In spite of an increase in educational and in-company programmes, Japan is among the four countries (together with China, Russia and South Korea), where employers notice the highest gap between English skills required in the workplace and those available. What support could the CEFR Companion Volume (2018) and the use of BELF offer? Many consider these two topics as an enormous shift of paradigm for all the stakeholders involved. Some even think that the use of BELF is also an Anglo-western threat to Japanese norms of communication. Katrin Lichterfeld will provide you with a kind of BELF toolbox to bridge the gap between theory and practice in this webinar. How could you deal with a societal need for global English and a lack of exposure to English in the daily lives of your Japanese learners? What activities could raise your learner’s BELF awareness to combine their linguistic repertoire with intercultural communicative competence? This is a joint event of JALT BizCom and JALT CEFR & LP SIG.
