TEFL NEWS is a quarterly publication, and it will appear at the end of March, June, September, and December at URL: http://ilc2.doshisha.ac.jp/kkitao/teflnews/.

We started this newsletter mainly to inform people throughout the world about what is happening in Japan in the field of TEFL, and secondarily to inform people in Japan about what is happening in TEFL in other parts of the world. Thus this newsletter will mainly be made up of conference reports, research reports, and events or news related to TEFL in Japan by Japanese people in English. We will include similar content related to overseas events, written in either in English or in Japanese. We encourage Japanese people to write articles in English.

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The 19th annual conference of the Japan Association of Comparative Culture (JACC) was held at Doshisha University Tanabe Campus on June 14, 1997 with the attendance of about 100 people.

JACC is a unique organization, since its headquarters is located in Hirosaki, in the very northern part of Japan. Its scope is also unique and covers almost anything related to culture.

There was one lecture, one symposium, and 26 presentations on various aspects of culture.

The lecture was entitled "Re-Evaluation of Jomon (Straw-rope) Culture" given by Koichi Mori, a professor of archaeology at Doshisha University.

The symposium was "Internationalization of Comparative Culture," and it included four speakers, who spoke on "Worldwide Use of Indigo," "Stereo- types Made by TV Documentaries," "Various Aspects of Supremacy of the English Language," and "Internationalization of the Study of Comparisons of Females."

The twenty-six presentations covered almost all aspects of culture and language. They also covered language teaching and literature as well as history, religion and other fields. Two foreign researchers gave their presentations, which added some originality to the conference.

The JCCA is always open to you if you are interested in anything involved in language or culture.

In the morning, fifteen presentations were made, three at the same time. Topoics of the presentations included teaching skills, international understanding, conversation analysis, pragmatics, learning strategies, and using a dictionary. I attended five of them, and I was impressed by the quality of studies presented, particularly by graduate students. One interesting presentation was on using WWW by Harumi Kashiwagi. She showed how to use WWW for teaching English, even with sounds.

In the afternoon, two workshops (demonstrations) were held. Motoko Yamamoto did a workshop on teaching English using a debate in a junior high school. She showed how to teach what debate at the beginning and showed how to conduct a debate using some college students using the topic, "School Regulations Should Be Abolished." She emphasized reasoning and expressing opinions in English.

The second workshop was on teaching extensive reading in a high school. This was the result of the project done by a group of teachers and graduate students. They showed what kinds of materials they used, how they carried out the program, how they evaluated the students, etc. All the participants in the workshop had a chance to try to read a passage as quickly as possible and then to check their reading comprehension with several questions. We learned how to calculate reading speed with comprehension. It was a huge project, and I admire them for carrying it out successfully. However, I do not necessarily agree with the way they made reading materials available to all students.

The lecture was given by Yukio Otsu at the end of the conference. He argued that what we have to do in English classes in school is not useful for students. His main point was that it is important for students to learn communication and culture. However, the most important result of language classes is for students to learn how interesting the language is. He showed some interesting examples of unusual or amusing phenomena in Japanese and English, and also he discussed why they happened.

After the opening ceremony, Haruyo Yoshida and Shinsuke Yoshida demonstrated computer software developed for MS-DOS and Windows95. The latter was multimedia software which had texts, pictures, and sounds.

The software they demonstrated included programs for rapid reading, vocabulary, practical English, and even dialogues. The Yoshidas conducted some research projects over software they had developed, and they showed results which indicated that computer software can be a very effective way to study English.

The Yoshidas also presented information about classwork their students have done with commercial software. They are teaching business letter writing using Word97. This included using Excel97 and inserting charts into a file made with Word97. Students are supposed to learn vocabulary related to clothing and cultural background knowledge related to clothing and then they were required to write a business letter to order clothing.

The Yoshidas also demonstrated how to use Power Point to make multimedia software and Acrobat to practice browsing. They also showed a couple of pieces of software developed overseas, which they are using for their class.

For one and half hours, we saw a great deal of software both developed by the Yoshidas and purchased. We learned that we can do a lot using different software.

In the afternoon, two presentations were made.

Tomomi Otsuka argued that learning strategies became popular in 1980s and 1990s, but they were not necessarily successful, because observation was very difficult. She used key words in listening and conducted a research project with 80 freshmen for ten weeks. She divided the students into three groups, using TOEFL preparation, news and pop songs, and she found that the news and song groups made significant progress.

Hirofumi Wakita presented a long handout (16 pages) about concepts and statistics of international exchange programs for senior high schools. International exchange has been emphasized by the Ministry of Education and scholars, but high schools have struggled with putting theory into practice. Many high schools have established some relations with schools in North America and Europe, and they have sent students there. However, the number of schools that have relationships with schools in other parts of the world and students they have accepted from other parts of the world have been small, though they are increasing. I was surprised to find that some schools in Kyoto have ties with Russia, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, etc. What he emphasized was that, in order to succeed at international exchange, schools have to have a clear vision and concrete projects to carry out. If they have a sister school relationship without any concrete plans, they cannot do much. In order to carry out projects, of course, the financial problems need to be overcome, and this is often difficult.

After I left, a symposium was held by Naonobu Fuse, Shunji Tatsumi, and Kazuko Nakajima about introducing foreign language teaching and international awareness education to public primary schools. The moderator was Yukinobu Oda, professor more than seventy years old. Fuse is a teacher of a primary school in Shiga Prefecture, and he describeded English programs by Japanese teachers and an English-speaking teacher. Tatsumi explained current situations, what people expect and anticipated problems from the viewpoint of a board of education. Nakajima has a long-term interest in this topic, and she discussed teacher training, teaching English at different levels, and various issues related with this topic.