Yukio Tono

Yukio Tono is a Professor of Corpus Linguistics and Director of the World Language Center at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He received his Ph.D. in corpus linguistics at Lancaster University. His research interest includes corpus applications in foreign language teaching and learning, corpus-based SLA research, and corpus approaches to CEFR-related research and resource development. He is the Principal Investigator for the CEFR-J Project.

CEFR-J Project: Its Impact on Foreign Language Teaching in Japan

Featured Presentation

As the Principal Investigator, the speaker has been working on the development of the CEFR-J, a localized version of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) for English language teaching in Japan. For the last 15 years, he has led the project team to develop various educational resources (the wordlist, the grammar profile, the text profile, inventories of exponents, and can-do-based performance test batteries) to enhance the effective use of the framework for ELT from primary to tertiary levels. After a brief description of the project, he will discuss the possibility of creating a language-independent workbench for designing and preparing syllabuses and teaching materials using the CEFR-J resources and corpus data in the target languages. As an example, a program of pedagogical reforms on 28 foreign language majors at TUFS using the CEFR-J will be reported.

Useful Text Analysis Tools for Teachers

Featured Workshop

In this workshop, I will share some of the useful text analysis tools for language teachers. The workshop is designed for those who are not familiar with text analysis tools such as Text Inspector, Coh-Metrix, Lexical Complexity Analyzer, Kristopher Kyle’s suits of tools, among others. Concordancers such as AntConc will not be covered in this workshop. I will demonstrate how to use the tools and explain how to interpret the output. Especially the workshop will be useful for those who want to know how those tools behave differently in terms of tokenization or lemmatization, which will affect the results of your analysis. Also practical tips for using those tools for teaching will be discussed.