2019 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Assessing Foreign Language Activity Assistants' perspectives on primary Foreign Language Activities
| Project/Area Number |
16K02952
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| Research Institution | Fukushima University |
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Principal Investigator |
Mahoney Sean 福島大学, 行政政策学類, 准教授 (50292454)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
猪井 新一 茨城大学, 教育学部, 教授 (80254887)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2016-10-21 – 2021-03-31
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| Keywords | 小学校外国語活動 / 外国語活動協力者 / ノン・ネイティブ・スピーカー / 教科 / 英語の非母語話者 / EAA / 外国語活動支援者 / 英語教育 |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
In June, July, August, and November, the investigators presented at international and domestic conferences in Bangkok, Sapporo, Hirosaki, and Nagoya. They summarised the progress and challenges that Japanese and non-Japanese assistant (non-native English speaking) teachers revealed via extensive interviews. Conference attendees included teacher-trainers, other researchers, policymakers and team teachers, to whom we provided suggestions on issues such as improving teaching materials, raising awareness of the world’s Englishes, and motivating homeroom teachers to take on more of a leading role in English classes.
In two articles published in Japan and Korea, we further refined our findings and expanded on their implications, while demonstrating successes and failures to be learned from.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
We decided to use SurveyMonkey for the large-scale survey, and transferred funding from FY 2018 to FY 2019. We had originally intended to send invitations to the bilingual online surveys to 5000 schools, but reduced the sample size to 4000 due to budgetary considerations. The late-September timing of the survey allowed even participants whose contracts began in August and September the time to gain at least some experience.
Since our target group can be found only in an estimated 11% of primary English classrooms, a response rate of 5-12% (n = 200-480 respondents from 4000 schools) would be deemed a success. So far, we have 271, but would like to increase the number of non-Japanese respondents in particular. For this reason, we have extended the survey into FY2020.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Although job security for non-Japanese, non-native English speaking assistants in particular has been negatively affected by the coronavirus pandemic, we plan to reach out through boards of education, assistant recruiting agencies, and SNS groups to increase the number of survey respondents.
We will need to alter the wording of some questions to reflect the 2020 curriculum (and recent, pandemic-appropriate teaching styles), but the revised surveys will be kept as close as possible to the originals to allow for as many comparisons as possible. While the pandemic has postponed or cancelled opportunities for us to share our research findings at conferences, we intend to write new papers based on the new quantitative database.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Again, in order to better compare online questionnaire responses, we decided it would be best to increase the number of non-Japanese respondents in particular. We shall do so by extending the survey into FY2020.
I’ve renewed the subscription to the SurveyMonkey Advanced Plan (52,200 yen, after an Educational Institution 25% discount) in order to add to the database in the first half of FY2020, and to continue processing and analysing data from all surveys in the second half.
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| Remarks |
I intend to update my research homepage at www.ipc.fukushima-u.ac.jp/~a085/ to publicise as many of our results as copyrights allow.
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