Abstract
In spite of the fact that English has expanded to become the preferred language of international communication in more and more (professional) fields, English teaching in Japan is still notorious for its inefficient attainment at any level of its educational system, for which a variety of barriers have been pointed out.Believing that the crucial barrier especially at university level lies in our students' low motivation for learning English, we have developed an original bilateral computer-aided Web system with materials to accelerate learners' motivation. This extracurricular multimedia device, aiming to develop our students' synthetic working abilities of English, consists of the activities: 1) reading aloud and listening to summarization of short lectures delivered by U.S. professors and 2) dictation and summarization in English and Japanese of ca. 600 articles drawn from TIME.The originality of our device centers on our constructing of the system on which the learners can evaluate for themselves their adequacy and degrees of comprehension and summarization at each stage of their activities. Specifically, we have devised our own computerized self-evaluation system to deal with various synonymous expressions in summarization. Our further devising is under way to build our students' essential fluency in English required in their academic field as well as in their university coursework.
