Preparing Pre-Service English Teachers for 21st Century Classrooms through Integrated Task Design

Reforms to the foreign language education curriculum by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology emphasize a communicative approach through interaction and authentic language tasks. Many pre-service teacher education programs focus on the conceptual aspects of these reforms but offer few opportunities for pre-service teachers to experience them in practice. This paper describes a Theme-Based Content Instruction pedagogical approach that integrates skills with particular emphasis on 21st century skills. The assigned project engaged students in historical inquiry through pair research on a selected decade, poster creation with QR-code-linked digital resources, peer-generated questions, structured debate, and reflection. With selected 21st century skills serving as a design orientation within an analogdigital continuum, the project integrated communicative, physical, and digital resources into a coherent learning sequence. This paper details how the task design centered on communication, critical and reflective thinking, creativity, collaboration, and digital literacy in ways aligned with national curriculum standards for secondary English language education in Japan. By offering a practice-based, conceptually informed account of task design and implementation, this paper aims to contribute a transferable model for pre-service English teacher education.