Culture and Constructivism: A New Approach to Student-Centered English Language Education in Japan (original) (raw)
Educators and researchers continuously discuss the best ways to engage and interest students in the material used in class. In this paper, we build on our research and the existing literature that suggests that using materials that are culturally familiar to the students is a good way to improve language gains as well as motivate and engage them in the lessons, as it connects the material more closely to their personal past experiences and schema. Here, we introduce the results of a survey that we developed to gauge student interests and discuss our approach to developing culturally relevant materials. The results of this study show that this interest is consistent across a variety of majors. This new prong of our work focuses on developing materials that are constructivist and culturally relevant, and therefore specifically designed to promote autonomous learning. After introducing the results of our survey into student interest and a discussion of materials creation, we close this article with a discussion of the feedback from students on a pilot lesson developed in conjunction with a renowned Japanese film critic.
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