Educated Japanese English: expanding oral/aural core vocabulary

要旨

Abstract: Having established the world's first undergraduate college of world Englishes, and in an ‘Expanding-Circle’ setting, we have created the pilot environment for a new type of ELT curriculum. We must address the creation of a curriculum that is pervasively informed by the philosophy of world Englishes at both a macro and micro level. Certain program-wide decisions have been implemented from the outset, such as having all freshmen take a required class in World Englishes Studies and attend a three-week overseas seminar in Singapore, and hiring teachers from ‘Outer-Circle’ countries. Nevertheless, the philosophy of world Englishes must also be incorporated into all aspects of our ‘foundation’ communication-skills classes. Acting on the premise that developing a broader spoken lexicon will be more desirable and useful than learning colloquial American English, this paper presents a pre-experiment in expanding Japanese students’ core aural/oral vocabulary as a means to contributing to the development of an ‘educated variety of Japanese English.’ It is hoped that the results of this study will help serve as a guide to further research, and eventually, to the type of components that should be included in a ‘world Englishes compatible’ oral communication curriculum.

主題