Introduction to the AOP Project
The Action Oriented Plurilingual Language Learning (AOP) Project is a five-year research project launched in 2006 that is subsidized by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) as part of a program “promoting the advancement of academic research at private universities”. The Keio Research Center for Foreign Language Education is a designated “Academic Frontier Center” under the program.
The research considers language education in all stages of learning, seeking ways to achieve greater coherence in foreign language, primarily English, tuition from elementary school through to graduate school and to provide students with better skills for communicating in plurilingual and pluricultural environments.
The AOP Project will work on reconfiguring a grand design for language education within an educational paradigm founded on social constructivism. Looking to hand the initiative to learners, the project will promote the adoption of action-oriented task learning and pursue various avenues helping to shape strategies for autonomous learning.
Responding to the issues
Through its activities, the Keio Research Center for
Foreign Language Education considers language education in all stages of
learning, seeking ways to achieve greater coherence in foreign
language, primarily English, tuition from elementary school to graduate
school and to provide students with better skills for communicating in
plurilingual environments in which English plays a major role.
A shift toward action-oriented task-based learning would squarely
address the need to develop communicative competence with broad
applicability on the international stage. It will also be important to
incorporate a host of opportunities for intercultural exchange into
educational environments targeting plurilingual and pluricultural
competence development in order to cultivate adequate language
proficiency for gathering and redistributing the bulk of localized and
multilingual information being distributed via now-ubiquitous
information networks.
As an educational research body, the AOP Project will delve into these
issues in pursuit of fundamental improvements that ought to be made to
Japanese foreign language education environments. Theoretical platforms
and practical knowledge underpinning earlier accomplishments, in
particular the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) that has been continually worked upon in Europe for 30 years, will provide a basis for reforms.
Plurilingual and pluricultural elements are already beginning to
manifest in 21st century Japan through the globalization of corporate
enterprise, the growing influx of foreign workers, and the unhindered
flow of information across national borders. It is not difficult to
imagine the trend continuing along the same lines. The ultimate
objective of the AOP Project is to support these developments by
intricately reconfiguring foreign language education within a new
educational paradigm based on social-cognitive constructivism, going
beyond frameworks hitherto relied upon. More specifically, that means
establishing learning environments to support this approach and building
up new teacher training systems.
- Plurilingualism & Pluriculturalism
- Action-Oriented Learning
- Social Constructivism
- Autonomous Learner Development
- The 4 Savoirs
- Keio and Education Coherence
- 31.08.2009 【Fri 11.09】Workshop on CEFR and English Profile(Finished)