EMF awareness in the Japanese EFL/EMI context

The notion of English as a multilingua franca (EMF) positions English within multilingualism, and EMF awareness prepares students to communicate effectively in this multilingual world of mobility. The present paper explores how, if ever, EMF-aware pedagogic intervention influences Japanese students’ perceptions of their communicative practices, particularly for English-major undergraduates in L1-shared classrooms. This intervention was made by providing opportunities for participants to engage in EMF and by examining their first-hand experiences and published EMF communication extracts in the classrooms. Empirical data from an open-ended questionnaire demonstrate that multilingual and transmodal accommodation was a way for them to notice and take advantage of global networks, develop capability and confidence in communication, and foster sensitivity to interactants’ backgrounds. The data also illustrate the invaluable role of individual multilingual experiences as classroom ‘materials’, and suggest that discussing these experiences potentially turns L1-shared classrooms into EMF scenarios through foregrounding students’ multilingual repertoires.

English Major Undergraduates’ Needs and Perceptions of Business English Activities and Resources in a Chinese University

This article explores English major undergraduates’ views on business English skills and topics, and investigates their perceptions of the meaningful activities and resources in one Chinese university context. The main research instruments are questionnaires containing rating and open-ended questions, and researcher’s participant observation with 149 English major undergraduates enrolling in Business English courses in 2016. The results show that participants most often require improvement in note-taking skills, public speaking and need to learn business communication topics. Participants value communicative teaching methodologies, including role plays, oral presentation, theme-based discussion, games and group work. Participants more often rely on electronic media resources, such as videos, internet and mobile applications than the print media resources such as library, books and dictionaries. This study serves as basis for further business English curriculum development and resources provision in the higher education setting. The study also indicates the potential for business English resources development and exploitation in China within the international education environment.

PRACTITIONER OF EFL FOR NON-ENGLISH MAJOR UNDERGRADUATES: SPECIFIC PROFESSIONAL NEEDS

The paper deals with the problem of forming the methodological competence of a prospective practitioner of EFL for non-English major undergraduates. Foreign language learning environments training English and non-English majors have been comparatively analysed from the point of view of the teaching objective, result, content, process and resources. On the basis of the analysis, specific professional needs of a practitioner of EFL for non-English majors have been singled out. They encompass such components of the practitioner’s professional activity as research, designing, organizing, self-education, and collaboration. Research and designing include students’ educational and job-related needs investigation, academic and professional discourse analysis, teaching objective specification, teaching content selection, course syllabus development, teaching materials selection, adaptation and development. Organizing focuses on the application of the functional approach to EFL acquisition, computer-assisted learning, distance learning, blended learning, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), role plays, business games, simulations, differentiation strategies in the groups with the heterogeneous input level of the students’ intercultural communicative competence and low level of motivation to foreign language learning. Self-education presupposes developing a positive attitude to the students’ field, monitoring the latest news and achievements in it, mastering the basics of the students’ major, its terminology, genre and discourse peculiarities. Collaboration includes cooperation with students, readiness to be corrected by them when a solecism in the subject is made by the practitioner and collaboration with a teacher of the students’ major while selecting the teaching content, designing the course and in team teaching. The singled out peculiarities are to be taken into consideration while designing the structure of the methodological competence of a practitioner of EFL for non-English major undergraduates.