Saturday, April 12 in JALT Kitakyushu

This is to announce that I'm going to make an oral presentation for about 90 minutes on communicative language ability in a JALT Kitakyushu local conference. Below is the abstract from the JALT Kitakyushu site.
http://www.jalt.org/chapters/kq/

A three-dimensional understanding of communicative language ability

Yosuke Yanase

Despite the unquestioned acceptance of the term, "communicative language teaching" would be disoriented without a good understanding of the concept of Communicative Language Ability (CLA). A relatively well-clarified theory of the concept has been offered by Bachman and Palmer (1996). It is not without problems, however, in that (1) the concept of its central competence "strategic competence" is not exactly clarified; (2) the role of the body is neglected; (3) the theory of communication is not explicitly considered. In this presentation, which is an extensively enlarged version of the JACET 2007 symposium presentation (http://yosukeyanase.blogspot.com/2007/09/three-dimensional-understanding-of_264.html), I will present a "three dimensional understanding of communicative language ability," in which CLA is represented as a vector whose direction and magnitude is determined by the three dimensions: mindreading ability (the X axis), physical ability (the Y axis) and linguistic ability (the Z axis). The concept of the mindreading ability is theoretically supported by the Theory of Mind and Relevance Theory.

Yosuke Yanase is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and TEFL at Faculty of Education, Hiroshima University. His academic interest includes philosophical analyses of English language education, theories of communicative second language ability, and qualitative analyses of English language classes. He is influenced by philosophers like Wittgenstein, Davidson, Arendt and recently Luhmann. He expresses his views on TEFL and general affairs in his English blog (http://yosukeyanase.blogspot.com/) and Japanese one (http://yanaseyosuke.blogspot.com/). He is a great fan of creative music of various genres from classical to experimental and beyond (http://yosukeyanase-music.cocolog-nifty.com/).

• Meetings are generally held on the second Saturday of the month at the Kitakyushu International Conference Center. The presentations usually start at 7:00 p.m., but the doors are open 30 minutes or so earlier.

All welcome, admittance for regular meetings is free for JALT members, 1000 yen for one-day members. Please note that this is subject to change in the case of special events. In the event of any changes, the admittance fees will be noted above.