I. This is a report of a two-year psychological study concerning English as a school subject. The first year included (1) pupils' English ability test, and (2) research on the relation between English ability and interest in English. The pupils were examined in two groups: the superior and the inferior. The superior pupils showed more interest in English and wanted teaching techniques to be improved. The inferior pupils did not show so much interest in English and complained about the teachers, personalities. The English ability test showed what kind of words or sentence patterns were difficult to the pupils.
II. In order to ascertain the real condition of the inferior pupils in English, the purpose of the second year was set to clarify (1) the relation between the teacher' teaching methods and their pupils' English ability, and (2) the difference of ability between the superior group and the inferior group. As subjects, 661 pupils of the 2nd year classes of several junior high schools in Tokyo were selected.
III. The study of the pupils'English ability covered various aspects: words, reading comprehension, composition, grammar and pronunciation.
The main results were:
(a) Difficulty increases along the aspects as follows: reading comprehension, pronunciation, grammar, word meaning, composition.
(b) The inferior group was very poor in reproducing words.
(c) The superior group found it difficult to under stand meaning as sentences became longer, but the inferior group did not show any clear tendencies.
(d) The comprehension of sentences became more difficult when they were given orally rather than visually.
(e) The greatest difference of ability between the superior and the inferior groups appeared in composition.
(f) When pronouncing words given visually, both groups showed more difficulty with vowels than with onsonants.
(g) As for accentuation, both groups failed more in 3-syllable words than in 2-syllable words.
IV. As for reading comprehension, specially designed problems were used to probe what the causes of the inferior pupils' difficulties were.
The problems were divided into 4 parts: (1) comprehension of a 75-word paragraph; (2) translation of short sentences which were taken out of the previously mentioned paragraph and which included important function words; (8) questions concerning the grammar which was necessary for translating the paragraph; (4) test on words taken out of the paragraph.
The results were:
(a) Both groups showed the greatest difficulty in translating the short sentences.
(b) The inferior group had no exact knowledge of word meaning.
(c) The relation between the translation of the short.
sentences and the knowledge of word meaning was fairly high in both groups, but the relation between, other coefficients was not so high.
(d) Failure in translation was mainly due to lack of knowledge of elementary sentence patterns rather than of word meaning.
V. The teachers, teaching methods were examined in two ways. One was done by a questionnaire and the other was by tape-recording actual lessons in class. Based on the answers to the questionnaire, a numerical evaluation to each teachers methods was made to take one case for instance; it was able to out how much emphasis a teacher put on word drill. But actually, there could not be found the corelation between the teachers, methods and their pupils'ability. Therefore, the second means was employed. But in this case, the problem was how to give a. numerical evaluation to what had been recorded. As an index, the time employed for explanation or drill and the frequency of repetition were used. This brought more satisfactory results than the former, but was not entirely statisfactory.
