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| Kunitaro MIZUNO (associate professor) |
BA in Liberal Arts (The University of the Air, Chiba, 1994);
MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (Saint Michael's College, Vermont, 2005). Professor Mizuno joined the staff at Fukuoka Prefectural University in 2008. |
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| English II and English IV:These two classes are extensive reading classes. Students borrow whatever books they are interested in from the office and the library, and read one book per week absorbing a substantial amount of English from them. Each book has its own distance attached to the cover (400 words/km), and the students compete with each other to "run" the farthest by the end of the semester. They also write a reaction report which is then posted on the "Interactive Reading Community (IRC)" website. The IRC is designed to create a reciprocal reading environment which supports interaction between books and readers across classes and universities and fosters autonomous learning.
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| Academic Writing:The Academic Writing class is designed to help freshmen write reports in Japanese for their major subjects. The students learn how to gather information from the library and the Internet, how to evaluate it critically, how to brainstorm and arrange their ideas, and how to write an academic report. In groups of two or three, they work together on a report to be submitted at the end of the semester.
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| Mobile Interactive English Community (MIEC) Project:This project envisages using a combination of mobile phones, the Internet and face-to-face instruction to create a ubiquitous English learning environment. With this objective in mind, I have been working on creating the Mobile Interactive English Community (MIEC) Project website. The MIEC is designed for students with low English proficiency.
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| Those students who join the MIEC keep a diary (of a few English sentences per entry) detailing the ideas and feelings that come to them between classes. Whatever they write is then sent from their mobile phones to the MIEC on the Internet. Teachers then modify their sentences on the MIEC and create a learning resource using the original and modified sentences.
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| The modified sentences and comments from teachers are posted on the MIEC to be shared with others. In this way, the MIEC continues to grow larger as more sentences are added to it. Through this class, the students become acquainted with an authentic resource of vocabulary, grammar and conventional expressions. By expressing their thoughts and ideas, they also contribute to it and become more aware of how Japanese and English compare as languages.
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Professor Mizuno has a great interest in developing on-line learning environments. He enjoys attending conferences and meeting and sharing ideas with other professionals engaged in similar research.
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| Copyright(C) 2008 Fukuoka Prefectural University All Rights Reserved. |
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