Hello everyone, nice to meet you.

My name is Hao Hao. I am currently an Academic Collaborative Researcher. I am an international student from China. When I was studying Japanese at a university in China, I often felt that the classes were boring. My daily routine consisted of listening to the teacher’s explanations of vocabulary and grammar, and then memorizing the textbook passages after class. However, when it came time to actually meet Japanese people, I didn’t know how to speak. Therefore, I started thinking about whether the way classes were conducted could be changed to increase opportunities to use what we learned in class. Currently, I am focusing my research on improving Japanese language education classes. In particular, I am conducting research focusing on a teaching format called Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Simply put, CLIL is a teaching format where students learn specialized knowledge in a foreign language. In Japan, there are also university classes conducted in English. For example, in a class I conducted, I taught Chinese learners at a university in China about cross-cultural issues, specifically Japanese culture, in Japanese. This allows them to learn not only the content but also the Japanese language itself by utilizing that content. However, there are issues such as the lack of a class design theory for CLIL and the slow progress of ICT utilization in CLIL, which leads to the problem that the quality of the learner’s learning depends on the instructor’s experience. Therefore, in order to ensure the quality of classes conducted using CLIL, I am using Instructional Design to design CLIL classes, verifying their effectiveness, and attempting to extract the elements that should be incorporated into the design of CLIL. Of course, in line with the issues, I am also incorporating ICT elements. I hope to be able to review the elements that ensure the effectiveness of CLIL.

For this week’s English seminar, I read the following paper.

Paper Title: “Design and Implementation of College Japanese Teaching Interactive System Based on Moodle Platform”
Author: Jing Yang
Year of Publication: 2022
Journal Name: Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

I chose this paper because I wanted to understand the points to keep in mind when using ICT to supplement the current state of Japanese language education in Chinese universities.

Here, I will briefly introduce the content of this paper. With the increase in international exchange, the current situation of Japanese language education at universities is shifting toward an emphasis on cultivating Japanese language proficiency, with a focus on improving students’ communication skills, practical application skills, and creativity. However, current university Japanese language education still places too much emphasis on theoretical knowledge and lacks the cultivation of practical application skills. This paper constructed a college Japanese teaching interactive system based on Moodle and analyzed the current state of college Japanese education and instruction. It is shown that by utilizing Moodle to conduct online education, it is possible to more actively promote autonomous interaction and discussion among teachers and students, or between students, significantly improve students’ motivation for autonomous learning, and allow students to receive higher-quality instruction. The author explains the reason for this as follows: From the students’ perspective, using Moodle to read materials before class and discuss them online after class can strengthen autonomous learning and communication with others, and from the teachers’ perspective, using Moodle can better manage the educational process and promote class improvement.

In this paper, an analysis is conducted on the needs of teachers and students when using Moodle, as well as Moodle’s questionnaire function, external resource utilization function, and material browsing function. However, I think it is rather unfortunate that this paper lacks information on how the data was collected, specific analysis methods, or the specific questions used in the questionnaire. Also, I think autonomy affects the utilization of Moodle, but there is not much mention of that point, and I suspect that the students’ characteristics regarding autonomy might have a significant effect. I also strongly recognized that Instructional Design is also important.

Moodle is one of the Learning Management System platforms widely used around the world and has various functions, but I felt that it would have provided more useful insights if the paper had discussed more concretely the impact of the Moodle functions used on learning, and the opinions of students and teachers regarding the Moodle functions used.