Key words: Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), English as a Foreign Language (EFL)

Futures thinking is used by governments to consider long-term strategic approaches and develop policies and practices that are potentially resilient to future uncertainty. English in Action (EIA), arguably the world’s largest English language teacher professional development (TPD) project, used futures thinking to author possible, probable and preferable future scenarios to solve the project’s greatest technological challenge: how to deliver audio-visual TPD materials and hundreds of classroom audio resources to 75,000 teachers by 2017. Authoring future scenarios and engaging in possibility thinking (PT) provided us with a taxonomy of question-posing and question-responding that assisted the project team in being creative. This process informed the successful pilot testing of a mobile phone-based technology kit to deliver TPD resources within an open distance learning (ODL) platform. Taking the risk and having the foresight to trial mobile phones in remote rural areas with teachers and students led to unforeseen innovation. As a result EIA is currently using a mobile phone-based technology kit with 12,500 teachers to improve the English language proficiency of 700,000 students. As the project scales up in its third and final phase, we are using the new technology kit—known as the ‘trainer in your pocket’—to foster a ‘quiet revolution’ in the provision of teacher professional development at scale to an additional
67,500 teachers and 10 million students.

In the context of EFL teaching, testing can have serious backwash (or washback) effects on teaching practices (McNamara, 2000). This paper reports the findings of a study on these effects. Using the triangulation technique from social science research, the study reviewed the teaching and testing practices in 2005 at the best Lower Secondary School (LSS) in Khanh Hoa, a province in central Vietnam. Findings indicated that language-based term papers had distorted the teaching practice at the school, generating grammar-based or test-oriented extra-curricular classes. Unsurprisingly, students‘ performance of both oral and written English, as tested by the researcher‘s communicative test, was extremely limited. The study, therefore, made practical suggestions to all the stakeholders of provincial education, from the teaching staff to the local Department of Education and Training (DOET) and the local Teacher Training College, for a reform in language testing practices.

Despite policies from Japan’s education ministry (MEXT) designed to promote communicative language teaching (CLT), Japanese teachers of English (JTEs) have tended to continue using yakudoku (grammar-translation) (Nishino, 2011). This phenomenon may be partly due to the lack of CLT-oriented activities in the MEXT-mandated textbooks (Rosenkjar, 2009). However, to date there is a lack of research on the differences between MEXT-mandated and CLT-oriented textbooks. In the context for this study, while grade 10 classes continued to use the regular textbooks, grades 11 and 12 began using materials from a Western publisher. In order to understand the change, the researcher analyzed the textbooks using a framework designed by Littlejohn (1998). Results indicated that a shift was necessary from the teacher-centered transmission paradigm to learner-centered interpretative ways of learning.

"This paper will cover what incidental and instructional vocabulary acquisition entails; how each is thought to work, and how each affects the acquisition of language. To achieve any sort of acquisition first we have to know what a word is. After that incidentiality is examined and show to hinge on sufficient, and meaningful, exposure to lexical items. Thereafter we look at instructional vocabulary training and reminded that strategy training and rote learning has been shown to enhance and support vocabulary acquisition. Lastly we ponder upon how vocabulary could be taught by applying incidental exposure in conjunction with instructional teaching using meaningful feedback and extensive peer group-work.

Keywords: Incidental vocabulary acquisition, instructional vocabulary training, incidental exposure, exposure, receptive knowledge, productive knowledge, communication, group-work, feedback, input, learning strategy, facilitator of learning."