Students within English Communication classes often struggle to speak to each other with confidence. They can be unmotivated and hesitate to speak up due to feelings of being under-prepared and anxious to share their opinions (Hann, 2007; Stroud, 2017). However, studies show that students who plan their speech during pre-task, in-task and post-task stages are better prepared and supported to interact with others, and demonstrate better fluency (Bui & Huang, 2018, Stroud, 2019). In addition, research indicates that students will participate more if they are allowed to repeat the same tasks (Fukuta, 2016; Jamalifar & Salehi, 2017). This presentation discusses how combining such findings can be used to get students speaking more and with greater fluency (face-to-face or online) using the Traffic Light Trainer system. Across three rounds of speeches, students learn how to plan speeches better, depend less on their notes and speak with increasing fluency. The presenters will outline how the system works, show recent classroom data that they have gathered with Japanese university students, and detail how to apply the Traffic Light Trainer to any English communication course. Participants will also learn about materials they can use to utilize the system with their own students.

Teachers may find it challenging to get students to think about the texts that they read at a deeper level. In this presentation, an interpretive technique originally developed in the fields of narrative therapy and socio-narratology will be introduced. This technique asks readers to write letters of appreciation to writers, protagonists, or even to the texts themselves. In order to do this, readers must think carefully about what texts mean and how texts relate to their own values, experiences, and beliefs about themselves and the world around them. In their letters, readers are asked to be specific about what they appreciate, which requires them to reference the original text in their letters. The presenter will show how to adapt this technique for the EFL classroom. This will include ideas on how to introduce students to the genre of letters of appreciation and how to use the letters for discussion activities afterwards. Additionally, examples of student work will be shown.

Literature is a valuable educational resource, as it reflects universal issues that resonate across cultures and generations. However, in FLT, literary texts are still mainly utilised for presenting established interpretations and historical/social contextualisation of their content and for stylistic analysis, leading to a lack of engagement with the literary themes among students (see Teranishi, Saito, & Walsh, 2015). Instead, literature’s potential as motivating input for developing L2 communication skills through eliciting learner responses to and personal interpretations of the texts should be exploited (Fraser, 2018). In this session, methodological choices which challenge learner expectations of typical literature courses by providing opportunities for encouraging critical thinking, eliciting learner reactions, and enhancing productive linguistic skills are explored, with the aim of making literature more accessible and enjoyable to FL readers. Practical suggestions are then examined for incorporating literature into tertiary FLT, and are illustrated through teaching materials and resulting samples of L2 learners’ creative writing in response to the literary texts. The purpose is to offer ideas for teachers to experiment with employing literature in FL classes, in order to actively involve learners in the interpretation of literary input while developing their L2 productive skills through discussion and creative written output.