Since the advent of Communicative Language Teaching methodology, many highly effective language learning techniques and promising avenues of research have been abandoned on the grounds that they were not sufficiently ‘communicative’ or ‘authentic’. These include things that many successful language learners swear by, such as rote learning, memorization, substitution, drilling, grammar-translation, and error analysis. Despite this ‘progress’, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Japanese students learn any more English now than their parents did – and many people believe that the opposite is true. In this presentation, I will introduce a new range of materials, which follow a ‘back-to-basics’ approach focused on what actually works for Japanese learners, and discuss the principles and research evidence on which they are based.
The annual bonenkai will follow the meeting.
