2023 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
The forming of a CLIL partnership: Examining the factors required to create a successful content driven CLIL course at a Japanese university
| Project/Area Number |
23K00648
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| Research Institution | Tohoku University |
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Principal Investigator |
Barry Kavanagh 東北大学, 高度教養教育・学生支援機構, 准教授 (80404820)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2023-04-01 – 2027-03-31
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| Keywords | CLIL / CLIL engineering / Specialist education / Curriculum development / Needs analysis |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Based on my needs analysis and research on CLIL courses for engineering students at Japanese universities I created a CLIL Biophysics pilot course spread across the first and second semesters. The courses were created in consultation with the School of Engineering professors and in the second semester I team taught classes with a content specialist professor. I created original teaching materials for the course that focused on academic reading, listening, writing and speaking which were all centered around the CLIL framework. These lesson materials were combined with authentic materials for the course. I created a website to host the materials which also included interactive material and original multimodal tools which I created for students to use. This research resulted in my creation of a new official School of Engineering CLIL course that will cater to all of the engineering departments and across engineering disciplines. I presented the preliminary findings of my research at national and international conferences and submitted papers to journals.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
I achieved what I set out to do. Many of the things I wanted to do in the second year of this research project I managed to do in this first year such as implementing pilot courses and inviting content specialists to team teach with me. I conducted the necessarily background research to examine CLIL engineering courses conducted at other universities in Japan by both content and language specialists and also did a needs analysis with the faculty of engineering and used the results to create my courses and arrange team teaching with some content professors at Japanese universities.
I created pilot courses, presented the results and managed to finalize an official CLIL engineering course at my university which will allow me to get data on student performance through pre and post tests and allow me to expand on my teaching materials. As I am still in the initial stages of the research I have sent off papers for possible publication and it is something I want to focus on in the new academic year.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
For this year I plan to do the following: Conduct the official CLIL course I created in October for engineering students. Create a new website with teaching and learning materials to be used by teachers and students. I hope this will be seen as a model for how CLIL can be used for specialist English language education at a Japanese university. I will also Invite more content specialists to team teach with me and create a textbook of units for the course. I will plan and execute language and content tests and Interview content teachers whom I will team teach with to get their experiences and impressions of CLIL and teaching their content in English. I also hope to incorporate AI tools into my courses and teaching. Finally, I will get some results published.
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| Causes of Carryover |
A planned research trip to Taiwan was cancelled so I did not use all of the funds available to me but I will use them in the following year for an international trip to Ireland for the World CLIL conference.
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