The present study aims to test what has been known in SLA as the aspect hypothesis, which claims that the acquisition of verb inflections in an early interlanguage development are influenced by lexical aspect that each verb possesses. In order to test this claim, I used 3,498 samples of past tense verbs from learner corpora consisting of free composition data by the second and the third year junior high school students in Japan. Although I employed the Vendler's classification of four lexical aspects, the results indicated that the acquisition of the past tense marker was only affected by two aspectual categories, 'stative' and 'dynamic'. Since this binary division of the lexical aspect has not appeared in previous studies, I argued that there are four potential reasons for the outcomes: 1) the nature of learner corpus data, 2) the effect of input, 3) the possible L1 influence, and 4) the effect of tasks.

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This research presents two conclusions about EFL learner's syntactic processing in the written language. First, the experiment made on senior high school students showed the possibility that an enforced decrease of syntactic processing strategies leads to a smaller difference between comprehension and production. Second, it demonstrated that some of the subjects clearly followed the different syntactic processing mechanisms in comprehension and in production. Some could not comprehend relative clauses well though they could produce them. Others could not produce but could comprehend them. These results show the possibility that there is little difference between comprehension and production in EFL learners' pure syntactic processing in the written language, though the learners may have two different syntactic processing mechanisms running in opposite directions.

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The aim of this paper is to verify the effects of the new way of instructing the subjunctive mood presented in Nagai(1997). Its main claims are: (1) the main semantic feature of the subjunctive mood is not the counterfactual condition, but expression of the language user's mental attitude when s/he is not necessarily talking about reality; (2) we should not categorize its several usages based either on the tense or the form it takes, but present one basic rule for expressing subjunctive meanings: we can create a sense of incompatibility by means of tense-manipulation; (3) in addition to exercises on forms, we need more exercises on meaning. Several hypotheses about the effects of instruction were set up, and a comparison was made between two classes; the control group taught in the traditional way and the experimental group in the new way. Since the learners of the experimental group showed better performance, the hypotheses were generally verified and the new way of instruction turned out to be promising.

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Teachability of communication strategies (CS), i.e., whether or not CS-based instruction brings about desirable effects in second language acquisition, is a contentious issue in CS studies. This paper first indicates three major problems of empirical CS studies which have attempted to provide evidence for a positive view of teachability. One of them is concerned with lack of comprehensive examinations of teaching materials. To discuss and illustrate this problem, 21 English textbooks currently used in Japanese junior high schools were analyzed, referring to the theoretical and empirical outcomes of CS studies in the past. The result reveals that no systematic attempts to apply research results of CS studies are made in the analyzed textbooks. Based on this analysis, this study further discusses needed conditions to resolve the teachability issue and concludes that more examinations of teaching materials, observational studies, and empirical studies are required to predict precisely when and how to introduce CS-based teaching into classrooms.

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Teacher feedback or peer feedback on students' written compositions is one of the frequently used instructional methods in writing classrooms. Writing researchers have been interested in the effect of feedback, but most of them have investigated the feedback effect only in terms of the improvement or the rate of incorporated feedback comments in revised texts. In other words, they have taken a product-oriented approach. Through the theoretical examination of previous studies in the light of revision processes, this paper argues that students' successful revisions made on the basis of specific comments do not necessarily indicate that they have acquired more sophisticated revising skills, and that the approach is not adequate to understand the effect of feedback on students' compositions.

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The purpose of this study is to reexamine the nature of revision with a particular reference to the relationship between revision and 'reading' (reading that is conducted in the writing process). Recent process-oriented writing research has assumed that the manner of conducting revision differentiates the skilled from the less skilled writer, and this difference gives rise to the differing quality of written product. However, the problem is that why this difference occurs has not been made clear. In this study, it is assumed that the function of 'reading' is the crucial factor which affects the quality of revision to a great extent. Then the study was implemented to scrutinize how 'reading' works in the writing process. As a result of text analysis, it became clear that the essays produced without 'reading,' especially macro-level 'reading,' have certain characteristics compared to the essays produced under the normal condition. Specifically, (1) dispersion of focus, (2) lack of transition markers, (3) digression within a paragraph, and (4) repetitious use of words were observed. Therefore, it appears that the degree of success in 'reading' is one of the main causes determining the quality of revision.

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Listening tests involve two types of comprehension question according to language skills to be tested. Literal questions measure the ability to understand the propositional meaning of a message, whereas inferential questions attempt to measure the ability to interpret the illocutionary meaning implied in the message. The purpose of the present investigation is to determine whether the ability to make pragmatic inferences can be measured along the same dimension as the ability to understand information at the literal level. In other words, this study aims at investigating whether or not there are two distinct traits. A four-option multiple-choice, 50-item listening comprehension test was developed and administered to 256 Japanese learners of English. Skills judgements, reliability, IRT-based approaches and factor analyses were used for checking skills separability. The results show that the ability to interpret an utterance cannot be measured along the same dimension as the ability to comprehend a message literally, although the two traits are highly correlated.

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Cognitive styles of individual learners are considered to play an important role in second language learning. This article presents a study on the relationships between Field Independence / Dependence (FI/D) cognitive styles, the listening ability of the subjects, and their use of listening strategies. 153 adult EFL subjects took the Embedded Figure Test (EFT) to measure FI/D, listening comprehension tests, and filled out a strategy questionnaire. The results showed there was a nearly moderate correlation between EFT and listening test scores but significant differences between Field Independent and Dependent subjects were found only in a few strategies. A few unexpected strategies used by the subjects indicated that some successful listeners may utilize the characteristics of both Field Independence and Dependence when necessary and strategy use may be affected more by the content of the task rather than individual cognitive style.

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This paper tries to determine how learners' perceptions of strategy utility and cost are related to their actual strategy use and non-use. To date, most of the relevant studies have been descriptive in nature in that the research approach taken is to focus mainly on finding interlearner differences in strategy use. Since learning is basically an individual and self-regulated process, we cannot ignore intralearner factors and should see what makes learners decide to use or not to use strategies. A questionnaire survey was conducted to explore to what extent and how Japanese university learners' perceptions of utility and cost of strategies have effects on actual strategy use and non-use. It was found that their perceptions of strategies clearly influence their use and non-use of the strategies in many different ways. Particularly, the results strongly showed that the more useful and important learners perceive a specific strategy to be (utility judgment), the more often they actually use it. Some other interesting findings were also shown with implications for future research in this field.

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Although it is generally thought that words which are difficult to learn are also hard to retain, researches on vocabulary learning often fail to grasp the evidence of this statement. We looked at foreign-language vocabulary forgetting in Japanese EFL learners (N=21), using a paired-associate learning in which English words were paired with Japanese translations. In the learning phase, the participants memorized all the words. Two post tests followed 4 days and 11 days after the learning respectively. The stimulus materials were controlled on word concreteness. Receptive testing took place (L2-L1 direction). It was found that 1) concrete words were less susceptible to forgetting than abstract words at 1st post test (4 days after). However, 2) this concreteness effect could not be seen between 1st and 2nd post tests (11 days after). Theoretical accounts of these findings were proposed.

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This paper explores English learners' ability to guess the meaning of unknown words from their linguistic context. Specifically, the study focuses on (1) the optimal ratio of unknown to known words in which Japanese EFL learners can guess successfully and (2) the relationship between different contextual clues and their use by about 300 Japanese high school students in different grades; i.e., first- to third-years. Findings show that there is no significant difference between the means in success rates for the two groups for either ratio: 1:35 or 1:40. This is regardless of participants' grades although more students can guess successfully in a ratio of 1:40 than in the 1:35 ratio. There is only one exception where there is a significant difference between the two groups of first-year students regarding one passage. Moreover, the results indicate that there is a significant difference in the use of contextual clues though there is one exceptional case for first-year students. The results also show that there is a significant difference between the use of local and global clues.

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A brief overview of the research findings on the processing mechanisms associated with the phonological loop of working memory shows that second-language acquisition is assumed to be guaranteed by increasing (1) skill-based procedural knowledge as well as declarative knowledge, (2) articulation speed along with recognition accuracy, and (3) memory span. The following one-shot experiment has been carried out with particular emphasis placed only upon the second factor concerned with articulation speed and recognition accuracy. In the experiment, comparisons were made among the effects of utterance repeatability (i.e., speed) and accuracy on aural comprehension ability under the three teaching conditions, (1) where stimulus utterances were slowly presented, with both accuracy and speed being ignored, (2) where they were slowly presented, with only articulation accuracy being focused upon, and (3) where they were presented at accelerating speeds, with both articulation speed and accuracy being focused upon. The results showed that articulation speed and recognition accuracy were the two determining factors which helped us predict fairly accurately their aural comprehension ability.

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This paper attempts to examine in what kind of relationship the processing and storage components in working memory operate in L2 visual sentence-comprehension. Two notions from L1 reading studies - capacity theory and trace-decay hypothesis - are considered as distinctive arguments here; the conceptual basis of the former is resource-sharing between two components following the principle of a trade-off relationship, and the latter is based on resource-switching with the assumption of trace-decay. Reaction times for gender-mismatch detection in self-paced reading task were analysed to investigate the relation between the two components. Two types of data analyses - mixed-design ANOVA and correlation coefficient - suggested that there was a simple forgetting in proportion to the reading rate rather than a trade-off between information maintenance and processing difficulty. This argument is further discussed in relation to the L2 reading threshold hypothesis with the assumption that the interference resulted from resource-demanding language processing in L2 causes the information decay, which could as a result impair the whole comprehension process. Implications for L2 reading pedagogy are discussed in the conclusion.

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This study discusses some issues regarding nativeness in English language teaching. Both native and non-native professionals have raised their voices against the wide-spread idea that an ideal English teacher is a native English speaking teacher (NEST). This is called the native speaker fallacy (Phillipson, 1992a). This paper first reviews recent issues regarding NESTs vs. non-NESTs and then introduces the six advantages of non-NESTs clarified by Medgyes (1994). Then three suggestions are made for Japanese teachers of English (JTEs). JTEs are expected 1) to know the fact that 'the native speaker fallacy' and its related issues have been discussed over many years, 2) to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of both NESTs and non-NESTs, and 3) to establish an English community where everybody uses English as a means of communication to create practical English users or multiple competent speakers (Cook, 1999).

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This paper deals with the Dutch National Action Programme on Foreign Languages (NAP) as a case of nationwide management and implementation of policy-making. The aim of this programme is "to put a national policy on language education and foreign-language use in a coherent framework" (Tuin and Westhoff, 1997, p.22). This programme is related to the question of how to tackle the problem of continuity during the various stages of foreign language education in school and society in general, which has been in the subject of much criticism in the Netherlands. Japan also has this problem and the government has taken some measures for the improvement of foreign language teaching (FLT) as a whole, but these measures are likely to have only a limited impact on the fundamental reform of FLT in Japan because the proposals do not include the basic research data actually used for making proposals and the procedure of implementing the proposals. The Dutch approach, on the other hand, is extremely purpose-focused and rational, and this approach would give an insight to Japanese leaders on the management of nationwide FLT reform.

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