English Education Program for Japanese Soccer Players and Coaches Seeking Career Opportunities Overseas

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of Japanese people wishing to pursue a career as a professional athlete or sports coach. In this research, we describe how an English teaching technique involving genre-based activities enhanced the football training instruction foreign language communication skills of six student-athletes who want to be international football players or coaches. Two types of qualitative research (learning log records, semi-structured interviews) were used to analyze the changes in the participants’ English utterances during two task performance tests (football training instruction in English) during the 15-week study (mid-term and second semester) in terms of lexico-grammar and generic structure. The English teaching method using genre-based tasks was found to enhance the participants’ understanding of football coaching-specific lexico-grammar and generic structure, which they were able to apply to performance tests.