Many English teachers in Japanese universities today are facing difficulties. In addition to apathy and disciplinary issues, quite a few students are admitted to university without taking English proficiency exams. Students enter the university ill prepared in oral and reading skills despite studying English in both middle school and high school for at least six years. Class size sometimes exceeds 50 students.
While the use of computers has long been proposed as a means to cope with these issues, the situations have not greatly improved. For students with faulty background of learning English in lower schools with little or no autonomy, self-access learning with computers does not function well in many cases without teacher assistance. They need teacher instruction until they reach certain levels so that they know how to learn the language by themselves. This is where computers do not offer great help.
In this session, attempts to blend ICT and face-to-face instruction in more effective manners are reported. While making the most of the ICT features such as CMS, MoodleReader module and the Internet, the teacher gives active instruction to students in the most problematic areas, speaking and reading. For reading, autonomous reading is facilitated among students, providing advice and suggestions on how and what to read, while comprehension check and progress reports are taken care of by the moodle module. As for pronunciation and recitation, to maximize the effect of face-to-face instruction, the classes are divided into two, and while half the class works on individual tasks online, the other half receives intensive face-to-face oral training from the instructor.
Evaluations will be made using the scores reported in the daily class reports from the students, as well as comments and thoughts written in those reports.
