ELT in Japan (ELT-J)

Teaching English /r/ and /l/ to Asian EFL learners: a lexical approach Part I Charles Jannuzi University of Fukui, Japan Introduction English /r/, /l/ and contrasts between these two categories of sounds are often cited as pronunciation and listening perception problems for a variety of EFL learners, most from E. Asia. The language backgrounds most often associated with these problems are Japanese, Korean, Chinese and some languages of SE Asia (e.g. Thai but also Cantonese Chinese). Other language speakers have also expressed an interest in improving their pronunciation of English /r/ and /l/, including Russian and German EFL learners.  Perhaps the most well-known group to have a problem with the two categories of sounds is Japanese EFL learners. This could be because their native language background creates the most difficult problems to overcome. It could also be because Japan attained affluence before most of the rest of Asia and hired native speakers of English to he...

Basics of Vocabulary Study in TOEIC Practice Class Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan Introduction Teaching and studying vocabulary are a major part of EFL classes. However, are we helping students to acquire a broad, deep and nuanced lexicon? Many TOEIC practice textbooks on the market here in Japan include a vocabulary section. Usually this is presented as a pre-reading or pre-listening task. Often it is a list of key words taken from the reading or listening exercises of a given unit. And the units are often 'themed': food and drink, shopping, at the airport, recreation, etc. So the themes and the TOEIC practice texts 'select' the vocabulary. Also, textbook writers like to stick with the most frequent vocabulary of English because they know the TOEIC test writers do. The vocabulary pre-reading or pre-listening tasks most preferred here in Japan are (1) the bilingual word list (i.e., a list of English words requiring translation into Japanese) and (2) ...

Here is a slight revision of an earlier piece.  Why is 'research' in ELT/TEFL/TESOL/AL/SLA so irrelevant? Glossary of terms for those who are not familiar with this field: AL=Applied Linguistics (most usually the application of some version of linguistics to second or foreign language teaching and learning) ELT=English Language Teaching FL=Foreign Language FLT=Foreign Language Teaching LL=Language Learning SLA=Second Language Acquisition TEFL=Teaching English as a Foreign Language TESOL=Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Why is 'research' in ELT/TEFL/TESOL/AL/SLA so irrelevant? by Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan While most of the research in support of and about ELT is produced in academia, most actual language teaching and language learning are done outside academia. Even when FLs get taught at universities, the people who often end up with the teaching duties are not in the sort of university posts that are meant for resea...

Why don't text-to-'speech' programs process IPA or other such phonemic, phonetic or phonological scripts? Charles Jannuzi University of Fukui, Japan What language would such a program put out? Text-to-speech/spoken language programs basically work on the principle of recognizing whole words in a language (based on their relatively unique spellings and the spaces in between each word) and matching them up with the recordings of pronounced whole words. The misconception here is that, when we speak,  we somehow 'generate' phonemes or allophones and these are strung together into something that adds up to 'real speech'. There is no phonemic or allophonic model of a  language that can do that--which is why speech recognition programs work only if  you train them and bark simple words and phrases at them. Even the most algorithmically powerful ones depend on you speaking to them not in sense or  breath groups of fluent speech but in a greatly slowed down ...

The Japan Center for Economic Research ( JCER ) has published a report about how two new 'new economy' companies in Japan, Uniqlo (casual clothing similar to the Gap) and Rakuten (a web-based 'shopping mall'), are making English the official language of their company. These bold, controversial decisions come about mostly because their executives see overseas markets as the key to future growth. Moreover, Uniqlo is a retailer centered in Japan, but its clothing and accessories are almost entirely manufactured overseas, in China. Japan, with its low birth rate and aging society, has actually started to record decreases in population. Although the economy has been alternating between government-subsidized low growth and stagnation for the better part of two decades, Uniqlo and Rakuten have both experienced rapid (if at times uneven) growth. Long before this, Sony Corporation , an OLD 'new economy' company (they still relied on hardware manufacturing for most...

Ten reasons why English learning in Japan fails Ten reasons why English learning in Japan fails (as .pdf download)