Global education is a specialized field which aims to help students acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to survive and thrive in a global age. As an approach to language teaching, it involves integrating a global perspective into the design of teaching materials through a focus on global issues and international themes as well as concepts such as social responsibility, international understanding, and world citizenship. Global education emphasizes meaningful engagement with real-world topics and draws on ideas from content-based instruction. It encourages classroom teachers and textbook writers to experiment with global education materials and to explore resources from fields such as peace education, human rights education, and environmental education. It has also led to new thinking about the social responsibility of language teachers, textbooks, and curricula in a world of inequality, poverty, prejudice, and pollution. This paper gives a brief introduction to the field of global education, outlines its relevance to English language teaching, and describes key features of a global education approach to designing content-based EFL materials. It outlines global education criteria for analysing EFL textbooks, discusses problematic textbook content, and surveys the resources available to teachers who wish to add a global dimension to their classroom materials.

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Despite decades of progressive social reform with regard to LGBTQ protection in many countries around the world, demands that the ELT curriculum addresses queer absence, or LGBTQ erasure, have fallen largely on deaf ears. In this paper I address key issues surrounding representation, identification and erasure, and I explore some of the reasons for the systematic editing out of non-normative genders and sexualities from English language teaching. My contention is that LGBTQ erasure is a double injustice—on the one hand an injustice against LGBTQ people who are denied recognition in the curriculum and on the other an injustice against those who are not LGBTQ and who are denied the opportunity to see the world through different eyes. I conclude by offering some suggestions as to how we might redress this situation.

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To explore the relationship between the time spent learning English as a foreign language (EFL) and developments in interest for culturally specific teaching materials that promote communication, this paper examines the attitudinal profiles of a group of Japanese EFL learners (N=156) over the course of more than five years of learning. Specifically, it looks at how interests in cultural products (movies, TV programs, and print media) associated with the foreign language being learned change after one, two, three, four, and more than five years of EFL learning. The results reveal that the more time EFL students commit to learning, the greater their need for cultural products becomes. Moreover, this paper demonstrates how important it is for teachers to use culturally specific materials or supplement their lessons with such materials so that the content and subject matter of teaching materials not only lead to affectively engaged learners, but also help students make connections between the classroom and realworld communication.

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This study investigated the relationships between foreign language learners’ self-beliefs conceptualized as self-confidence and self-efficacy, motivation, and antecedents of their self-beliefs, namely, social comparison and temporal comparison. Using data collected through a questionnaire involving 284 female university students learning English in Japan, this study attempted to construct a model explaining the relationships between the variables through the use of structural equation modeling. The results indicated the following possibilities: (1) self-efficacy influenced self-confidence; (2) both self-confidence and self-efficacy led to more self-determined forms of motivation, which resulted in motivated learning behavior; and (3) social comparison and temporal comparison affected the two self-beliefs, especially the former on self-confidence and the latter on self-efficacy. These findings suggested a close link between self-confidence and self-efficacy, a powerful influence of these self-beliefs on motivation and motivated learning behavior, and different functions that social and temporal comparisons play in the formation of self-confidence and self-efficacy among foreign language learners.

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This study explores the role of division of labor during learner–learner interactions in the language classroom. Previous studies have identified both positive and negative aspects of giving each learner a role in the interaction. These apparently diverging views should be investigated to better understand the effective facilitation of peer interactions. Drawing on the concepts of cooperation and collaboration, a single instrumental case study was designed to investigate learners’ engagement in two types of narrative writing tasks. Five dyads of EFL learners created a whole story together through collaborative writing (without division of labor) and wrote one sentence in turn respectively through cooperative writing (with division of labor). Recorded talks during both tasks were investigated along with written data to trace L2 development. The findings revealed that the collaborative task elicited more conversational turns between peers, which most of the learners found useful and interesting. On the other hand, more than half of the correctly-resolved LREs in both tasks resulted in failure in knowledge transfer. These results suggest that collaboration is generally preferable to elicit more dynamic interactions, but in both tasks, educational intervention would be essential to maximize the merits of peer interactions for L2 development.

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This study examines how teaching active listening and questioning skills can improve English language students’ speaking skills, and how the effects of this approach differ depending on individual affective factors. This study assigned 55 Japanese junior high school students into three groups: an active listening skills group, an active listening and questioning skills group, and a control group. Each group attended English-speaking lessons customized to their requirements. Then, I analyzed and adopted orthogonal contrasts based on whether or not the participants had received instructions regarding active listening and questioning skills. The results indicated that providing instructions regarding active listening skills has a positive impact on speakers’ fluency and accuracy, and additional training related to questioning skills results in further improvements in accuracy. I also found that the outcomes of speakers who are inclined toward low-risk approaches to learning improved when their interlocutors displayed active listening skills.

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The current research targeted Japanese high school EFL students (N = 296) to examine the causal relationships among vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs), self-efficacy, self-regulating capacity in vocabulary learning (SRCvoc), and vocabulary size gains. To this end, we used structural equation modeling (SEM) and formulated three hypotheses for the structural model: (1) SRCvoc promotes VLS use and subsequent vocabulary size gains; (2) self-efficacy fostered by SRCvoc reinforces further VLS use; and (3) success in vocabulary size acquisition is associated with self-efficacy increase. The results of the SEM support the structural model and its three hypotheses for the students in this study. However, the weak relationships found among the four variables were in contrast to those of prior studies targeting students in contexts other than Japanese high schools. By comparing the results of previous and current research, we consider the possibility of influences of different variables on vocabulary learning in different learning environments.

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Although causal relations are essential in narratives, second-language (L2) readers often have difficulty monitoring their coherence (causal coherence), especially when those relations span across distant parts of a text (global coherence). This study examined whether and how L2 readers’ monitoring of global causal coherence is promoted with a reading goal. Japanese university students read narrative texts first for general comprehension and then to understand the causal relations in the texts (the causal goal) while thinking aloud. The results showed that the causal goal did not increase participants’ success in coherence monitoring. However, this goal qualitatively altered the types of reading processes leading to coherence monitoring. Specifically, inference generation more strongly contributed to coherence monitoring in the causal goal than in the comprehension condition. Based on these findings, we propose a new theoretical model of L2 reading, the two-stage model of standards of coherence, explaining the reading goal’s quantitative and qualitative influences on L2 processes. The findings suggest that educators need to recognize that a reading goal does not always improve learners’ reading immediately; however, it is the first step in coherence monitoring and changing reading behavior.

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