Linfeng Wang

Purpose This study aims to search for fitting lenses to view and interpret teacher learning in a Japanese secondary school teacher staffroom and capture the reconstituting of researcher subjectivities in this process. Design/Approach/Methods A narrative approach chronically documents the findings and use of the lenses in analyzing the staffroom daily interactions and traces the journey of transformation in our researcher subjectivities. Findings The telling of a Japanese staffroom (shokuinshitsu) as a thrice-told tale under the three lenses—cultural-historic activity theory, contextualism, and intimacy orientation—each uncovers a unique interpretation of the learning going on in the daily life of the Japanese staffroom. While complementary, Western-lenses are found to be unable to explain the nature of the everyday practices in the staffroom formed under the worldviews and ethics of East Asia. Our critical examination of the major academic encounters involved in the past two decades illuminates the complex dynamism behind our research perspectives, awakens us to the dominance of Western-centralism in our researcher subjectivities, transforms our worldviews, and returns us to our cultural roots to build alternative frames of reference as East Asia as Method. Originality/Value This study not only uniquely demonstrates what decentered, alternative, and diversified frames of reference would look like in studying East Asian practices but also what it would take for scholars to move toward East Asia as Method. Additionally, going beyond the three lenses, it contributes to our understanding of how space (staffroom as an entity) mediates forming of the character of those who are dwellers of the shokuinshitsu.

This paper is a brief review of our meta-grammar project with special emphasis on the meta-grammatical activities conducted in Japanese classrooms. The first section describes the research questions and research procedures of the project; the second section reviews the recent history of language education in China with reference to grammar teaching; the third section is an analysis of secondary-school Japanese students' response to the meta-grammar classes as seen in the questionnaire survey; the fourth section considers how teachers found the project by analyzing their answers to the questionnaire and discussions at teachers' meetings; the fifth section presents the teaching materials we actually used in the experimental classes and describes how they were used; and the sixth and final section, based on the discussion up to this point, suggests the way this project can make a great contribution to the curriculum development of language teaching at the level of secondary education in Japan.

<p>This study seeks to analyze the rhetorical patterns within English textbooks for junior high-schools. Rhetorical patterns refer to the structure of connections, or links, between sentences within a text, and previous studies have identified up to seven basic rhetorical patterns within general expository texts. Accordingly, they are considered to be an essential factor in assessing whether a text is easy to understand. Moreover, some empirical studies, that have investigated the effects of different rhetorical patterns on reader comprehensibility, report that certain rhetorical patterns can facilitate readers in recalling the meanings of a text more accurately than other patterns. Based on a framework of rhetorical patterns, twelve units from two distinct themes were selected and analyzed from six authorized English textbooks for seventh graders, which were revised in 2012 with the implementation of new course study guidelines. The analysis results indicate that half of the selected units employ the "list" pattern, considered to incorporate the lowest level of connectivity in terms of textual structure, while half of the selected textbooks tended to utilize the same rhetorical pattern throughout their units. Moreover, the analysis of rhetorical patterns highlights the importance of textual structure and connectivity for research into the compilation of textbooks.</p>

The aim of this paper is to describe the results of the research designed to produce a new curriculum for developing the intermediate language learner's meta-grammar abilities and therewith suggest some new ways of curriculum development and classroom practice. This paper has a tripartite structure. The first part argues that the classroom practice focused on meta-grammar learning not only helps students to acquire linguistic abilities as well as work collaboratively but also helps teachers to improve themselves professionally through efficient collegial collaboration. The second part gives the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the pre- and post-tests measuring the effects of meta-grammar teaching at the level of the fifth year in secondary school. The analyses show that a couple of meta-grammar classroom activities have not affected students' ideas about grammar learning and problem-solving strategies but have helped them understand what they have learned and newly acquire grammatical awareness. The third part describes and analyzes the opinions of the teachers involved in meta-grammar teaching, who suggest the efficacy of meta-grammar instruction with focused contents to the fourth-year and fifth-year students who have learned the basic grammatical frameworks of Japanese and English. They also suggest some practical ways to incorporate meta-grammar activities into the regular school curriculum.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how secondary-school students' grammar learning in Japanese and English classrooms takes place with relation to their feelings about and attitudes towards grammar learning as well as to their learning strategies and how each of them is related to grammatical ability across individual languages such as Japanese and English. This research set out by hypothesizing that secondary-school language students can learn Japanese and English more effectively by acquiring ' meta-grammatical ability ' than by learning grammatical rules of Japanese and English separately in mono-lingual classrooms. We examined the relationships among their feelings concerning the usefulness of grammar, attitudes towards grammar learning, learning strategies, and the scores of a test on meta-grammatical ability by employing a questionnaire and a test on metagrammatical ability. As a result, by means of structural equation modeling, we demonstrated the relationships among students ' feelings, attitudes, learning strategies concerning grammar, and the meta-grammatical scores with a figure, and showed effective learning strategies on meta-grammatical ability.

This paper describes the theoretical basis of the research grant project which is designed to provide a set of methodologies to develop high school students' meta-grammatical abilities. The paper begins by explaining the purpose of the project and the key concept 'meta-grammatical abilities', which are supposed to enable students to analyze any language in a structural way. It then goes on to make historical surveys, respectively from the viewpoints of Japanese education and English language teaching, of grammatical approaches to language teaching, and finally suggests the possibility of combining some of those different approaches into a methodology of interlanguage grammar teaching.

The present study examined the impact of newly designed lessons for both Japanese and English language classes. These lessons were designed in order to offer opportunities for students to notice the similarities and differences in grammatical structures of different languages in order to develop their meta-grammatical awareness. Two kinds of lessons were newly designed for English language classes and Chinese classic literature classes taught in Japanese classes, and were used to teach 5th-year secondary school students in three classes. A pretest and a posttest were conducted to measure their grammatical knowledge of Japanese and English as well as meta-linguistic knowledge. / Through the analysis of the processes of the classroom discourse during the newly designed lessons, students' comments about the lessons, and the change between pre-and post-test scores, we examined the effects of students ' meta-grammatical abilities. The results showed that the students improved scores of all three types of knowledge and that the three types of knowledge correlated with one another. In addition, qualitative sampling analyses that focused on students with poor meta-grammatical knowledge implied that they acquired a means of noticing language rules meta-cognitively in their own ways and improved their cognitive work through meta-grammatical lessons.