This book examines the perspectives and experiences of student teachers who are in the process of becoming secondary school English teachers in Japan. It reports on the trainee teachers' attitudes towards theory and practice in their professional development. Through a discussion of what professional expertise should look like in this context, the…

This report describes a workshop on the Dynamics of Machinery based on the fabrication of a gyro- bicycle in a summer school program for junior high school students. The workshop was conducted by engineering students who had completed "Creative Research", an engineering design course at the National Institute of Technology, Okinawa…

Over the decades, efforts have been made to incorporate diverse perspectives on World Englishes into English Language Teaching (ELT) practice and teaching materials. To date, the majority of ELT learners and teachers have not yet been exposed to materials which use and explore non-standard forms of English. This paper examines the attitudes of…

The use of humor in EFL across the world has been widely discussed as an effective way to create a more comfortable, productive classroom environment in language learning. However, student-perceived benefits of both teacher and student-produced humor in the more specific context of a Japanese language classroom have not been explored in any great…

Japanese college students (N = 18) aspiring to become English teachers in junior or senior high schools studied several examples of educational games and created their own English games as an assignment during the last two weeks of an educational psychology course. Results indicated (1) a significant increase between pre- and post-…

This essay is about the experiences, feelings, and thoughts of a Japanese teacher before and after an article appeared in a nationwide newspaper, "Asahi Shinbun". Here he discusses the reactions of administrators and students as well as his efforts in working with students in writing and producing a play about a lesbian high school…

This article explores the behavioural strategies adopted by a sample of teachers in Japan. The data for the study came from a total of 298 Japanese students who were invited to evaluate teacher behaviour by using the Student's Teacher Evaluation Questionnaire. The sixteen-item questionnaire was adopted from Paisey (1975), who had conducted similar…

What would you expect the differences to be between Japan and England in how pupils learn history in the post-14 phase? Perhaps your guess would be: Japanese school students learn a lot of historical facts and focus upon their own identity and English school students talk a lot more in lessons and are more concerned with justifying opinions using…

These two journal issues include the following articles: "Assistant Foreign Language Teachers in Japanese High Schools: Focus on the Hosting of Japanese Teachers" (Great Gorsuch); "Communicative Language Teaching (Organizational Effectiveness of Upper Secondary School English Language Departments and Their Commitment toward…