A Pedagogical Plan for "Communication IA" at Hiroshima University

This article describes what I have done in one of my English classes at Hiroshima University. I started to teach English in the liberal arts curriculum at Hiroshima University five years ago. Before that, in the teacher development program, I mainly taught upperclassmen who wished to become English teachers in middle schools. In this sense, teaching English to freshmen with a variety of academic backgrounds and also with different levels of English abilities has been quite a new challenge for me, even though I am regarded as an expert on English language education, oftentimes being asked to make comments on lessons I have observed both at elementary and secondary schools. In this paper, I would like to present some of the ideas which I implemented in "Communication IA," which focuses mainly on developing students' speaking ability, including some problems and concerns I was faced with. In the first semester, 2010, I taught 33 students whose English abilities were not so high. With some information on my personal teaching background as an introduction, the article then depicts the major activities I undertook in this class, which are followed by some feedback from the students through a questionnaire survey. Finally, some problems to be solved in developing students' oral skills are discussed