Volume 16 Issue 2, February 2023
A Duoethnography of the Elucidation of Teacher Agency of Digital Tools for Teaching English as a Foreign Language During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japanese Universities
Dan Ferreira, John Peloghitis
Abstract:
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, a lack of decisive leadership from Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) resulted in each Japanese university implementing ad-hoc emergency measures for teaching. Although the majority of universities started teaching online three years later (in 2022), university teachers are expected to teach in a variety of contexts — online, face-to-face, or a hybrid of the two. To date, there is scant literature reporting on the ongoing tension between teachers who want to exert agency over the use of instructional and communication tools (ICT) under such circumstances and university policy on the sanctioned use of digital tools during this ongoing crisis. Adopting a duoethnographic approach, this study aims to elucidate teacher agency of digital tools for teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japanese higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. In duoethnography, new knowledge is discoverable from the individual lived experience, and the study findings offer societal implications to enhance the meaning of the phenomenon or inform educational leadership with further insights regarding teaching English as a foreign language in Japanese tertiary education. The findings of this study show that the insights provided by the duoethnographic method not only provide a cathartic salve by which teachers can constructively overcome negative teaching circumstances on an individual level but also warrants further research to explore teachers’ similar experiences in other teaching contexts on a global scale.
The Role of CALL in Japanese Public Schools: Perspectives of Foreign and Native Teachers
Michelle Lees, Andria Lorentzen
Abstract:
This paper combines two mixed-methods research projects in Japan that investigated the current status of technology in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education to gain deeper insights on how and why technology is used in the Japanese public school system. The aim of these two studies was to identify the factors related to the role of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in EFL classes involving both Japanese and foreign language teachers of English. Questionnaires collected qualitative and quantitative data from 99 participants, which included 49 Japanese Teachers of English (JTEs) and 50 English Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs). The findings indicated that although JTEs had a positive attitude towards technology, external factors such as time, training, and experience resulted in a reluctance to utilize it when teaching. In response to this finding, a number of practical recommendations were developed to promote technology usage in the EFL classroom.