DREAM.lab brings students, teachers and researchers together to develop and analyze multimodal texts.

D = Development     (Develop students’ digital skills for language)

R = Research           (Research data produced)

E = Evaluation         (Evaluate the techniques and data)

A =  Analyze             (Analyze the techniques and data)

M = Multimodality            

Multimodality is one of the newest developments in TESOL and Applied Linguistics that is especially important for language teaching in the digital age. Multimodality studies how language is used with multimedia such as video, movies, television, radio, and any form of digital communication.  It is a branch of teaching originating with the tradition of the research of Michael Halliday (M.A.K. Halliday) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).   Work in multimodality mixes traditional language with images to understand how they function together.  It has been developed by scholars at some of the world’s leading universities such as the University of London, the University of Technology in Sydney, the University of California, Berkeley, and Penn State University.

DREAM.lab is located in Room 1345a of the Mishima Campus of Nihon University and telephone is x613 

DREAM.lab has produced three important pieces of research in the past 12 months:

1.     Interviewed teachers on three campuses in Japan about how they used video in their classrooms for teaching English.  Part of this data was published in the Nihon University Studies in International Relations as:

Grandon, M. (2012). Interviewing EFL teachers. Studies in International Relations, 32(2), 69-75. ISSN 1345-7861.

2.     Gathered student survey data from over 200 students on three different campuses in Japan about learning English with videos.

3.     Created and published a video for the internet that has now been watched by 28,000 people in 120 countries around the world.  The students were able to communicate with people around the world using multimodality, and the work created blog discussions all over the world. "A vision of Japanese Students Today" published on YouTube.