Report on the 51st Annual Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) Conference

countries (Fujishima & McCandie, 2024; Cook et al., 2023, p. 12). At the 2025 conference, the majority of sessions centered on English education, as indicated by abstract keywords like "TESOL," "EFL," and "ESP," and nearly all sessions were conducted in English (JALT 2025 Conference Handbook).These characteristics make the conference particularly relevant to English-medium courses at Kanazawa University's Institute of Liberal Arts and Science, such as English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which are taught in large part by non-Japanese instructors.To illustrate the range of interests represented at JALT, the present report highlights four different sessions, including presentations, workshops, and plenary talks the author attended on November 1 and 2, 2025. Designing Tasks for Meaningful L2 Teaching and Assessment (Shoko Sasayama)In this plenary talk, Shoko Sasayama (Waseda University) introduced the tenets of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in the context of university English education.TBLT, as Sasayama explained, is a general framework built on the idea that L2 learners acquire a language more robustly by using it in purposeful contexts to accomplish relevant tasks.Despite the popularity of the framework, however, a practical challenge instructors often face is selecting, designing, and sequencing tasks to support L2 use for meaningful language learning.Sasayama proposed that the most critical step to overcoming this challenge is the establishment of clear learning outcomes in terms