Bio
Rintaro Sato
Rintaro Sato is an associate professor in the Department of English Education at Nara University of Education. His research interests include intake and output processing, feedback and negotiation of meaning. Before he came to Nara , he taught English in public high schools in Hokkaido for over 15 years. It’s very difficult for him to stop playing rugby( though he is not young ). Email: rintaro@nara-edu.ac.jp
Summary
Title: English teaching in the Japanese EFL Environment. How Efficacious?
In the presentation I discuss how English can effectively be taught in the Japanese EFL (English as a foreign language) context. In this environment, learners do not often have an actual need for communication in English. It is rare for them to have exposure to English; Rather, English is taught as a knowledge-based subject; Some students study it for tests or entrance exams. Thus I believe teachers should create teaching approaches for this input scarce in EFL situations. In learning English, the utilization of tasks has been gaining a high profile recently, and the long-established traditional teaching methodology based on the Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) model is now being replaced by Task-Based Language Learning (TBL) in SLA. (Skehan, 1998). However, in the Japanese EFL learning environment, we might be skeptical of the effectiveness of TBL in grammar teaching. In the presentation, the suitability of TBL and PPP in the Japanese school context and the effectiveness of PPP from the point of view of skill acquisition theory will be discussed. I also discuss effective teaching from other aspects.
