Event

[Distinguished Lecturer Series] Practice and Automatization: Bridging ISLA Research and the Classroom

Saturday, June 20th, 2026, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Speaker: Dr. Yuichi Suzuki (Waseda University, Japan)

Details: https://www.tuj.ac.jp/grad-ed/events/2026/0620/bridging-isla-research-and-the-classroom

Does practice make perfect? While practice was once dismissed as mechanical drills, the 21st century has witnessed a major reconceptualization of this term. In this seminar, we move beyond mindless "parroting" to a modern and more productive definition of practice as "specific activities engaged in systematically and deliberately" to develop robust knowledge and skills in a second language (DeKeyser, 2007; Suzuki, 2023). We will explore how this systematic practice leads to automatization. Automatization involves fine-tuning and restructuring of knowledge encompassing lexis, grammar, pronunciation, and pragmatics, which allows learners to progress from effortful processing to fluent communication skills.

The course navigates from theory to pedagogical practice with the following three main research domains:

• Cognitive Foundations: Examining Skill Acquisition Theory and the interface of explicit/implicit knowledge.
• Optimizing Practice: Applying principles from cognitive psychology (e.g., desirable difficulty, practice distribution, transfer-appropriate processing, cognitive individual differences) to maximize learning.
• Teaching Methods: Application: Critically analyzing the role of systematic practice within Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) frameworks.

Finally, we address the research-practice gap. We aim to think of the responsibilities of researchers to produce transparent and relevant work that benefits stakeholders such as language teachers, teacher trainers, and policy makers. Through lectures and discussion of empirical studies, we will explore how to bridge the divide between research and pedagogical practice.

Organization: Temple University, Japan Campus: the Graduate College of Education (Temple University, Japan Campus)

Cost: free

Venue: Online

Location: Online, Online Events, Online Event

Contact Temple University, Japan Campus

Graduate College of Education Program Office