
Student Needs
To understand the students’ needs, I conducted a survey in English at the beginningof the first semester. I aimed to elicit students’ responses to a variety of questions covering(a) general areas of improvement; (b) types of feedback they expect their teacher to provide
them with; (c) their research interests (topics); (d) their confidence and skills in writing
academic essays/papers; (e) skills they would like to enhance; (f) their use of English/L1
in class, and so on. I designed the survey to find out what my students’ needs and struggles
were and to explore how to better assist them with improving their academic writing skills.
All the students expressed an interest in improving their academic writing skills and inlearning how to better incorporate researched data in their writing projects. Further,fourteen of the 24 students had emphasized that the areas they wished to improve mostwere coherence and cohesiveness in English writing, a lack of academic vocabularyrepertoire, and using complex sentences in their writing. Some also reported that theywanted to overcome a tendency to “use simple words” in their final written products, andbecome able to identify reliable sources for their research.
Peer Feedback
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Some students commented that it was a waste of time reading and responding to eachother’s papers. In addition, students with weaker writing skills reported that reading theirpeers’ papers was challenging and time-consuming. They explained that they had toconstantly refer to a dictionary in order to understand what their peers had written, whichsomewhat slowed the process and made the task too difficult to accomplish. In such cases,
students simply wrote a couple of sentences commenting on the length of the paper rather
than on its content. A quote from a male student enrolled in the course illustrates thispoint aptly: “I think this paper is good because it shows the problem and solution for it clearly, and has
good reasons to make this solution. Moreover, it has some objective opinion and data. However, this paper
is difficult to read; therefore you should use more understandable expressions.” (Yuki’s peer response)
Another important finding was that students were not used to openly criticizing eachother’s papers as it is not a common practice in Japanese educational institutions. Hence,some comments were very general and did not necessarily provide constructive andvaluable feedback for revising and developing their papers. I also noticed that both maleand female students were very careful not to hurt each other’s feelings. Empathy was adriving force in formulating peer comments, which may be attributed to Japanese social
norms in communication. The following quote illustrates students’ attitudes toward giving
feedback to their peers: “Your paper is clear and easy to understand, and includes much information.
I can know bad and good points of the topic. In the introduction, you wrote what you discuss clearly, so it
is easy to understand and interesting.” (Masayuki’s peer response)
To change students’ beliefs about giving and receiving peer feedback, I decided toprovide the students with some training on how to write constructive feedback so that
their classmates could make relevant changes, if necessary, in their drafts: They read andresponded to other students papers’ by reviewing research papers and problem-solution
reports written by students in previous classes (anonymous sample papers written by
students from previous years). I explained to students that the main goal of the feedback
was to assist each other in finding pitfalls (if any) in their drafts, and also to provide eachother with ideas and comments about• what THEY thought could be interesting to add to the researched topic;• what questions they thought could be addressed in their writing;• what part of the essay should be improved (e.g., introduction, body, conclusion,references, citation in the work, tables/graphs).
In the first three weeks of this training I devoted 40 minutes of the class time to workout the mechanics of peer feedback with my students. While advanced students were able
to read the sample papers quickly, others required more time to read and understand thecontent of the papers. Students were provided with a peer response sheet (adapted from
Oshima & Hogue, 2013) and made relevant comments accordingly. They were asked towrite their comments in either their L1 or L2. Their comments were then discussed in theclass where each student had a chance to report on his/her peer response. The training
sessions continued weekly during the first seven weeks of the semester with a gradualdecrease in the second half of the semester. The results of this training created a positive
atmosphere for students to comment on each other’s papers without fear of losing face or
hurting each other feelings.
During the first seven weeks of the course, students commented on all three drafts,
thereby providing multi-audience feedback, rather than teacher-only feedback. With
students working in pairs and groups of three at times, each student was able to receive
feedback from two or three peers and me. To my surprise, through examining students’peer responses, I found that students’ comments were more straightforward than my own
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feedback as the teacher of this class. Students had commented that they wanted their peers
to make relevant revisions so that when they have read it the second time around, it would
be more interesting to learn about the issues that the writers had researched. In sum, thetraining in providing peer feedback to each other had a crucial impact on students in thatit addressed the importance of feedback, its meaning, and value in the planning, revising,and the writing process.
Questioning Teacher Feedback to L2 Student Writers
When I provided my own feedback to students of this class, I always tried to include
praise to raise students’ motivation and encourage those students with weaker writing
skills. The reason for including praise in my comments was based on a student survey
response (mentioned above) where a male student reported, “I need my teacher to praise me. If
I am praised I can do my best and my motivation to improve is always high.” (Yuki’s survey response)
Yet students already had built-in preconceptions that if their written products lacked any
grammar mistakes, their written work would meet the criteria to get an “A” grade for thecourse. I provided students with a variety of feedback, employing coded comments on
grammar and collocations, focusing on global rather than local errors, pointing out
strengths and weaknesses of the organization and structure, advising students how to makethe papers reader-centered, and identifying research questions related to the discourse ofa genre in question. I discovered that some students lacked the metalinguistic knowledge
to comprehend my feedback and make relevant corrections or revisions in their futuredrafts. I also found that even advanced students occasionally could not follow thecomments that I had provided them with on their earlier drafts. To solve this problem, I
decided to use face-to-face conferencing where I could provide oral feedback to mystudents on their progress.
Exploring Teacher-Student Conferencing
Research in EFL writing indicates that, to be effective, feedback should be provided
in a variety of modes, be focused on individual variables and preferences, and serve as thepedagogical tool for learning (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006; Peterson, 2008). The axis
around which teacher-student conferencing revolves is the Vygotskian concept ofscaffolding, providing a solid platform for the dialogue between a teacher and student. To
ensure efficient learning outcomes as a result of this dialogue, teacher-student conferences
should be carefully planned and delivered. One of the most salient issues that Ferris (2006)
addresses is the right timing for the conferencing. She insists that earlier teacher-student
conferencing is more productive and efficient in that students can make revisions andcorrections during the process of writing rather than waiting for the final draft.
So what has worked in my class? Prior to the conferencing, students were given a rubric
asking them to prepare a list of questions pertaining to their piece of writing. Some students
in my class asked me whether they could use their L1 during the meeting in case they could
not make themselves understood in the L2. Surprisingly, most students felt comfortableusing the L1 during the conferencing, reporting later that it was easier for them to use L1
metalinguistic knowledge to clarify comments and feedback provided by the instructor. As
the class was comprised of 24 students, each student was given 5-7 minutes to discuss
issues related to their writing. Throughout the two semesters, each student had fourchances to have a conference with the instructor. Those students who could not attend
the sessions were asked to have a teacher-student conference after classes. After the
conferencing, students were required to reflect on the outcomes and record theirreflections in their learning journals (a note-book accounting for 30% of their final grade),which were a part of the assessment portfolio.
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During the conferencing, I usually made notes about each student’s individual learning
variables; however, I did not have enough time to talk to a student and make notes
simultaneously. As a result, I asked my students in English and in Japanese if I could
possibly audio-record our sessions using a voice recorder. I also informed them that therecordings would be used for keeping record of their academic progress and kept safely in
my house until after the semester ended. After that, the recordings would be deleted. As
no student objected to my request, I recorded the sessions, which turned out to be more
effective than the written feedback I provided them with on their first drafts. I could easilytransfer the files to my personal computer and keep the record of each student’s
conversations. These records helped me to prepare for the next meeting and also see howeach student progressed throughout the course. That is to say, I wanted to see (a) if
students followed up on agreed points of discussion we had had during the teacher-student
conferencing, and (b) if they made changes/revisions (if necessary) to their second drafts.
Continuing to Learn from L2 Student Writers
Developing English writing for academic purposes is highly challenging forundergraduate students, particularly when they are writing in an L2. I fully realize thatfinding the most effective way(s) of teaching L2 learners how to write English academic
essays and/or research papers is not an easy task, as each student follows a different
pathway of development and so requires a different set of responses from the teacher tohelp them develop further. What I am striving to do is to explore what works and what
does not work with the L2 student writers that I teach. While some pedagogical techniques
are successful at times, others require modification, adaptation, and adoption of eclectic
approaches to teaching based on students’ abilities, needs, and development of academic
skills necessary to graduate from a university. In a word, I am learning from my students
how to be a better teacher. The journey is an ongoing process of exploration with mystudents, in relation to research in the field. The puzzles that I’m interested in exploring
next are how and why the deployment of writing journals may have a beneficial effect on
developing students’ fluency skills in writing in English for academic purposes.

References
Allwright, D., & Bailey, K. M. (1991). Focus on the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ferris, D. R. (2006). Does error feedback help student writers? New evidence on the shortand long-term effects of written error correction. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds.),
Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues (pp. 81-104). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nicol, D. J., & Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006). Formative assessment and self-regulated
learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher
Education, 31(2), 199–218.
Oshima, A., & Hogue, A. (2013). Writing essays. Longman Academic Writing Series. Level 4 student book:
Essays (5th ed.). Tokyo: Pearson Japan.

Peterson, S. S. (2008). Writing across the curriculum: All teachers teach writing. Winnipeg, MB:
Portage & Main Press.

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Reader Response to “Academic Writing: In Search of Effective Ways ofProviding Students with Constructive Feedback”
Peter Collins, Tokai UniversityThe experience of writing an academic paper can be an exhilarating one.
When we have a passion for a topic, when we’ve learned about anddrawn conclusions about it, and have a burning need to share a message
with a receptive audience, academic writing can be a deeply satisfying
process. On the other hand, writing a paper simply because we are required
to can be a confusing, tiring, and, in the end, discouraging struggle.
As someone who teaches academic writing to Japanese university students
myself, I’m particularly interested in Ms. Shaitan’s efforts to see that her secondyear students have the former, positive experience. Her practices include a
prewriting survey inviting students to reflect on their own areas for improvement,
training in peer support, and carefully timed teacher-student consultations.
There are more things I would still like to know, however, about how these threecomponents impacted students’ attitudes toward writing as well as the qualityof their writing.
A prewriting survey such as the one Ms. Shaitan administered is a valuable
step for students to go through; their first-year course seems to have helped
them identify areas for improvement in their own writing. Still, since she foundthat she had overestimated the writing skills they had built in that first year, I’m
curious as to what extent the first- and second-year courses are coordinated;
it seems there’s room for improvement.
Ms. Shaitan describes her experiences with some of the perennial challengesof peer feedback, including students who seem overly concerned withdiscouraging each other with negative comments. The weekly training sessions
help nurture a supportive classroom atmosphere, but I’d like to know whether,by the end of the course, students felt that their critical thinking skills had
evolved. My own students have little experience even differentiating between
facts and opinions in English texts; this makes it difficult for them to evaluate
whether the arguments they read are sufficiently supported.
These students experienced writing for multiple readers, with both theirteacher and their classmates responding to their papers. I’d like to know more
about whether they kept this particular “audience” in mind when choosing
their topics, clarifying their writing purpose, and developing their writing. My
Academic Writing students represent a variety of departments and tend tochoose topics specific to their own academic interests. Thus, they are unlikely
to be familiar with each other’s content; a marketing major researching andwriting about stealth advertising, for example, may get only limited feedback
from students majoring in architecture or tourism. As part of the prewriting
phase, I have students discuss their topics and positions in groups. Throughgauging classmate’s understanding (or lack thereof), students will hopefully
come to understand two things. First, their paper’s message needs to beunderstandable to a relatively wide audience, and second, this understanding
requires that the message be supported by clear organization, flow, andlanguage. I’m curious about whether Ms. Shaitan’s students felt that they wereable to overcome knowledge gaps through the student interactions she set up.

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Ms. Shaitan’s idea of having students practice providing peer responses withpapers from previous classes strikes me as an ingenious way to provide student
writers with experience looking critically at others’ writing. I agree with her thatgiving and receiving constructive comments is challenging for students whose
educational culture places relatively little value on peer feedback. I would liketo know more, however, about whether her students, initially reluctant tocriticize and be criticized on writing, were able to synthesize peer feedback
with the insights they gained from the series of teacher-student conferences.
I’ve enjoyed this overview of Ms. Shaitan’s exploratory teaching, and would
like to hear more about how the routines of peer and teacher feedback she
established in her classes influenced (a) her students’ comfort with English
academic writing, and (b) their writing itself. On her pre-writing survey, they
identified very specific target areas for advancing their academic writing; did
she—and did they—see improvement?

Reader Response to “Academic Writing: In Search of Effective Ways ofProviding Students with Constructive Feedback”
Martin A. CaterJ. F. Oberlin UniversityIn her short reflective article, Alex describes her struggle to provide
constructive feedback to her students. The problems she discusses are issues
that many language teachers have to deal with. I can certainly relate tothese challenges, and feel a little better knowing that I am not alone in looking
for ways to help students become more autonomous through developing
feedback and review processes for themselves.
Last year was the first time for me to teach writing at a Japanese university,and initial exploratory practice sessions revealed a real lack of learner
enthusiasm towards any kind of peer review: similar to Alex’s learners, many ofmine strongly believed that it was strictly the teacher’s job to provide
feedback; others also expressed a reluctance to criticise the work of their peers.
As sophomores, the learners had all had some experience of peer review intheir previous year, yet any training, if it had been given, had not resulted inthem feeling positive about their experience. Due to this feedback, I limited thescope of peer review work in class and spent quite a substantial amount oftime marking work at home. This was possible because I had a limited university
workload that year; were I to have had more writing classes, such an approach
would have been impractical. Students responded well to face-to-facefeedback in class although the time available for such sessions was very short,
like Alex’s, averaging just over five minutes.
Although my students had made it clear that they felt it was not worthwhile,
I feel that my decision to minimise our focus on peer review actually denied
learners the opportunity to develop valuable skills. The practice of peer
feedback, when done well, should foster a sense of community in thelanguage classroom. Being able to critique the work of others in a polite but
effective way is not only an important academic ability, but also useful in theSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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workplace. As learners begin to value the input of their peers, the role of theteacher changes, allowing space for a genuine autonomy to develop. It isclear to me that Alex was right to include this in her lessons, and spend time
focusing on how it could be effectively nurtured.
As I begin a new academic year teaching writing at a different institution, I
am looking to take a fresh approach to implementing peer feedback in class.
Although my new group is at CEFR A1 proficiency, the benefits of conducting
the activity are applicable to all levels. This year, I plan to get learners to do anumber of short, collaborative writing tasks. This work will then be shared withother groups, who will provide feedback with the help of an instrument
focusing on specific aspects of organisation and target structures related tosyllabus objectives. It is my hope that the collective nature of creating andevaluating written work will make it easier for students to give each otherconstructive criticism. A collateral benefit of reducing the volume of output will
also allow me more time to give my own feedback. I fully intend to take on
board Yuki’s response regarding the importance of praise, and will also
validate learner comments by echoing them in my own feedback.
As a fellow believer in exploratory teaching, I am sure that my new
approach will create additional puzzles as well as address problems for me andmy learners. But through a continued process of exploration, reflection, andlearning with my own peers such as Alex, I am optimistic that small advances
can be made.

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Uncovering Teacher Assumptions and Developing
Intercultural Communication through Heightened Local
Culture Sensitivity
教師の思い込みの発見と現地文化に対する文化的感受性を 高めることによる異文化間コミュ
ニケーションの促進

Satchie Haga サチエ・ハガ
Seikei University 成蹊大学
Email: hagasatchie@gmail.com

W

ith the official shift away from teaching prescribed linguistic forms toincorporating them as a part of a broader repertoire for communication(Amano, 1999; Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology,2013), I, like many English teachers in Japanese universities, teach “English forcommunicative purposes” courses. However, when I began teaching them, I would often
become discouraged and frustrated when I set up communicative activities and students
would only use a minimum amount of English, and then either stop the activity and say“Finished,” or revert to Japanese. When I discussed my frustrations with one of myJapanese-American friends also teaching at a university in Tokyo, she suggested thatJapanese students need more structure. She gave me an example of a conversation activity
that worked in her class where she used vocabulary cards containing target verbs andnouns, and the students would have a conversation flipping over the cards. I have usedsimilar activities to introduce or promote vocabulary acquisition; however, in her case, thepurpose of the cards was to assist the students’ conversation. For example, on the topic ofglobal warming, several vocabulary cards would be laid out, and students would discuss
the topic with question prompts that were in the textbook. They would answer thequestions while looking at the cards, and use the vocabulary in the conversation. Whenthey used the vocabulary they replaced it with a new card. She found that students wereable to discuss more when they could see the vocabulary in front of them. In other words,
by directing and limiting the linguistic focus of the conversation activity to the specific set ofterms in her vocabulary card activity, she found that her students were able tocommunicate more.
For me, this was an entirely novel idea. Up until that point, I thought that limiting the
focus to specific vocabulary would stifle student conversation. However, when I spoke
about this activity with a non-teacher Japanese friend, their response was, “She understands
how Japanese like to learn. Free conversation is very difficult for us.” This comment caused me tostart to re-evaluate my teaching practice. I realized that perhaps I was not thinking about
my learner needs as deeply as I should have been. Like other teachers, I over-simplisticallyattributed students’ reticence in conversation activities due to their low English proficiency(Tsui, 1996), or their lack of confidence and fear of making mistakes or being laughed at—
not to lack of structure.
As I thought this over further, I started to reflect upon my own assumptions as a nonJapanese university teacher. I am Canadian and completed my Masters at an American
university; I wondered about the influence of my North American education on my
expectations for my non-North American learners. I looked to Barna (1994) who suggests
six “stumbling blocks” that can affect intercultural communication. Of the six, I realizedthat assumptions of similarities and the tendency to evaluate may be the two blocks that teachers
are the least aware of. Assumptions of similarities refers to the taken for granted, unquestioned
belief that people share similar values and beliefs as ourselves. The tendency to evaluate refers
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to the tendency of approving or disapproving the statements or actions of the other person
based on our framework rather than making an effort to understand it from theirworldview (Barna, 1994, pp. 341-342). I realized that I had succumbed to these stumbling
blocks—I had been expecting my students to conduct the communicative activities as
Western students without deeply considering their existing values and communicationstyle.
I decided that as a window and a model for intercultural communication, before
imposing my values onto my students, I should first make an effort to understanding theirworldviews. It was only when I approached teaching with a heightened local cultural
sensitivity—to understand and respect the students’ background schema, and adjust myteaching to meet their expectations—that I began to see them take great strides indeveloping their communicative ability.
In this short reflective article, I will first share questions from my teaching practice andthen examine the research to reflect upon classroom intercultural concerns. I will conclude
with future considerations about my learner development practices.
Understanding my Students’ Worldviews
In order to deepen my knowledge about my students’ perspectives, the questions that
I wanted to answer were: How do my students best learn? What kind of classroom and activities are
comfortable for them and will promote their learning? How do they communicate? What communication
techniques do they use in Japanese that they can learn in English? and What is different for them aboutcommunicating in English compared to communicating in Japanese?
Learning in Japan: Expectations of teachers and students.
In Japan, like in many Asian cultures, the teacher’s role “has socially been prescribed asthat of a model, a knowledge transmitter, a learning guide, an authority, an expert, anurturer and a virtuoso, and the student’s role as that as a receiver, a follower, an apprentice
and an audience” (Li, 2003, p. 74). This is in contrast to Western education systems that
tend towards teachers acting as facilitators where questions and discussions among
students are encouraged (Saito & Ebsworth, 2004). Students are viewed as cocreators/facilitators in the learning process and the teacher can be wrong. Expatriate
teachers with TESOL training often are prepared with activities that focus on a learnercentred classroom, the development of learner autonomy, meaning focused input/output,
and encourage unplanned discussions (Li, 2003; Saito & Ebsworth, 2004). However,Western concepts such as autonomy, spontaneous discourse, and a democratic learning
environment may often be unfamiliar to the Japanese learner and can be met withresistance. As I started to think this over more, I understood my friend’s comment now
that “Japanese students need more structure.” I began to look for patterns and create formulas
for students to remember and develop. For instance, instead of introducing a topic,
teaching them the vocabulary and then giving them discussion questions, I started withhow to give an answer to a question that promotes more discussion. One effective pattern
I introduced to them is an “Answer-Add-Ask” (AAA) pattern, where lower-level students
focus on pragmatics such as turn-taking and higher level students can engage in developing
and expressing opinions in a modified Response-Opinion-Ask pattern.
In order to meet student expectations of providing them with models for them to frame
their output, I gave them many examples of English discourse markers that they could use
to structure their conversations. Additionally, I used Bloom’s taxonomy of questions(Anderson et. al., 2001) as a framework to provide the learners with many examples ofSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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English question stems. In student reflections, a common sentiment shared by all levels isthat they initially find creating their own questions and continuing a conversation to bevery difficult; however, remembering the examples made it easier. After discussion
activities where students were required to discuss one topic for 5 to 10 minutes, students
frequently commented that the structured patterns they learned in class helped to maintainthe momentum of communication and extend their conversations beyond their
expectations. For instance, Kotaro, a second-year student, was surprised at how long they
could talk about one topic and now wanted to talk more than the time allowed, while
Atsumi, another second-year student, observed that asking questions was very helpful for
her to keep the conversation going. Moreover, students felt that their English ability had
progressed. For example, after a discussion activity, Shoei, a first-year student, commented,“I feel my English improved a lot,” while Yu, a second-year student, felt he “could speak morethan usual.” Teppei, a second-year student, observed that using the ready-made phrases
helped with communicating more fluently, and Saki, another second-year student, foundthe phrases so useful that she wanted me to prepare more that she could memorize andincorporate in her conversations.
Regarding values, Western, including English-speaking cultures, tend to be classified as
individualistic with self-determination to achieve personal (individual) goals. This is incontrast to Eastern collectivist values that tend to emphasize a sense of self that isinterconnected with others and the harmony of interpersonal relationships (Hofstede,2011). For Westerners, being different and having unique ideas is highly regarded.
However, for Japanese, being part of a group and being similar is seen as desirable. In mycase, I recognized that students liked to work together, but I had thought that this was due
to it being easier to complete the assigned tasks rather than a cultural preference. However,I now started to recognize the cultural implications of collectivist values on theircommunication. For example, in discussion they were much happier when they shared thesame opinion than if they disagreed (i.e., happy shouts of “Me too” vs. silence).
In order to facilitate familiarity with new types of communicative activities as well as
promote solidarity amongst the students, I now consider the first month of the year as anextended “ice breaker.” In the first month, I have students do tasks working in pairs andgroups with the primary purpose of finding similarities and becoming closer to one
another. For example, they would form teams with team names based on one thing thateveryone in the team liked (e.g., “navy blue” or “sleep”), and they would share their reasonsfor choosing this university. They would work on projects that they would present to theclass and vote on. The secondary objective of these activities was for them to become
familiar with interactive activities. Advancement of their English skills was a third
objective, so while I structured the activities to use English I was not strictly enforcing
English usage at this point. In student reflections, they made comments about how theycame to class more eagerly because they had friends and wanted to communicate with theirfriends. They also mentioned that, because others were trying harder, they also wanted tomake more effort themselves to communicate in English.
Promoting English communication while maintaining Japanese values.
An important concern for collectivist societies is the concept of face. Research has foundthat individualists have high self-face concern that leads towards dominating conflictstrategies, while collectivists have high other-face concern that results in avoiding conflictand high mutual-face concern that lead to cooperating conflict strategies (Oetzel et al., 2001).
As such the free-flowing style of discussion and debate commonly practiced in North
America or Europe is unpractised in Japan because people prefer to avoid the risk ofSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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offending other people. Rather, Japanese spend more time finding similarities or common
ground through which they can develop their relationships.
Recognizing this concern, I began to teach discourse markers, strategies, and patterns
that helped to promote other-face and maintain harmony in a discussion. For instance, inorder to “save face” when disagreeing, the response in the Respond + Opinion +Ask/Pass pattern should be positive (e.g., “That is a good point.”), before stating
disagreement (Positive Response + Disagreement + Pass). Students find disagreement
much easier to give and receive when adding this positive statement.
Face-saving discourse markers and strategies cannot be taught in one lesson, but need
to be practiced throughout the term in various fluency activities. By the end of the school
year, at all levels, most of my students successfully structured their opinions using thesepatterns and there were significantly fewer silences in their discussions.
Most students mentioned that due to the frequency of practice in the class they could
use the phrases more naturally. However, there were comments regarding how thepsychological difficulty of voicing disagreement affected participation in the discussion.
Rei, a second-year student, observed that while it was easy for him to discuss when hecould agree with other people, it was difficult to disagree because he did not want to“oppose” others. Being afraid to disagree made it difficult for him to convey his opinion
and therefore he was less active.
Other students commented that using the patterns helped encourage more honest
communication. For instance, Haruki, a second-year law student, pointed out that bystarting a response with a positive statement about the other person’s opinion people felt
more comfortable about sharing their true opinions. Shuma, another second-year student,
commented on the Japanese value of ocha wo nigosu, which is to be ambiguous as a means
to preserve good social relations. He mentioned that, although he felt that this “virtue”
was comfortable for Japanese, it made it difficult to understand people’s true opinions. For
Shuma, using the ready-made phrases combined with the patterns that positively
recognized the other person’s comments helped to make an atmosphere where it was both
comfortable to talk, and easier to understand people’s true feelings about a given topic.
Some students even mentioned that they wanted to use the patterns to promote
communication in Japanese. For instance, Chihiro a second-year student, stated that it wasdifficult at the beginning to use the phrases and patterns, but after using them in the class,they became natural and she started “to think that I can use this way in Japanese discussion, too. If
I say ‘I agree with you’ or ‘I can understand what you said’ before describing own idea, I can show how I
think people’s idea and give the reliefs. Therefore, I would like to use this [sic] discussion phrases inJapanese discussion.”
Explicit teaching of intercultural differences.
Another way I was able to deeply understand my Japanese learner perspective was forme to not only learn about differences between English and Japanese communication, but
to become able also to explain it in a simple way for my learners to understand.
In order to raise student awareness I began providing examples using visual aids. For
instance, I found that most students believe that English is more direct, but they do notknow why. I introduced Hall’s (1959, 1976) work on High Context and Low Context cultures.
In High Context cultures, such as Japan, the onus is more on the listener to understand.
This is in contrast to Low Context cultures such as English-speaking America, Australia,
Canada or the UK where the onus is generally on the speaker to make themselves
understood. I prepared a slide show where I explain and give examples of High Context

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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017and Low Context communication. Additionally, I used cartoons with Japanese speakers
and English speakers that visually highlight various intercultural differences that can affectcommunications. Some explicit learning points include the difference between waiting to
be asked for one’s opinion vs. proactively stating an opinion, and cultural expectations
about the way to communicate an opinion. For instance, in Japanese, it is common to say
the background first and then end with the main point. In English, the opinion comes first
and then the reasons. By understanding differences from the learner perspective rather
than simply saying “In English we do this, in this way,” I have become able to provide morecomprehensive suggestions and explanations to my students, and, in turn, they havebecome more motivated to try different models of communication.
Future Considerations
For teachers like me who are from a culture that is different from their learners, therole that we language teachers have provides an opportunity for us to view our own values
through an introspective lens whereby we can deepen our intercultural awareness. In orderto develop intercultural communicative competence in our learners, it is important for us
as educators to understand that our worldview is limited due to the assumptions that weeither consciously or unconsciously hold. We must first seek to understand our students
from their worldviews and then bridge the gap. The end result may be that our students
do not communicate in ways that we expect. However, our purpose should not be to meet
our expectations, but rather to empower our students to communicate their intentions
authentically. We can do this by being mindful of our students’ individual and culturalneeds as we foster their communicative competence. Looking forward, I would like topursue more research into learner intercultural communicative competence and develop
activities that use more authentic examples of Japanese and English. In order to raiseawareness and uncover teacher assumptions about how students from different cultures
should engage with their pedagogy, I would like to develop a practical model that educators
can use to identify intercultural concerns within their classroom. I am looking forward to
exchanging ideas with the Learner Development community about these issues in the
future.

References
Amano, I. (1999). Daigaku: chosen no jidai [Challenges to Japanese universities]. Tokyo:
University of Tokyo Press.
Anderson, L. W. (Ed.), Krathwohl, D. R. (Ed.), Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer,
R. E., Pintrich, P. R., Raths, J., & Wittrock, M. C. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching,
and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York, NY:
Longman.
Barna, L. M. (1994). Stumbling blocks in intercultural communication. Interculturalcommunication: A reader, 6, 345-353. Retrieved fromhttp://pharmacy304.pbworks.com/f/Barna,+L.M.+(1994).pdf
Hall, E. T. (1959). The silent language. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond culture. New York, NY: Anchor Press.
Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing cultures: the Hofstede model in context. Online
Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), 2-26. Retrieved fromhttp://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=orpc
Li, M. (2003). Roles, expectations, and pedagogies: Cultural influences and implications.
New Zealand Journal of Adult Learning, 31(1), 63-81.

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Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (2013). English
Education Reform Policy corresponding to Globalization. Retrieved fromhttp://www.mext.go.jp/en/news/topics/detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2014/01/23/13
43591_1.pdf
Oetzel, J., Ting-Toomey, S., Masumoto, T., Yokochi, Y., Pan, X., Takai, J., & Wilcox, R.
(2001). Face and facework in conflict: A cross-cultural comparison of China, Germany,
Japan, and the United States. Communication Monographs, 68(3), 235-258.
Saito, H., & Ebsworth, M. E. (2004). Seeing English language teaching and learning
through the eyes of Japanese EFL and ESL students. Foreign Language Annals, 37(1),111-124.
Tsui, A. (1996). Tsui, A. B. (1996). Reticence and anxiety in second language learning. In
K. M. Bailey & D. Nunan (Eds.), Voices from the language classroom: Qualitative research insecond language education (pp. 145-167). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Reader Response to “Uncovering Teacher Assumptions and Developing
Intercultural Communication through Heightened Local Culture
Sensitivity”
Maho Sano
Soka University

S

atchie discusses why intercultural understanding is substantial for bothlearners and teachers. She shares her struggles in teaching her Japanese
students communicative English and explains different changes she madeto her approach after a friend of hers said that providing more structured
speaking activities was more in line with what Japanese students expect. That
was in contrast to Satchie’s assumption that more control over students would
hamper the development of learners’ conversation skills in English. This caused
Satchie to realize that she was teaching through the lens of westerneducational values.
Reading Satchie’s article brings to mind remarks that my students’ havemade like: “My English is poor, so if I speak, that will be troublesome to myclassmates.” and “It is embarrassing to make mistakes.” I used to try to promote
more open-ended speaking activities, hoping that my students would improvetheir speaking fluency. However, my students were reluctant to speak. Fromreading Satchie’s article, I can see that I inadvertently ignored my students’cultural value of face saving. Students’ lack of linguistic knowledge was one
cause of their reluctance, but lack of knowledge resulted in reluctance rather
than in having many students talking with inaccurate English.
Reflecting on this teaching experience, I think that teachers should beaware of intercultural differences whether or not they share the same culture
with their learners and respect learners’ own culture or not. In retrospect, I feelthat I have unconsciously adopted teaching styles that are often seen as
western, even though I was educated in Japan and got used to exam-based
cramming until going to university. I came to believe that trying to speak
without being afraid of mistakes and less-controlled activities were moremeaningful. I got trapped by the “assumptions of similarities” referred to in
Satchie’s article: Our belief that people share similar values as ours.
Understanding learners’ cultural values and communication styles is essential,
but teachers should not let students stick exclusively to their own cultural values.
For example, a student may constantly refuse to disagree with someone tosave the person’s face. This communication style may work on certain
occasions, but the student will face communication troubles in another context.
Our job, in terms of intercultural awareness raising, is to encourage students togo beyond their comfort zone, and be exposed to and understand different
values and communication styles without downplaying their own culturalvalues. How to do so in terms of learner development in language education
is worth exploring.
In encouraging students to be open to different cultural values, one thing
we should keep in mind is that no student is on one end of the continuum ofWestern vs. Asian values. Learners, even from the same culture, stand on

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various points on the continuum. Therefore, the danger of ignoring individual
differences could be a risk whenever teachers categorize students into distinctgroups of “Asian” and “Western” based on stereotypical views of therespective cultures. However, culture is definitely an essential variable;
understanding and considering intercultural differences can contribute to thecreation of a learning environment where learners can prepare themselves tocommunicate successfully in authentic communication settings.

Reader Response to “Uncovering Teacher Assumptions and Developing
Intercultural Communication through Heightened Local Culture
Sensitivity”
Trevor Raichura
Himeji Dokkyo UniversityHow much do we place our own expectations about what entails a good
discussion (based on our cultural background and life experience),
instead of properly understanding how communication takes place inour students’ cultures? I could certainly relate well to the discouragement andfrustration Ms. Haga originally felt, and this short reflective article gave me
plenty to reflect upon concerning my own teaching situation and how students
in my classes communicate and discuss.
What challenges me the most about this short paper is figuring out how I can
integrate some of its ideas into my own teaching. In particular, I teach a classon debate, and as Ms. Haga suggests, using strong language to disagree withothers (let alone crushing the logic behind their arguments) is highly counterintuitive in Japan. Is it possible (and desirable) to have students preface theirrebuttals with words of affirmation? Is it acceptable to reject the conventionsof debate, which encourage contention? I suppose an initial answer to thesequestions would need to be fleshed out by looking at the course outcomes
more closely, and perhaps giving them an overhaul. In the end, the skills thatlearners develop in the course should match their perceived future needs. In
what cultural context will they need to develop arguments? What kind of
disagreements and counterarguments can they expect to hear? Do they feelthey will need to be able to affirm other people’s opinions before offering theirown (preserving “other-face”), or will they need to make their own arguments
clear, convincing and superior to others’ arguments (“self-face”)?
As I thought through these questions, I couldn’t help but wonder how
practical it is try and help students develop a more informed understanding ofcommunication in “English cultures.” With the global expansion of English
education, is it even true that interaction in English globally can be restricted
to low context culture norms? Perhaps English communication in countries like
Singapore or India is more “high context,” making it more similar to Japanesecommunication than one might think. For that matter, as Japanese English
begins to emerge as a legitimate form of the language, perhaps high context

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communication in English will also become a valuable tool for students toacquire.
Speaking of Japanese English, the increased adoption of English into
Japanese society will hopefully give more and more people in Japan a greater
sense of ownership of the language still referred to as “foreign.” The general
attitude towards English that I often encounter in Japan is that “it is spoken bypeople in other countries, but is completely unnecessary for everyday life inJapan.” On one hand, there is merit to this viewpoint. Most Japanese people
conduct their business and social lives without ever having to speak a word ofEnglish. Besides that, the foreign population (the majority of which is Chineseand Korean) is still under 2% of the whole. International business can be eitherdelegated to the few who speak English, or assisted by professional interpreters.
However, this attitude towards English may not always be the norm—especiallyin light of the Ministry of Education’s endeavors to increase the number of“Super Global Schools” (which will ideally enable more Japanese people toplay active roles in the world, presumably in English). It may take years or evengenerations to see a marked difference in the overall attitude towards English
in Japan. However, should English become a greater part of the Japanese
identity, communication may stylistically come to resemble Japanese, while
linguistically patterning itself after western norms of communicating in English.
In other words, Japanese English may follow the grammatical rules of western
English, but use a more roundabout way of expressing opinions, such as leaving
the onus on the listener to understand the speaker’s feelings. It will beinteresting to see how perceptions of the importance of English evolve in Japan,
and how those involved in language education adapt to the newly evolving
practices in English use. I am also interested to see how learners develop
communication practices that sit somewhere on the spectrum between
traditional western and traditional Japanese communication styles.
Reading Satchie’s article, reflecting on it, and writing this reader response
have helped me to recognize the importance (and responsibility I have) ofbetter understanding my students’ worldviews, cultures, experiences, andperceived future needs, and to better meet my students in their contexts of use.
As a result, I am trying new ways of making open-ended communication
activities meaningful for my students, and I also hope to integrate some ofthese ideas into the overall structure of my debate class in the coming months.

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Raising Autonomy by Negotiating Rules with Students: An
Exploratory Discussion about Action Research into Learner
Development and Autonomy
ルールの話し合いで学生の自主性を高める:
学習者ディベロプメントおよび自律学習に関するアクションリサーチについての探索的考察

Tokiko Hori

Andrew D. Tweed

堀登 起子

アンドリュー・トゥイード

Soka University
Email: thori@soka.ac.jp

Meijo University
Email: adtweed@gmail.com

Andrew Tweed: Tokiko, how about if we begin by explaining how we each became
interested in action research?
Tokiko Hori: I’d heard about the term “action research” (AR) sometimes; however, I
did not have any specific knowledge about it until I attended a faculty development forum
at Soka University in which Anne Burns shared her experiences with her career as an AR
professional. (She was a visiting professor at my university and was teaching TESOL
students at that time.) I was fascinated by the stories of teachers who conducted AR,
improved their teaching skills, and got a lot of fruit from that. When Anne suggested trying
a project at the end of her lecture, I put up my hand. As a novice teacher, I promised
myself to try every opportunity to develop myself as an educator/researcher as much as
possible. I did not have any knowledge about AR (sorry to admit this), and I had neverread Anne’s books beforehand and really was not sure what it would be like.
At the time I had several challenges with classroom teaching and management,
especially managing a classroom of 25 freshmen with mixed motivation and English
proficiency levels. So it was easy to decide where I would take action and conduct research.
Andrew: You are very fortunate to be able to learn and get support from Anne Burns.
I led some workshops on this topic with a group of teacher trainers in Cambodia, and weused Anne’s book (Burns, 2010) on Action Research (AR). When I met Anne a couple ofyears later she said that she had wanted to write the book in a way that made it easy forteachers new to AR to try it out.
I think it was a good decision to employ AR in your situation. While teaching a groupwith varying levels of motivation and English language proficiency is a common issue, inthis case, using AR would help you to understand the differences in your particular group.
Two of the trainers I worked with in Cambodia were concerned with a similar issue—thisis briefly discussed in a chapter I wrote about AR (Tweed, 2014). They taught large classesof over 50 students, their students had very different levels of English, and some of them
participated much more than others. The question that they explored was how they could
get students to speak more in their classes. What was the particular question that you asked
in your AR, Tokiko?

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Tokiko: My questions were related to my classroom rules. The course was a mandatory
English class for freshmen, twice a week. Students were allocated to the class based on
their TOEIC scores and supposed to be in the same class during Spring and Fall semesters.
My university surveys students about courses at the end of each semester, and as areflection on the results of the Spring semester questionnaire, I decided to introduce threerules in the Fall semester classroom. However, I was not sure whether those rules werereally good for my students, because they did not seem to work well. In particular, the rule
about “unnecessary smartphone usage” had not worked as I expected. So I wondered what
I should do with those rules to improve the learning environment.
We, AR project members, were in Anne’s office brainstorming what we could do for
our AR attempts. I admitted my concerns about classroom rules, and Anne suggested
involving the students in solving these problems. I was very lucky to have such helpfuladvice from her, and I decided to negotiate about the existing classroom rules with mystudents.
The first step I took was to allocate 30 minutes of class time for this negotiation. I
started by explaining that those rules resulted from reflection to their responses to thesemester-end questionnaire. I told my students that university students have more freedom
and responsibility for their own learning, just as they have rights of voting and marriage
because they are already regarded as adults. Discussion took place in small groups of threeor four, which were randomly assigned. After 10 minutes, each group shared theiropinions. Surprisingly, their responses were basically the same. There was more variety ofopinions when they were discussing in groups, but no one disagreed or asked for any
change to those rules. I wondered whether this was because of peer pressure or the wellknown Japanese cultural norm of group-oriented behavior. At the time, I thought that thisnegotiation had failed, since there were no changes and no critical or creative opinions,which I had expected to hear from my students.
Andrew: It sounds like you got started off in a good direction. One of the key pointsof AR is to select a problem, issue, or puzzle that you would like to explore for the purposesof making some positive change. I like the idea of involving students in discussing issues.
Sometimes just letting them know that there is an issue can make a difference, as students
and teachers focus on different things and have different perspectives on learning when
they come together in a classroom. Having these discussions with students can raise theirawareness of issues they had not previously considered. In your case, however, the students
did not suggest any new ideas. That must have been frustrating. I’m curious about the threerules that you mention. What were these three rules and why did you decide to focus on
them?
Tokiko: The first rule was allowing students to sleep in classroom. There were 30-45
minutes of free reading and/or watching time almost every class. Especially when thelesson was conducted in the CALL room once in a week, students were to choose materials
by themselves. Books with CDs and some DVD titles were provided, and they were also
allowed to watch YouTube videos. We call this “free reading” and “free watching.” Since thisinvolved independent activity, some students fell asleep or struggled not to sleep. I know
many teachers hate students sleeping in the classroom, but I believe people need so-called“power nap” sometimes, and set up this rule. The second and third rules were purely inresponse to my students’ comments. A couple of students were upset that a few students
were checking SNSs or web comics on their smartphones in the classroom. Those kindsof behaviors distracted other students, so the second rule addressed that. The third rulefocused on students going out of the classroom during the lesson. The three rules that we
agreed on are shown in Figure 1.

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Andrew: I think it is interesting that you and your class agreed on these rules. While
there are also classroom rules that might be related to academics (e.g., percentage of L1 vs.
L2 spoken during class; homework lateness policies, etc.), these rules are related to
students’ individual rights in the classroom. I imagine that the students felt that they wererespected and treated like adults because you involved them in making these rules andallowed some flexibility.
Figure 1. Negotiated Rules
Sleeping in class:
You are allowed to sleep 15 – 30 mins in class.
Your partner should set the timer for 15 mins and then wake you up. Sleeping more than
30 mins = absent.
Unnecessary smartphone / cell phone usage:
If you are spotted unnecessarily using your smartphone for things like LINE or games
during class, it will be counted as 1 out.
2 outs = 1 absence.
* You may use your smartphone if you ask the instructor first, or if the instructor indicatesyou should use it.
Leaving the classroom:
You may leave the classroom to go to the toilet if you ask the teacher before you leave theclassroom. However, 30 mins or more out from classroom is regarded as an absence.

Now I’m wondering what you did next. Anne Burns and others talk about the cycle ofAR, and that this cycle does not always move in one direction. Sometimes things do not
go as planned so we have to go backwards. What did you do when your students didn’t
give you any new ideas regarding these three rules?
Tokiko: That’s so true. When people notice that there is a problem, it raises theirawareness of the issue and sometimes solves the problems. According to my memo fromAnne’s lecture, I understand that there are four phases in AR: Plan, Act, Observe, and Reflect.
Once I had taken action, I didn’t do anything about that. Instead, I observed students’behavior with a slight hope of it changing.
About two weeks passed, and I was wondering why students in that particular classstarted to submit their homework much more than students in another class. Regarding
the classroom rules, I could see that their awareness of those rules had grown slightly andthat their behavior had changed a little—but not so much. However, I was surprised tosee more and more students in that class starting to submit homework regularly, especiallyfor the vocabulary development project, which was due by the end of semester. That
project consisted of five worksheets of word lists that students should learn and master attheir own pace. In contrast, regarding the other class (who were also freshmen, had thesame proficiency level, but were from a different faculty), their attitude during class time
was always good, but few students had submitted their vocabulary worksheets. It is
important to point out that I had not negotiated any classroom rules with this other group.
This made me wonder whether there might be a connection between negotiating rules
and the increased submission rate. I hypothesized that negotiating rules raised students’ownership of the class. Accordingly, the sense of ownership resulted in an increase in theSpecial Issue: Reflective Writing on Learner Development

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students’ autonomy. In the end, I found an article that helped me to understand thissituation. Stefanou, Perencevich, Dicintio & Turner (2004) propose three types ofautonomy support:● organizational autonomy support● procedural autonomy support● cognitive autonomy support,
and argue that varying combinations of those autonomy supports lead to different
classroom outcomes. In my case, it seemed that, by negotiating rules with students, theclass had become high in organizational autonomy support. Both of my classes werealready high in both procedural autonomy support and cognitive autonomy support, so
the difference between the two classes could, from this point of view, be attributed to thelevel of organizational autonomy support.
Andrew: I agree with you that these rules are related to organizational autonomy, but I
still have some questions. What is the relationship between these changes in organizational
autonomy and the changes in the students handing in the vocabulary homework? Do you
have any data which points to a link between these two changes?
Tokiko: Before explaining my understanding about these changes, let me introduce
those three categories of autonomy support and associated strategies by Stefanou et al.
(2004):
Table 1. Strategies Associated with Different Features of Autonomy Support(Stefanou et al., 2004)
Organizational Autonomy Support

Procedural Autonomy Support

Cognitive Autonomy Support

Students are given opportunities
to:● choose group members● choose evaluation procedure● take responsibility of due dates
for assignments● participate in creating andimplementing classroom rules● choose seating arrangement

Students are given opportunities
to:● choose materials to use in classprojects● choose the way competence
will be demonstrated● display work in an individual
manner● discuss their wants● handle materials

Students are given opportunities
to:● discuss multiple approaches
and strategies● find multiple solutions toproblems● justify solutions for the
purpose of sharing expertise● have ample time for decision
making● be
independentproblemsolvers with scaffolding● re-evaluate errors● receive informational feedback● formulate personal goals or
realign task to correspond withinterest● debate ideas feely● have less teacher talk time;
more teacher listening time
● ask questions

According to the table, participating in creating and implementing classroom rules isunder organizational autonomy support as I mentioned above. Likewise, my classes

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included procedural and cognitive support such as choosing the way of demonstratingcompetence and receiving cognitive autonomy support. For example, during “free reading”
and “free watching” time, students made notes in a “study report” about what they learned
from the material they chose.
As their teacher, I encouraged students to write down their reflections, including
difficult words or phrases, and questions or opinions about the contents and/or language.
Students were allowed to write both in English and Japanese. English was recommended
but not forced. So some students wrote totally in English, but other students preferred towrite in Japanese. Some even drew pictures to illustrate what they learned from the books
she read. At the end of the activity, students shared their study reports with each other.
Later, students received my comments on their reports as well as responses to theirquestions. However, in most cases, those responses were useful information or strategies
to find the answers by themselves, which could be regarded as a form of “cognitive autonomy”
support.
To come back to your question, Andrew, in terms of actual data, I don’t have specificnumbers now. However, more than half of the students of that particular class handed in
vocabulary homework while only a few students in the other class did when I noticed thedifferences between the two groups. As I explained already, both of my classes had a lotof procedural and cognitive autonomy support. The only difference was the negotiation ofrules (in other words, additional organizational autonomy support for one group). As aconsequence, I hypothesized those increases in handing-in rate were connected to raising
their autonomy, but I was not sure.
This also led me to reflect on my personal beliefs about language learning andteaching. After 10 years of working professionally as a freelance translator, I really knew
well that grammar-translation methods have limitations with regard to language
acquisition. I first came across extensive reading about seven years ago, and experienced
language acquisition with minimal L1 support. That experience increased my interest in
implicit language learning (i.e., extensive reading/listening, and casual speaking/writing),
so I conducted some research on longitudinal implicit language learning of adult learners.
My teaching beliefs are also rooted in value-creating (創価=soka) education, which myuniversity is named after (Makiguchi, 1972). Value-creating pedagogy argues that the“happiness” of students is the purpose of education, and that the meaning of student
happiness is the capacity to develop oneself and contribute to society by creating “values”(Ikeda, 1996).
Based on those beliefs, I designed the course to guide students to be users of English
rather than learners of English—especially a user of English who can contribute to others
using English as a tool of communication. So, I put greater emphasis on students’ active
learning and fluency development. For example, students engaged in quick writing (for fiveminutes, because they were basic level) for fluency development. Speaking practice starts
from preparing to express their own opinions or information to lower their affective filter
and to personalize their learning as much as possible. On the other hand, the textbook wasused for language-focused learning, especially when grammatical items were explained. To
practice those grammatical items, students were engaged in various games, pair work, andgroup activities, which is common in active learning classroom. Furthermore, I gave
“Express Yourself to the World” as the theme of their final projects. For this project students
were to find the way to connect themselves to the world by using English as acommunication tool. I prepared two online platforms (a class blog and YouTube channel)
for them to present their projects, allowing them to use other ways too if they wanted to.

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So one student made a beautiful pamphlet of Japanese castles for international students,
and another student made a picture book for kindergarten children.
Andrew: Your students were very lucky to have you as their teacher! What you
describe is a very interesting approach towards conducting an English course. Fukuda andcolleagues (Fukuda, Sakata, & Takeuchi, 2011; Fukuda, Sakata, & Pope, 2015) took asimilar approach. They argued that many Japanese university students have been made tolearn English, for example, to pass tests, and have lost interest and motivation to learn. In
response to this issue, as well as in recognition of the belief that a focus on autonomy
promotes lifelong learning, they decided to create a course in which the students have thefreedom to set their own goals, plan what they would do, select their own learning activities
and materials, and evaluate their own learning. And just like with your class, this was still arequired class. In addition to promoting self-directed learning, the instructors actively
supported students’ needs, in terms of autonomy, relatedness, and competence, which are
the three needs emphasized by Ryan and Deci (2000) to help students become selfdetermined, or, motivated. Fukuda and colleagues did not measure gains in language
proficiency, but they did measure students’ changes in motivation by employing validated
questionnaires measuring levels of “amotivation,” “extrinsic motivation,” and “intrinsic
motivation.” They reported a general trend of students moving in the direction of intrinsic
motivation.
To return to your AR project, let me see if I understand the outcome and yourconclusion. You negotiated rules with one class. By involving your students in making
these rules, which were about going out of the class, sleeping in class, and smartphone use,the class had more organizational autonomy. After these rules were agreed on, you noticed achange, which was that students were taking more responsibility for turning in their
vocabulary worksheets. The task of students doing their vocabulary worksheets can beclassified as both procedural and organizational autonomy. You also noticed an increase in
students doing more extensive reading and joining which could be labeled under proceduralautonomy. While another class you were teaching was a good class, you did not negotiateclassroom rules with them, and you did not notice the same kind of changes in their
behaviors. As a result of your observations, you hypothesize that by negotiating rules withstudents, which is classified as organizational autonomy, these students began to exhibit
greater autonomy, which is associated with procedural autonomy. Does this sound accurate toyou?
Tokiko: Yes, I think you articulated all the points I discussed above. And the workof Fukuda et al. (2011, 2015) has given me other insights to improve my teaching. Thankyou, Andrew.
Andrew: I don’t think it is a leap to say that one kind of autonomy can influenceanother kind of autonomy. Going back to self-determination theory, Ryan and Deci (2000)
claim that autonomy-supportive teaching can lead to more internalized forms of
motivation. Considering that perspective on your findings, it is possible that yourautonomy-supportive teaching was motivating for the students, and that this motivation
led them to be more proactive and take more responsibility for their own learning.
I’m glad that we have had the opportunity to have this discussion about AR as I am
also interested in interventions related to learner autonomy. I currently work as a learning
advisor in a university self-access center. In this work environment, self-directed learningis the norm. However, one of our key challenges is to provide the appropriate amount ofstructure and support for the students while the learner still remains in control of thelearning process. Another concern of mine, which many EFL educators in Japan share, is
how to increase student motivation, which is so important for students learning in self-

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Volume 24 Issue 2 Summer 2017

access centers. I would like to undertake AR that explores alternative ways of offering
structure and support to students in self-access centers as well as new methods forincreasing student motivation.
How about you, Tokiko? Do you have any plans to for any future AR projects?
Tokiko: As you mentioned, balancing structure and support while allowing students
to take responsibility for their learning is very challenging. Now I have all data from thoseclasses and noticed the gap between the lowest and highest scores of TOEIC is muchbigger in the class where I negotiated the three rules. Even though more than 20% of thestudents in both classes increased TOEIC scores by around 100 points, the scores ofseveral students in that particular class noticeably dropped. Why did this happen?
According to Stefanou (2004), the combination of “low in organizational autonomy support”
with “high in procedural and cognitive autonomy support” leads to the best performance outcomes.
I am therefore planning to re-design the course next academic year with better structure,and more powerful procedural autonomy support and cognitive autonomy support todecrease the gap. So, my new question at this point is “How can I decrease the gap among
students’ performance outcomes by constructing well-organized, but flexible and individualized language
learning in and outside of the classroom?”

References
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Fukuda, S. T., Sakata, H., & Takeuchi, M. (2011). Facilitating autonomy to enhance
motivation: Examining the effects of a guided-autonomy syllabus. Electronic Journal of
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8(1),71–86.
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http://eflt.nus.edu.sg/v8n12011/fukuda.pdf
Fukuda, S. T., Sakata, H., & Pope, C. J. (2015). The GAS that fuels motivation: Satisfying
the need for relatedness in the guided-autonomy syllabus. Electronic Journal of Foreign
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Ryan, R., & Deci, E. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic
motivation, social development, and well-being. The American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.
Stefanou, C. R., Perencevich, K. C., DiCintio, M., & Turner, J. C. (2004). Supporting
autonomy in the classroom: Ways teachers encourage student decision making andownership. Educational Psychologist, 39(2), 97-110.
Tweed, A. (2014). Getting started with action research: An introduction for teachersinterested in investigating classroom issues. In E. Doman (Ed.), Insight into EFL teaching
and issues in Asia (pp. 9-19). Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars
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