Creating English-Medium Professional Dialogue in Japan: A Practitioner-Led Innovation Study

Abstract

This practitioner-led innovation study examines a decade-long effort to establish English-medium academic meetings at a teacher education university in Japan, where English is highly valued as a school subject yet rarely used in teachers’ professional communication. Drawing on reflective journals, meeting notes, emails, and participant feedback, the paper addresses a practical problem: how to make English-medium professional dialogue workable in a shared-L1 EFL context. The study describes how the meetings were initiated, structured, and sustained, and how recurring design problems such as participant anxiety, native-speaker norms, and limited willingness to speak shaped the development of the innovation. Rather than presenting English-medium professional communication as an all-or-nothing practice, the paper focuses on practical adjustments that made participation more manageable and meaningful over time. It also reflects on the challenges of implementation, including resistance, discomfort, and the risk that English use might be interpreted as performance rather than support. This study identifies three replicable practice innovations: (a) a low-stakes translanguaging protocol, (b) Japanese-accented English as a legitimate professional model, and (c) behavioral participation indicators as alternatives to fluency-based measures of success. These innovations were developed through repeated practice over more than a decade and are offered as adaptable designs for practitioners facing similar challenges in EFL professional settings.