This action research study focused on teacher trainees and their beliefs about the potential of TBLT in their future teaching situations. The participants were fourth-year undergraduate students enrolled in the Teacher Education Program at a private university in Japan. As part of their seminar work, the students read a series of articles describing the process of implementing TBLT. They also read articles describing relevant research studies focusing on TBLT. After seven weeks of lessons with each lesson focusing on a different article, the teacher trainees participated in a TBLT lesson as students. Their assignment for this portion of the seminar was to share their thoughts, specifically TBLT’s viability for their future teaching context. The data were collected through the use of a questionnaire with open-ended questions. Each question represents a research question for this study. The research questions elicited the teacher trainees’ opinions on the following issues: TBLT’s viability within the Japanese context; TBLT’s viability for low-level learners; weaknesses and strengths of TBLT; possible approaches for incorporating TBLT into English classes; TBLT and student motivation; and whether they plan to use TBLT in the future. The results indicated the trainees were mostly concerned with TBLT’s viability for low level learners.

Effective turn-taking is vital for successful participation in group discussions. In Japanese EFL contexts, group discussion often exhibits turn-taking behavior that is markedly different from that of competent English speakers, often limited to each participant making a short speech and brief comments of agreement or disagreement. Turn-taking behavior is also a major component of the interaction in cooperative board games, which encourage group decision-making and often exhibit more varied forms of turn-taking. This presentation describes the use of cooperative board gameplay in the classroom as a training aid to develop learners' turn-taking skills. First, the presenter will explain the characteristics of cooperative board games from a TBLT perspective, including the range of speech acts contained within their gameplay. Then an analysis of student transcripts collected over one semester will be presented to illustrate changes in student turn-taking behavior in a variety of contexts. The changes explored include differences in turn lengths, speech act use, and turn-taking patterns of learners. The presentation will conclude with some suggestions for using cooperative board games in the language classroom to maximize language use.

In an effort to develop disciplinary literacies students in tertiary-level learning contexts, there have been various pedagogical approaches to fostering the learning of both language and content (Marsh, 2002; Zappa-Hollman, 2018). One widely-accepted approach is content-and-language-integrated-learning (CLIL), pointing to the importance of nurturing discipline-specific literacies of students as apprentice scholars who can appropriately participate in the scholarly conversations and practices of a discipline (Airey, 2011). Further classroom-based research insights are needed to deepen our understanding of whether and how CLIL-based approach can contribute to students’ empowered identities as legitimate participants in academia. This presentation explores a coordinated project-based pedagogical effort by university educators in Canada aiming to develop the disciplinary literacies of international undergraduate students in a linguistically-responsive course. The presenter will draw on specific examples of how such a pedagogical effort informed by task-based, functional approaches to language learning may create an educational space cultivating empowered identities of students. The presentation will illustrate how students were invited to position themselves and others as producers of meaning with a sense of affective, cognitive, and communicative empathy while exploring the inextricable relationship between language and disciplinary knowledge. The presentation closes with pedagogical insights into the importance of empathy-fostering classroom discourse.