■ The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology issues a document known as the Course of Study Guidelines on average once every ten years. This document states the overall and specific goals for English education in Japanese junior and senior high schools including specifying the contents of ministry approved textbooks. This study looks at the influence these guidelines have had on classroom pedagogy from the point of view of the student. For this study 112 college freshmen were surveyed shortly after they had been admitted into several private universities in the Tokyo area, responding to both closed-response and open-response questions about their perceptions of classroom practice in each of the six English courses defined in the guidelines. In the closed-response questionnaire, students were asked to rate various items related to teaching. In the open-response questionnaire, students were asked to describe the teaching practice of their English teachers. Standard descriptive statistics were used to analyse the quantitative data. The study gives insights into the successes and failures of the guideline's curriculum revisions. It is a response to call for the further study by Nunan (2003) and helps to show the complicated gap between educational policies and actual teaching practice in Japan.

During my JALTCALL 2020 Plenary Address, I explained about the importance of high frequency and special purpose (SP) vocabulary for second language learners of English, and then went on to introduce our New General Service List Project, a collection of 7 open-source, corpus-based word lists offering the highest coverage in each of their specific genres, as well as the large and growing number of free apps and online tools we have either developed or utilized to help learners, teachers, researchers and materials developers to better be able to utilize our lists. This chapter is a very brief summary of this project.

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