This practice-oriented workshop will focus on the practical steps to implement activities involving more practical communication skills such as discussions, presentations, and debates, which are the skills newly required to be dealt with in SHS English education. The presenter concluded from the three-day teaching practice focusing on the presentation activity that it is essential to show demonstrations with visuals and encourage students’ awareness, rather than explaining and teaching directly. The presenter gave a mini-presentation at the beginning of each class to model the presentation. The topics varied according to the content of the day’s lesson, such as stimulating background knowledge for reading, reviewing grammar, and so forth. Dealing with content that the students already knew increased the interaction, and even those not used to speaking in English were willing to talk, which was a good warm-up for the presentation activity. By showing examples of good and bad presentations, the students realized what kind of presentation they should give and successfully applied these realizations to their practice. The outcomes of these activities were analyzed through students’ reflection papers, questionnaires, and video recordings. This presentation can interest attendees looking to adopt communication-based methods in small steps.

This presentation shares an analysis of 20 content-based essays written by freshmen in the food and health department at a university in Southwestern Japan, using a CBI paradigm. Pre-writing, students were taught paragraph structure (including an introduction, a body, and a conclusion), were provided with a list of 50 health-related vocabulary words to use in writing, and were taught to check spelling and grammar critically. A themed essay of 200 words was assigned, and the students were given one week to complete the assignment. Post-writing, essays were analyzed by stratifying them into two streams: 1) structure, verifying that the writing contained complete introductions and conclusions with topic and concluding sentences, and complete bodies with supporting sentences; and 2) grammar, checking subject-verb agreement, plurals, and spelling. The writings were then read critically, checking for clear writing with topic and supporting sentences, grammar elements, number of vocabulary words used, and whether the word limit was reached. Results found that 70% of students had complete introductions and 80% had complete conclusions, and while the mean wordcount was 209. The average score was 84%. The presentation shares other results and further explains the implications for using CBI in the EFL classroom.