Umamoto's Office

Affiliation：Faculty of Bioresource Sciences / Department of Development of Local Resources
Position：Professor / vice president / Director, Institute for Promotion of Higher Education / Head of Academic IR Office
Degree：Ph.D.（Pedagogy）

▶︎ Office Web Site

• Historical study of the basic English vocabulary selection
• Research on English translation through the analysis of self-taught books
• Corpus analysis of English textbooks in the Meiji era and after
• Examination of historical English teaching materials and methods from the perspective of second language acquisition research
• Research on active learning in English using LMS
• English Studies in Hiroshima from the perspective of school histories

I am doing research on the history of teaching English as a foreign language.
One of the research interests is the Shobara English School. The school existed for only eight years in the mid-Meiji period, and a self-taught books called “Hitori-Annai” for the English textbooks used there are still in existence.
The author of the self-taught books was Shuichi Mori, an English scholar born in Shobara. The phonetic kana letters and numbers indicating the order of translation were introduced to understand English texts. They are, so to speak, a “textbook guide” in the Meiji era. These analyses of existing old books will give us suggestions for improving the present English teaching methods.

It has been more than 210 years since English education in Japan began with the Phaeton Incident as motivation. The current English teaching methods have been developed through constant trials and errors.
Many of the methods, however, seem to have disappeared without being fully tested for their effectiveness.
I would like to shed light on such historical teaching methods and re-evaluate their usefulness from the viewpoint of second language acquisition research.

○There is an urgent need to collect the remaining English education resources in the region.
Among the old books and newspapers sent out as “resource garbage” from old houses, there might be quite a few treasures that tell us history. Upon, at the request of the town of Kuchiwa, Shobara City, I once investigated educational materials and notebooks in the Meiji period. If you come across any old books or papers with Western languages in them in your storehouse, I would appreciate it if you would let us know before throwing them away.

○I hope to work with local schools and school boards to help improve English language skills and promote internationalization.

▶︎ Public lectures focusing on the history of English education and the history of English studies
▶︎ English teacher training in cooperation with school boards and schools, etc.