English grammar courses in teacher training programs often aim to cultivate not only students’ foundational knowledge of English grammar but also their ability to explain grammatical elements from a pedagogical perspective. Traditionally, teacher-centered approaches have been employed. Instructors deliver material on grammar and metalinguistic analysis to relatively passive students, which poses some obvious problems in terms of active learning. Much contemporary scholarship recommends learner-centered approaches to language acquisition. Would it be more effective to model a learner-centered approach when training students to teach English grammar? This paper reports on the author’s teaching practice of English grammar class in the Kansai region of Japan. I adapted video clips on grammatical targets for a lesson using the jigsaw technique—a cooperative learning approach that requires all participants to rely on one another to solve a problem or meet a goal. According to a questionnaire to gauge their experience, using the jigsaw technique in conjunction with the video clips encouraged them to learn grammatical items more proactively, interactively, and deeply than the traditional teacher-centered approach.

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The present study investigates whether dictation can alleviate Japanese learners’ anxiety for listening or not. According to previous studies, anxiety for listening undermines learners’ listening ability. Furthermore, there is a negative correlation between anxiety for listening and listening ability. One of the strongest factors of anxiety for listening is closely related to learners’ bottom-up skills. Therefore, for current study, dictation, an effective teaching technique to develop learners’ bottom-up skills, was employed for alleviation of anxiety for listening. The results revealed that there is no statistically significant difference and suggested that dictation with explicit instruction of sound change could yield better results.

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When it comes to improving foreign language proficiency, specifically oral skills, many might imagine presentations as effective activities. It is one of the most popular activities that language teachers utilize to cultivate students’ speaking ability. This has encouraged a certain stereotyped understanding of what speaking English looks like. However, teaching efforts tend to focus solely on the presenter’s role and not on the listener’s role. Presentation activities should be designed for producing more interactions between the speaker and audience. According to a questionnaire conducted for the present study, students learning English at National Institute of Technology, aged 18-19, preferred not to have any interactions between the presenter and audience, specifically they do not want to receive questions or comments on their presentations. In addition, the participants tended not to even ask questions or make comments about presentations as listeners. It seems that there are many issues to be solved if we would like to use presentation activities as an effective way of teaching communicative language skills. This study concludes that educators should reconsider presentation activities as a means of obtaining language proficiency by focusing on not only the role of the presenter but also the listener.

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