In this article, imitation and repetition of exemplars of the target foreign language usage is argued to be essential in learning the language. Firstly, it is claimed that procedural knowledge of the language rather than its declarative knowledge is the target of learning and that the learning of the former consists of establishing form-meaning connections of the language. It is also claimed that procedural knowledge of the target language is best learned through the learning of exemplars of the language usage as instances demonstrating form-meaning connections of the language. The arguments here are based on two recent theories relevant to language learning: ACT-R by Anderson (1993) and Usage-Based Model by Tomasello (2003). Secondly, it is argued that in input-poor learning environments declarative knowledge of the language can be a facilitator of the learning of the target procedural knowledge because it can assist learners to identify the connections between form and meaning. Thirdly, it is claimed that imitation and repetition play a crucial role respectively in establishing form-meaning connections of the language. Finally, it is pointed out that the notorious technique of old pattern practice can and must be reconceptualized as a cognitive type of practice promoting the learning of the connections.

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What kind of knowledge second language (L2) learners draw on when performing a grammaticality judgment task (GJT) has been a matter of continuing debate in second language acquisition (SLA) research. Previous research has shown that there is a relationship between the type of knowledge (i.e., implicit or explicit) and L2 proficiency levels. However, the type of L2 acquisition processes involved in GJTs (e.g., semantic processing, noticing, and metalinguistic reflection) has not been explored. This paper reports the results of a study with 160 Japanese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, and examines how the type of L2 knowledge, the type of L2 acquisition process, and the level of L2 proficiency interact in a GJT. Interactions were found between the type of knowledge, proficiency levels, and process types.

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This study aims to investigate how realizing problems during translation from Japanese to English and noticing forms in written model sentences encourage learners to internalize linguistic items. Thirty nine university students, classified into 3 proficiency levels, took part in an experiment, in which they wrote down problems they had realized while translating Japanese into English and also took notes of what forms they had noticed in looking at model sentences. A post test was given in the following week to examine how the participants internalized target linguistic items. The results are: 1) realizing problems and noticing forms prompt the immediate internalization of linguistic items and play an important role in mapping already learned forms with the new meanings in all proficiency levels, and 2) realizing problems and noticing forms make advanced learners internalize more linguistic items.

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This study longitudinally investigated the development of Japanese high school students' reading ability, focusing on its explanatory factors. The participants were given six English tests, and based on the data path models illustrating the structures of the participants' English reading ability were presented. The main findings were the major explanatory variables in the lower grades were knowledge of written language including grammar, and in the upper grades, their phonological ability including listening played an active role. These diachronic shifts were also confirmed in the comparison of better readers and low-level readers' models. More skilled readers had phonological abilities as the explanatory factors of their English reading performance, while in low-level readers grammatical knowledge was a constant determinant factor. As a pedagogical implication, for low-level readers, a training to improve their lexical and grammatical knowledge combined with phonological awareness is recommended.

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This study examined the correlations between (1) the teachers' awareness of the usefulness of reading strategies for helping students to read, (2) the activities in English classes, and (3) the students' awareness of reading strategies. The participants were 111 English teachers of 37 senior high schools in Gifu Prefecture, and 3,640 students taught by those teachers. Three types of questionnaire were made to investigate (1), (2), and (3). One of four grades of passage with comprehension questions were provided to the students before the questionnaire (3) based on their expected English proficiency levels. The main results were: (a) the teachers who were aware that top-down strategies were more useful for their students might consistently administer more top-down activities in class, and (b) higher proficiency level students utilized both top-down and bottom-up strategies significantly more than lower proficiency level students. The latter result suggested that the student proficiency level of English might be the determining factor in their reading strategies.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate how task difference and repetition can affect listening comprehension (LC). The tasks used in the experiment were the four-option multiple-choice task (MC) and the open-ended task (OE). The data collected from 54 Japanese university freshmen showed that listeners performed consistently better on MC than OE. This study also found that there was a difference between MC and OE in the effects of repetition: for MC, playing the text twice was effective in improving LC, but playing it three times was not so helpful: for OE, playing the text twice was not enough, playing it three times was needed to facilitate LC. In addition, this study compared MC with OE from the viewpoint of listeners' ranking among the first-, the second-, and third-hearing. The results showed a distinctive difference: high correlations were found in OE, but low correlations in MC. Based on these results, it is suggested that the outcome of listeners' performance depends on whether or not guessing could be utilized.

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In an effort to reformulate the affective domain of the listening process, the present study examines the psychological reality of the construct of "listening stress" introduced as an alternative to listening anxiety. The study also develops a construct model of listening stress through qualitative analysis of data obtained both by questionnaire and oral interviews with Japanese college students. The research results prove that the construct of listening stress is psychologically real with debilitative effects on the listening process. By developing a schematic construct model, the present study also reveals the possible components of listening stress and their relationships.

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The aim of this paper is to pursue predictors contributing to English writing ability in the high school setting, which is expected to be contributory to further research of English language teaching. In this paper, the data obtained were computed and multiple regression analysis was conducted with the data results of two types of writing task (dependent variables), and the linguistic tests plus metacognitive and affective factors (independent variables). Furthermore, using each factor as a dependent variable, multiple regression analysis was conducted repeatedly in order to identify the relationships among all the writing factors. Based on the data results, the path models were produced using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and the best model for writing ability was selected according to fit statistics. As a result, the primary common writing variables, such as 'Cloze', 'Motivation', and diverse metacognitive factors turned out to emerge; furthermore, various factors seem to be intertwined directly or indirectly in the Japanese high school setting.

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This study aims to investigate English writing and speaking abilities through grammatical knowledge. The first step to cultivate learners who can use English productively is to understand the use of grammatical items when they want to express something in English. Junior high school students are beginner learners of English. They always make use of the knowledge which they learned in English grammar classes. However, they can not communicate with the ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) well. In this study, I tried to focus on teaching grammar to lead to communication. After learning grammar, students were forced to make sentences and speak using the grammatical items in regular English classes. Finally, an oral test and a written test were conducted to examine whether students can write or speak English using the grammatical item correctly. The future tense and "There is ..., there are..." were used in this study. This study attempts to examine the relationship between grammatical knowledge, writing and speaking abilities in a junior high school setting. 60 oral tests and written tests by 60 students were analyzed. As a result, some features on grammar were found.

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The purpose of the present study is to investigate the applicability of two different kinds of activities, task activities and tasks, as a means for the improvement of the participants' understanding of the present perfect and the past tense at a technical college in Japan. A quasi-experimental study was conducted, setting four intact classes as experimental groups and one as a control group. Two of the experimental groups had initially experienced engaging in task activities three times, and the other two experimental groups had not experienced such activities. In the study, one of the experienced groups and one of the non-experienced groups practiced a task, and the rest practiced a task activity. The groups were compared in terms of their scores on multiple-choice tests, assessing if the learner could supply the most appropriate verb forms in a written dialogue. The quantitative results show that for the improvement of the target structures, the groups which engaged in a task showed significant improvement after the treatment whether or not they had previous experience with task activities. However, when the results of the test for other tenses were analyzed in order to see if there were any effects of overgeneralization, only the experienced groups which then engaged in either a task activity or a task showed an immediate significant difference.

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Based on previous research, the present study proposes six pedagogical principles for teaching the English articles at high school: 1)the idiomatic or conventional use of the articles should be learnt as such because there is no point in exploring an underlying rule, 2) the teaching of the generic use of the articles should be delayed until a later stage of language acquisition because it is very rare and difficult to understand, 3) whether the referent is context-unique is the best criterion for the use of the definite article and the learner should be given instruction in applying this criterion in selecting the appropriate article, 4) instruction in the countable / uncountable distinction should be given by starting with typical examples, 5) instruction in the countable / uncountable distinction should be taught by making the use of dual nouns to give the student a feel of the difference between the countable and uncountable forms of a word, 6) The student should be taught to use a dictionary to learn the countablity of new vocabulary on an item by item basis.

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This study examined the Revised Hierarchical Model proposed by Kroll and Stewart (1994). The model predicts a developmental shift from lexical links to conceptual links with increasing proficiency in second language (L2) learning. Two groups of junior high school students whose first language (L1) was Japanese participated in the study (i.e., first-year students: G1; third-year students: G3). Four types of stimulus sets were provided: 20 sets for Japanese word recognition (JR), 20 sets for English word recognition (ER), 20 sets for forward translation (L1 to L2: FW) and 20 sets for backward translation (L2 to L1: BW). A two-choice reaction time task was utilized to measure reaction times. The results showed that FW was slower than BW in G1, whereas no differences were shown in G3. The asymmetry found in G1 disappeared in G3. The prediction of the Revised Hierarchical Model was supported by the results of this experiment.

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This study focused on incidental vocabulary learning, specifically the effectiveness of several ways to trigger first awareness of a new word and then to enhance this awareness for retention of the word. Three ways to trigger the awareness (inference of the meaning from context, direct provision of the meaning, inference plus direct provision) and three ways to enhance this awareness (interpreting a passage with the word, freely producing a sentence with it, no activity) were identified and deployed. Two hypotheses were tested: that more words can be retained by giving additional intervention as awareness enhancement than by giving no such intervention; and that more words can be retained through triggering the awareness by giving context plus the meaning than by giving context only or the meaning only. The results partially supported the hypotheses, suggesting inference and enhancement can each generally produce better retention, but maximizing their effectiveness- depends on whether or not inference for first awareness is combined with provision of the meaning and then what type of enhancement follows.

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A lot of studies have been investigating factors influencing the success rate of lexical inferencing, but concreteness factor has been neglected. The aim of this study is to examine effects of concreteness on lexical inferencing. Four types of test were made to infer the meaning of: (a) concrete unknown words in concrete sentences, (b) abstract unknown words in concrete sentences, (c) concrete unknown words in abstract sentences, and (d) abstract unknown words in abstract sentences. The result revealed that concreteness of words did not influence the success rate of lexical inferencing, whereas the concrete context raised the success rate significantly more than the abstract context. Moreover, the result of questionnaire indicated that participants felt lexical inferencing from concrete sentences was easier than that from abstract sentences. These results imply that images created from contexts helped EFL students infer meanings of words. Therefore, a concrete rather than an abstract context should be used when we teach how to infer unknown words, so that students become more confident.

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The present study investigates the effects of morphological and contextual clues on Japanese EFL reader's lexical inferences. A total of 148 undergraduates participated in the experiment. Group A (n=70) completed the word-form based lexical inference test which examines the effects of morphological clues, while Group B (n=78) completed the context based lexical inference test which examines the effects of contextual clues on determining the word class and inferring the meaning. After they completed each test, both groups took part in a common lexical inference test which aims at examining the effects of two types of inference processes: morphology based, and context based processes. The results demonstrated that: (a) contextual clues had stronger effects on the success of the judgment of word classes; (b) the knowledge of derivational suffixes helped the word class judgment; (c) contextual clues had advantages over morphological clues on inference of the meaning; and (d) differences of two lexical inference processes did not have much effect on the success of inference. Based on these results, some implications for further research and instructions of lexical inference strategy are provided.

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This paper discusses "basic verbs" for Japanese learners of EFL at the junior high school level, which is part of the author's attempt to compose a "basic word list for Japanese beginners of EFL at the junior high school level." The verbs in the defining vocabulary of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the most common verbs in the English language in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, and the verbs used in the seven English textbooks currently used at the junior high school in Japan are surveyed, and the overlap among these three groups of data are compared. In an attempt to extract "basic" verbs, the concept of "coreness" (Carter, 1998) was employed to test the relevant verbs from the three groups of vocabulary. Some 85 verbs emerged as "basic." The remaining about 100 verbs, which seems to be the number of words proportionate to the total number of words in the Course of Study, are yet to be identified. For further investigation, a perspective from the learning of basic English structures needs to be incorporated into the results obtained herein.

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Now in the English education programs of Japanese universities, there is an urgent need to assist students who have not studied English positively and seriously for a long time. In order to assist the students move away from their long demotivated state, what teachers should do first is to know such students well. In Tsuchiya (2004b), nine demotivating factors of Japanese university students concerning English study were proposed. They are 1) reduced self-confidence, 2) classes, 3) compulsory nature of English study, 4) ways of learning, 5) teachers, 6) negative group attitude, 7) negative attitude toward English itself, 8) lack of positive English speaking model, and 9) negative attitude toward English community. In this article, an English class, which is usually regarded as a group of low achievement and low motivated students turned out not to be such a group. The class was divided into four groups based on those nine demotivating factors. The characteristics of each group are discussed in detail, comparing strong and weak degrees of each factor with the results of a background questionnaire in which the students were asked about their past experiences and learning environment of English. An implication for future classroom management is also suggested.

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The new approach to motivation recently taken in language learning has had a great impact on traditional motivation research. Referring to the new approach, this study focuses on an overlooked aspect of motivation, that is, state motivation, which plays a vital role in completing different types of tasks, and moreover discusses task characteristics that have a high probability to influence learner motivation. Hence, this study examines how state motivation relates to performance on tasks with distinctive characteristics and whether it varies from task to task. Results showed that (a) state motivation was correlated differently with different types of tasks, suggesting that tasks with certain characteristics were more suitably used to measure motivation, and (b) task types did not have any effect on changing a certain degree of state motivation, implying the powerful control of trait motivation over state motivation.

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The present study is a part of the medium-term project which is taking place in a former national university to explore a way of setting a standard of language proficiency required for Japanese teachers of English. This piece of research specifically focuses on the methodological dimension of the standard setting procedure with the deliberate applications of generalizability theory (Shavelson & Webb, 1991) and item response theory (Hambleton, Swaminathan & Rogers, 1991; McNamara, 1996). By means of this focus, the utility of the two statistical methods is described from theoretical and practical aspects, and this leads to revealing the complementary nature of the two methods. The article ends by summarizing how much the methods could contribute to the present twofold trend of English teaching/learning around the world: from paper and pencil test to aural/oral performance test; and from norm-referenced test to criterion-referenced test.

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Along with the spread of communicative language teaching, there has been growing interest in the measurement of EFL learners' communicative ability. This study empirically examines the validity of five communicative tests, and investigates whether reading sections designed to measure skimming, scanning, and global comprehension have high correlations with sections expected to measure the same sub-skills (the external aspect of validity), and how strongly the items in the same section are associated with each other (the structural aspect of validity). Results showed that (a) correlations among the reading sections measuring the same sub-skills were mostly moderate to high, suggesting relatively positive evidence of external validity, and (b) through cluster analysis, the scanning skill was identifiable in some test areas whereas skimming and global comprehension skills were not, implying that the structural aspect of validity was partially supported.

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The purpose of this study is to reveal the effects of affective variables on elementary school students' perceptions of their own English competence, and to examine the relationships among affective variables with respect to ages. Participants were 185 fourth graders (89 boys and 96 girls) and 143 fifth graders (60 boys and 83 girls). According to the results of path analysis, it was found that positive effects on perceived competence in English indicated willingness to communicate in English and enjoyment spending time with English, but a negative effect was anxiety in English for both fourth and fifth graders. Also, it was indicated that the path model of fifth graders was more expansive and complicated than that of fourth graders.

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There is a pressing need for us to reconsider the role and work of the ALTs and to propose more effective preparation for them on a practical level, since the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology announced in 2002 that the number of ALTs should be increased to the unprecedented number of over 8400. To cope with this rapid increase, however, surprisingly few surveys have been carried out in the recent years in the educational arena of ELT in Japan. In order to fill up this research void, our survey of ALTs and JTEs working in Hokkaido was conducted and analyzed in comparison with a previous nationwide survey (JET Programme Kenkyukai, 1996). The results shed light on a number of problems. There is still a difference of recognition vis-a-vis the position of an ALT between JTEs and ALTs. Furthermore, there has been an increase in the number of ALTs who tend to take a passive attitude toward team-teaching. Their present preparation proved inadequate on a practical level. Our comparative analysis leads us to propose effective ways to meet the pressing need stated above with regard to: (1) the position and work details for the ALTs and (2) their appropriate pre- and in- service preparation.

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With Community Involvement (CI) learning as its theoretical background and methodological model, this study reported on empirical research into intercultural joint classes conducted in the 2004 academic year. A questionnaire survey was conducted on 11 second-year university students, who participated in joint classes with the University of Hawai'i and Chiang Mai University, Thailand. The survey examined their responses concerning 7 items: confidence, English skills, emotion/motivation, interest, worth participating in joint classes, requests for next joint classes, the notion of "English as a tool for communication".

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In an attempt to achieve the goals of teaching reading stipulated in The Course of Study (MEXT, 1999) as well as to live up to its underlying principle, I adopted two young adult books as English reading materials for 3rd-year high school students. This paper reports why and how I used literature, and discusses some of its benefits. The selected two novels, which were written by contemporary hyphenated Americans, deal with cultural conflicts. One of the strengths of reading the literature on this subject is that readers can simulate cross-cultural experiences by considering the feelings of the characters, thus developing an ability to cooperate with people from other cultures and to survive in the international community. From a standpoint of language development, the original texts of young adult books, unlike abridged versions that are found in authorized textbooks, provide abundant input of authentic language used by the students' counterparts in English-speaking countries. Another advantage is that literary works, if selected to suit the students' interest and their English proficiency levels, prompt readers to search for information regarding the authors and the themes of the works on the Internet, which provides further input of English. These strengths of using the literature in a reading course are discussed in this paper, followed by some examples of the post-reading activities I created.

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The purpose of this study is to analyze the data collected from pre-service teachers and to examine what kinds of difficulties pre-service teachers face when they plan and do their teaching. I have been in charge of the English teaching analysis course for four years. Every year in class I ask students what they feel and think after teaching. The analysis of data has clarified where they feel difficulty in their teaching and revealed that they have difficulties in common. The skills they often find difficult when they plan their teaching and actually teach are those in (1) adjusting materials and teaching approaches to students' level, (2) giving clear directions, (3) managing class time, and (4) focusing their attention on students.

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