The Teaching of Translation in the Context of College Education: Its Purpose and Rationale

Translation has long been neglected in language teaching for reasons which have little to do with any considered pedagogic principle. We all know that the objections raised against TILT (translation in language teaching) have been directed at the so-called grammar-translation method. What is less known, however, is that the "translation" component of this method is simply a "transcoding" whose focus is on form rather than meaning. It is simply a pedagogic tool to test learners\u27 understanding of the surface structure of the target language. As such it has nothing to do with what we call "translation" (or translation proper). In short, translation has been condemned for a crime it didn\u27t commit. In this paper, I shall argue that it was time to give TILT a fair and informed appraisal. My main argument for reassessing the role of translation in language teaching is that translation is basically a meta-linguistic task since it is a process that necessarily requires one to go beyond the linguistic level of understanding and communication and, therefore, is one of the most effective ways of nurturing language learners’ meta-linguistic awareness. To illustrate my claim and what TILT can do in more concrete terms, this paper describes how I conducted an otherwise regular, and perhaps monotonous, college “Reading” class (aka, Eibun Koudoku) from a translational viewpoint, hoping to show that TILT in fact can provide students with a very much exciting and educational experience

Output Training in English Classroom: Bridging the Gap Between Input and Output

Swain (1985, 1995) states that output can play a major role in SLA. Teachers of Englishgenerally concur with Swain; however, they remain unconvinced unless they are shown inmore concrete terms how they can incorporate production training into their classroompedagogy. This paper, which is a transcribed version of a talk given by this author at ameeting of the Tokyo Association of Teachers of Junior and Senior High Schools on thisparticular subject, proposes two such task-based teaching methods: Dictogloss and Text Reconstruction (aka, Oral Reconstruction of a Full Text from a Text Skelton). These methods have been proven effective in the context of Interpreter Training in which this author has been involved for more than 20 years. Although whether these methods are also effective for less proficient learners remains to be seen, they will nevertheless provide useful hints for teachers of English trying to put Swain’s theory into practice

Why Is Simultaneous Interpreting Possible? : Cognitive-Linguistic Mechanisms of Simultaneous Interpreting

吹田市民大学講座　関西大学講座　講演録（第1回講演

Using Blended-learning for Fostering Vocabulary Learning: An Interim Report of the Newly Implemented “Grammar & Vocabulary Development” Course

This is an interim report on the effectiveness of a newly implemented blended-learning course designed to foster vocabulary and grammar learning targeted at the 1st year students at the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies, Kansai University. The course, entitled “Grammar & Vocabulary Development,”constitutes one of the core courses in the new curriculum implemented from 2013 at the FFLS. This report begins with the rationale of the said course, which is followed by some data and statistical analyses thereof as to the overall effectiveness of the course. It concludes with suggestions for possible improvement and future direction of this experimental endeavor.実践報

Kansai University Bilingual Essay Corpus Project and Prospects for Research and Pedagogical Applications

This is an interim report of the Kansai University Bilingual Essay Corpus Project currently being undertaken at the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies of Kansai University (KU) by the above authors. The project officially began in April 2012 for the primary purposes of (1) collecting essaydata written both in English and Japanese on 13 different topics by the KU students and compiling them into a large-scale bilingual corpus, and (2) analyzing the corpus data from various viewpoints, be they lexical, syntactic, organizational, rhetorical or otherwise, to properly assess and gain insights into the students’ linguistic and compositional competences in both languages. The English part of the corpus (ver. 2012) currently contains approx. 650,000 running words, and the Japanese part approx. 1.5 million Kana-kanji characters. The corpus size will be twice as large as that of the current version by the end of 2013. The project also aims to develop an error tagger and a logical/organizational features editor, which the authors believe will be instrumental in otherwise time-consumingannotation work. Some of the research questions the authors plan to pursue in the course of the next phase of the project will also be outlined at the end of this report.研究ノート平成25年度関西大学教育研究高度化促進