Mehrasa Alizadeh
Otemon Gakuin University
About
Mehrasa Alizadeh is Associate Professor at Otemon Gakuin University in Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan, where she teaches English as a foreign language to Japanese students. Mehrasa’s research interests include mobile learning, immersive learning, and the use of virtual reality in language education. She has published and presented extensively on immersive learning in international conferences and journals. She is currently leading an international collaborative project funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). The project aims to promote intercultural understanding and language skills by connecting language learners in Japan with their overseas partners through virtual tours and AI-enhanced intercultural exchange activities.Sessions
Keynote From Fail to Prevail: A Reflective Narrative of Immersive Technologies in Language Education. more
Sun, Jun 14, 09:00-10:00 Asia/Tokyo
As educators and technology enthusiasts, we often hope that each new innovation introduced into teaching will become a success story. While educational technologies have considerable potential to support language learning in many ways, failure remains an ever-present possibility. Such experiences, however, can provide valuable opportunities for reflection, learning, and growth. In this keynote, Mehrasa reflects on her past work with immersive technologies in language education, examining not only what prevailed but also what failed and how she attempted to address these challenges. By critically engaging with initiatives that did not unfold as planned, she will highlight key pedagogical and practical lessons drawn from these experiences. She will also demonstrate how these insights have directly informed the design and direction of her current project, offering a reflective account of how learning from failure can ultimately help innovation prevail in technology-enhanced language learning.
Presentation An Interactional Study of Student-Student Rapport Construction in a Zoom Course on EFL Small Talk more
Sat, Jun 13, 11:20-11:45 Asia/Tokyo
Rapport plays a central role in fostering engagement, participation, and interpersonal alignment in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) interaction, yet student-student rapport in online settings remains underexplored. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) Rapport Management Model (RMM), this study investigates how Japanese university EFL learners construct rapport during Zoom-based small-talk interactions, with a particular focus on the interactional strategies used across verbal, paralinguistic, and embodied nonverbal domains. Using video-recorded dyadic Zoom interactions, the study adopts a qualitative, micro-analytic approach to capture interactional strategies for rapport development across complete interactional episodes. A stratified purposive sample of dyads was analyzed to explore patterns of rapport construction and potential gender-based differences in interactional practices. The study offers pedagogical insights into how rapport can be systematically analyzed in online EFL interaction. By linking theoretical constructs to observable interactional practices, the findings inform task design, teacher mediation, and the development of interactional competence in digitally mediated language learning contexts.
