Enhancing learners’ production ability: oral presentation and academic writing skills for globalizing process of university education

11th February 2020 : 13:00 - 14:00

Seminar Abstract

 

The author presents some ideas for how to enhance EFL (English as a foreign language) learners’ production skills such as oral presentation and academic writing. It has been argued that universities should change their function towards the global model of a knowledge-producing center of innovation. To achieve this goal, it is necessary for students to develop production skills in English which is a useful international language. However, to date, there remains unsettled questions regarding what and how to learn such skills at higher education. Indeed, there are few studies which provide evidence of effectiveness of specific methods.
This paper demonstrates how to utilize the results of computer-based corpus research into EFL classroom contexts. First the TED speech corpus containing 300,000 words is analyzed to reveal how representative business leaders could conduct persuasive presentations. Then, 1 million word academic corpus data consisting of 102 articles on competitive research journals from the social, human and natural sciences is used to show how to persuade reviewers to accept. These results indicate that there are several important communication strategies which we could introduce into the tertiary education.

About the Speaker

 

Yasuo Nakatani is a Professor of the Faculty of Economics at Hosei University. He received Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham and is an academic visitor at Oxford University. His research interests are Second Language Acquisition, Academic Writing, and Business Communication. He published a number of research articles regarding Communication Strategies in international Journals such as The Modern language Journal (MLJ). He is a coauthor of Language Learner strategies: Thirty years of research and practice form Oxford University Press and has published several books such as Improving Oral Proficiency through Strategy Training, and Global Leadership: Case Studies of Business Leaders in Japan. He is a reviewer of MLJ, TESOL Quarterly, System, Studies of Second language Acquisitions, Language Learning, and Journal of Pragmatics. He is also an external Ph.D. examiner of Queensland University, Australia and Massey University, New Zealand.