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This year marks the 7th biennial College and University Educators (CUE) event uniting researchers and practitioners who are involved in tertiary education in Japan. This all-poster event focuses on English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which encompasses teaching English for any specific profession or academic discipline, including business, medicine, nursing, law, among many others.
Important Announcements
Please go to Building C (where the Plenary will be held) to check-in and receive your badges.
The location of the pre-symposium roundtable and symposium has been changed! The new building where the symposium will be held is Student Center B and C.
(By September 20th)
JALT Members - 1,500 yenNon-JALT Members - 2,000 yen
Senior Citizens and Students - 500 yen
(On September 21st, for those who did NOT register first in Indico.)
JALT Members - 2,000 yen
Non-JALT Members - 3,000 yen
Senior Citizens and Student - 1,000 yen
This is the first plenary session for the 7th CUE ESP Symposium which is co-sponsored with Iwate-Aomori Chapter.
Morning poster presentations
Poster Summary
Medical Vocabulary and terminology can be difficult for medical students. When working in a hospital, it might be difficult to understand what each department or ward is about. To assist students with these problems, a game was created by the author to help students and learn about different parts of the hospital. This poster presentation will go over the lesson plan, and the game itself. Students can learn vocabulary in a fun, gamified way.
Extended Summary
Gamification has played a role in assisting educators in higher education with language teaching. Creating games for use in the classrooms has helped improve motivation and engagement in students. (Ivanjko, et al., 2020) Games are fun and helps educators in making lessons fun and enjoyable for the students. It is used in various genres such as information and communication technology, healthcare, marketing, education, and business. (Husseinovic, 2023) gamifying medical vocabulary is the basis of this presenter’s lesson plan. Medical Vocabulary and terminology can be difficult for medical students. When working in a hospital, it might be difficult to understand what each department or ward is about. To assist students with these problems, a game was created by the author to help students and learn about different parts of the hospital. This poster presentation will go over the lesson plan, and the game itself. The name of the game is English Simulation Hospital. Students can learn vocabulary in a fun, gamified way. It is hoped this can be used in the classroom to assist learning vocabulary.
In this poster, a method for teaching vocabulary where students create their own vocabulary tests is explored. Previous research by Owens and Reed (2017) laid the theoretical foundation for this approach. Other recent studies, such as Patterson (2016), suggest that involving students in the test-creation process enhances motivation and possibly word retention. Additionally, recently developed digital tools and game-based learning software, like Kahoot, facilitate greater student interaction.
The emphasis here is on academic vocabulary (specifically from the NAWL), as it is deemed relevant to students' needs, i.e. students need to pass tests (TOEIC, TOEFK) compulsory for their study and/or finding work in Japan, and also for study abroad (IELTS), as well as academic writing in their subsequent undergraduate studies.
The poster will demonstrate the selection and justification of vocabulary, the variety of test questions designed to deepen word knowledge (Nation, 2013), the rationale behind having students create the tests, and student feedback on this method, both in terms of how much they enjoyed the process and the extent to which they felt it was effective.
The poster presentation aims to provide a useful example for educators seeking innovative, student-centred, and effective strategies for vocabulary teaching.
The research presented in the poster aimed to evaluate five university-level EAP courses in an Indonesia institution, focusing on what cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements constraining and/or enabling the successful practices of EAP teaching and learning in the institution, using the framework of Practice Architectures (Kemmis, 2019), through thematic analyses on the data in the form of documents and interview transcripts with five lecturers of the courses.
This poster presentation shows the process of making a textbook for inbound tourism. The local people around the international cruise ship terminal in Shimizu struggle with English needed for visiting passengers and crews. To solve this problem, seventy-six Tokai University students interviewed local people at the terminal and analyzed and categorized their needs. The textbook is the result and is especially unique due to the large number of students involved in its creation.
As problem solving is an integral part of many professional and academic fields, “problem-solution” is a commonly taught rhetorical structure in English for academic purposes courses (Sarangi & Roberts, 1999). However, textbooks that feature problem-solution often neglect to provide a systematic account of the core vocabulary and how it is used (e.g. Koester et al., 2012, Swales & Feak, 2004). This presentation applies a novel approach drawing on the works of Lakoff and Johnson, applying their theory of conceptual metaphors to transparently explicate the metaphorical logic behind problem vocabulary. It also draws on Weirzbicka’s (1988) related work on the semantics of grammar to explain features which are often dismissed as arbitrary, such as preposition usage. The analysis reveals three major categories of vocabulary items used to describe problems in academic texts in economics and engineering, lacks, barriers, and constraints. It then continues the analysis to reveal how commonly collocated “solution” vocabulary logically fits into each category. The presentation ends by describing activities to reinforce the vocabulary items, their grammar, and collocations, and proposes other categories for further investigation.
Vocabulary knowledge is a strong predictor of reading proficiency (Dong, 2020), and morphological knowledge, including affixes, is particularly critical in English for the pharmaceutical sciences because a significant portion of medical terminology is derived from Greek and Latin, especially because their L1 is Japanese, which poses a handicap to mastering medical terminology because many terms are derived from Greek and Latin (Horst, Cobb, & Nicolae, 2005).
Library practices in schools exert significant influence on students’ learning attitude and behavior. This paper explores the existing situation of library practices in community and institutional schools of Nepal. Despite a number of options to educate students in school from library-use, library provision and its existing practices in community and institutional schools in Nepal are still unsearched. In context students study only during the time of their class, assignment and examination preparation, how the schools make use of library for the promotion of students’ learning is the main concern of the study. Information for the study was collected from fieldnotes and lived experiences of eight participants: one teacher and one student from each of four schools: two institutional and two community. The study found that teachers in community schools occasionally visit the library and rarely encourage their students to benefit from the library. However, some students were found to borrow books from the library. As students in institutional schools have library period once a week, they enjoy reading books or doing something in the library. Overall library practice in Nepal lacks adequate proficiency in management, administration, and provision of study materials; and ultimately has not motivated students’ hearty participation.
This poster explores the use of AI-driven feedback tools in university writing classrooms to enhance dialogical writing skills. It highlights how AWE can complement traditional methods by providing immediate insights into writing. Recent studies point to the potential of AI-powered AWE to help students improve writing in terms of content, organization, and logic. A step-by-step guide demonstrates how to create an activity for continuous, personalized feedback by using MyGPTs (OpenAI) and Claude Projects (Anthropic).
As international business becomes inevitable, Japanese professionals face challenges due to limited foreign language skills. However, they are left to self-learn these skills, because of reduced funding for overall employee empowerment since 2009. I present some of the challenges and struggles faced by working adults who self-learn business English skills, drawing on data from my case study, the Institute for International Business Communication, and the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.
Innovative material development specifically for medical university students in ESP courses will be presented on this poster. It emphasizes developing interesting and useful learning activities that meet the particular language requirements of medical students, thereby improving their academic and professional communication abilities.
Email Address: Rachel.Patterson@ilscedu.com
Name: Rachel Patterson
Affiliation: Kindai University
Poster Title: Enhancing Students' Spoken English for Study Abroad through Teacher-Created Dialogs
Poster Summary: This poster explores a collection of teacher-created dialogues designed to propel university students towards fluency in everyday North American English. Tailored specifically for pre-departure a study abroad program, these dialogues go beyond basic textbook examples, focusing on more natural-sounding speech acts.
Extended Abstract: Students often know the model conversations in their textbooks are somewhat inauthentic and thus less interesting. Teachers may ask students to write their own dialogs, resulting in several awkward or strange phrases and stiff unnatural interactions. Even dialogs created using AI tools has several limitations. This poster explores the process and collection of teacher-created, more authentic dialogues designed to propel university students towards fluency in everyday North American English. Tailored specifically for pre-departure a study abroad program, these dialogues go beyond basic textbook examples, focusing on more natural-sounding speech acts. Students hone essential communication skills like making small talk, requesting politely, apologizing effectively, and sharing news in a way that is sounds like North American English speakers. The methodology used in this approach engages students, provides meaningful input and practice which then prepares learners for graded role plays and, ultimately, the real-world interactions they'll encounter during their experience abroad.
Presenter Bio: Rachel Patterson is an EFL teacher at the Kindai University Faculty of International Studies. She works with the Global Studies program which prepares students for semester-long study-abroad program. She has extensive experience in creating and implementing authentic language learning resources aimed at improving students' communicative skills and cultural knowledge.
When introducing tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) into the university EFL class, scaffolding is often needed. This paper discusses the use of a closed-style “choose your own adventure” story game to help students transition into a more typical open-style TRPG. Students start by making simple binary decisions with prescribed results, then discuss alternative actions their character could have taken that are not prescribed for them in the story. This bridging step helps students build the agency needed for more typical TRPGs.
This poster presentation will (1) explain the differences between the ESP genre approach and the rhetorical genre approach (RGS), (2) point out potential pitfalls of a solely ESP genre-based approach, (3) provide the major tenets of the RGS, (3) highlight particularly relevant concepts for teaching research genres to graduate students in their disciplines, and (4) suggest ways to strengthen an ESP genre-based curriculum by infusing some ideas form RGS.
This poster presents a guide to specialized mini-corpus building for EFL science and engineering students at a Japanese university. Students collect online language samples to create a specialized mini-corpus focused on a shared research topic, such as environmental sustainability. Together, the teacher and students unanimously decide which words or phrases to investigate, then use the mini-corpus to examine the data together
This poster investigates effective teaching of genre-based reading and writing courses in universities courses and its impact on student empowerment.
The Foundational Literacies course exposes students to a variety of genres, all of which will be important in their future lives, such as information reports, academic essays, emails (especially formal emails to teachers/future employers), narratives, and procedural Texts (tour guides, recipes…etc).
This poster examines Johns (2008)'s differentiation between 'genre acquisition' (where the focus is on students' ability to replicate a type of text, often using a template, in a structured and predictable manner) and 'genre awareness' (which cultivates the rhetorical adaptability needed for continually changing contexts), noting a strong current emphasis on the former. While genre acquisition centers on "training," genre awareness leans towards "education," which Johns argues is the preferable objective. Yet, Johns acknowledges the difficulties in crafting a course that fosters genre awareness. In this presentation, I will discuss an approach designed to achieve this goal. The presentation will detail the course's framework and its goals, showcase a sample activity, and share student work and reflections to illustrate progress toward achieving genre awareness. The goal is to encourage discussion among educators and inspire them to adopt similar methods in their teaching practices.
This is the second plenary session of the 7th CUE ESP Symposium co-sponsored with Iwate-Aomori Chapter JALT