This study aimed to examine factors that might affect listening comprehension ability of Japanese learners of English. The factors were vocabulary/grammar, reading comprehension, articulation speeds for Japanese and English words, English repeatability (i.e., the ability to repeat verbal input in English), auditory short-term memory, reading rate, and reading efficiency. The present study investigated these factors for the first-year students at a Japanese senior high school and made an attempt to explore exactly how they affected listening comprehension ability of Japanese learners. The results showed that listening comprehension of learners with good short-term memory was significantly better than that of learners with poor short-term memory in cases where their vocabulary/grammar and reading test scores were within the same level. A significant correlation was also observed between the articulation speed for English words and English repeatability, and between English repeatability and listening comprehension ability.

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This study aimed to explore the analysis units that would be suitable for listening recall. It compared four analysis units-idea unit, pausal unit, tone unit, and proposition. Forty-seven participants were asked to listen to a passage twice and write down everything that they could remember from it. The recall protocols were scored against the four analysis units. Their score on each of the four analysis units was compared to an external criterion measure, the listening section of the computerized assessment system for English communication (CASEC). The results indicated that all the analysis units were significantly correlated with the external measure. Further, this study analyzed the data using factor and cluster analyses. The results of these analyses revealed the characteristics of each analysis unit. Finally, this study identified the tone unit to be the most suitable analysis unit for listening recall.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the correlations between the paper and listening tests of English proficiency administered by the National Center Test for University Admission or Daigaku Nyugakusha Senbatsu Daigaku Nyushi Center Shiken (hereafter the Center Test) in 2006, when the listening test was introduced for the first time. The analyses were conducted based on data from 244 third-grade high school students who took both tests. The results showed that there was a moderate positive correlation between the paper as a whole and the listening tests. A closer examination revealed that the listening test was also moderately correlated with two sections of the paper test: grammatical knowledge and reading comprehension of a narrative. However, there was only a very weak correlation between the listening test and the section on pronunciation, word stress and sentence stress in the paper test Other findings are as follows: (a) The listening test had the same high level of reliability as the paper test; (b) The listening test had the same level of item discrimination but (c) a lower level of item difficulty. Some suggestions for future test construction are drawn from these findings.

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A recall test is useful in that the test score is not affected by question items; however, this test is frequently criticized as being simply a memory test that does not measure pure reading comprehension. Although retrieval cues are sometimes provided to readers in order to decrease the effects of the memory load, it is unclear how these cues are related to the ideas recalled. The aim of this study is to examine what types of retrieval cues can promote recall performance of Japanese EFL learners. In Experiment 1, we investigated the relationship between learners' L2 reading proficiency and the importance level of recalled ideas. In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of cue types on recall tests. In addition, the results of three types of recall tests - free recall, recall with main cues, and recall with detailed cues - were compared in order to elucidate the validity of cued recall tests. The results showed that retrieval cues did not promote recall performance. Moreover, we found that cued recall tests had lower correlations with L2 reading proficiency scores than free recall tests, which indicates that retrieval cues reduced the concurrent validity.

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This study examined how the number of unfamiliar words university students encounter in the TIME magazine and Cambridge CPE would affect their self-assessed reading comprehension level. It yielded the following three results: first, students' self-assessed comprehension level was in strong inverse proportion to the occurrence ratio of their unknown words. Second, with a vocabulary of approximately 6,000 words, they managed to attain only 54% of comprehension. Third, the occurrence ratio of those words whose meanings students were able to guess to some extent averaged approximately 1% across all the comprehension levels, and was not related to their self-assessed level of comprehension. Thus, the study suggests that in order to read current English without much difficulty, students need a much larger vocabulary, and that their insufficient vocabulary can perhaps be augmented by a well-developed guessing strategy, a problem which has yet to be researched.

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The present study was implemented to find out, in order to help Japanese EFL learners comprehend passages better, in what order a series of inference questions should be arranged. In addition, the interaction between question sequence and learners' L2 reading proficiency levels was examined. Inference questions were ranked from the viewpoint of the degree of proximity to a text theme, and questions asking for themes of entire passages were labeled as thematic questions. The main finding was that for lower L2 reading proficiency learners, the local-to-global transition, or the step-by-step way of questioning had a positive effect on their reading comprehension. In contrast, the learners of higher L2 reading proficiency showed a tendency to benefit from the opposite sequence. Furthermore, it was shown that these sequence effects were not limited to a particular type of question, but were spread over a series of questions

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The present study is based on a ten-month extensive reading program for all the first-year students at a senior high school. The students' awareness of reading strategies as a kind of metacognitive activity was examined through two investigations involving the use of cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches. In the first investigation, the first-year students, who attended the extensive reading program, were compared with second-year students at the same school, who had not been exposed to extensive reading. In the second investigation, which was conducted in the following year, the students who attended another extensive reading program as an elective course in their second year as well were compared with those who did not take the course. From the results of these investigations, we can infer that learners acquired some reading strategies in the earlier stages of the extensive reading experience and became aware of others in the later stages. Further, the learners showed confidence in the use of global strategies and awareness of progress in the use of these strategies. The present study suggests that the metacognition of reading strategies is related to learners' reading ability and their experience of extensive reading. It also suggests that confidence in the use of reading strategies might be more related to learners' experience of extensive reading than to their reading ability.

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The present study attempts to explore the relationship between reading comprehension and morphological development with specific reference to a unique type of learners called "Good Readers Poor Spellers (R+S-)." R+S- are learners who are good at reading comprehension (well above average), but are extraordinarily poor at spelling (below average). In previous studies, it was found that R+S- were poor decoders. Then, how could they be good readers? It is said that reading comprehension is closely related with morphological development. Therefore, this study investigated correlations between reading comprehension and morphological development (both the meanings of base words and their morphological forms) in terms of the three extreme types: R+S+, R+S- and R-S-. The results showed that R+S- acquired word meanings as well as R+S+, and their knowledge of morphological forms was in the middle between R+S+ and R-S-. The results indicated the strong relationship between reading comprehension and morphological development.

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The current research is a longitudinal study that probes how speaking performance of senior high school students changes across a year (specifically 13 months) from the first year to the second year at an English Course at a Super English Language High School (SELHi). Thirty-nine Japanese learners of English (20 male and 19 female students), who were frequently exposed to English input and often used English, took a speaking test of picture description twice. Analyses of their utterances show substantial progress in speaking performance. To be specific, all the aspects tested in syntactic complexity and lexical complexity changed to a moderate or large degree. In addition, there was also improvement in some aspects of the number of uttered words and speaking time, fluency, and accuracy (e.g., an increase in the proportion of error-free clauses).

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The present study attempts to examine the developmental processes of two types of speaking ability of Japanese EFL learners by analyzing the breadth and depth of conjunction use in oral performance. Based on Cummins' Hypothesis (1980), the author (2004) generated a research hypothesis focusing on the commonalities and dissimilarities between the two types, including BICS-type speaking and CALP-type speaking, and tested it by four studies (2005a, 2006a). From a cognitive linguistic perspective, the interlanguage corpus data gathered through the performance tests enabled the author to examine the internal process of linguistic production and information processing by inspecting the participants' use of conjunctions. Hierarchical cluster analysis with two explanatory variables yielded different types of grouping between the two types of oral performance. Accordingly, it was found that the two types of speaking ability were acquired through different developmental stages.

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The purpose of the study is to investigate the efficacy of learning experience during the elementary school period, particularly in relation to the improvement of pronunciation skills. The focus was put on the difference between pronunciation skills of inexperienced and experienced students. 148 seventh graders' pronunciation skills were measured by means of an interview task with a native speaker of English. Five raters evaluated their pronunciation skills holistically on a five point scale. The experienced students, who were at an advanced level of English proficiency, showed that they had significantly higher pronunciation skills than both the inexperienced and other experienced students. The existence of a threshold level was suggested. The amount of learning experience could not directly explain the difference found between the inexperienced and the experienced students.

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This study attempts to clarify the difference between word frequency and word difficulty for Japanese EFL learners. The first experiment is designed to investigate learners' vocabulary knowledge at each frequency-band based on JACET 8000. The subjects took a bilingual computerized vocabulary size test and their scores were analyzed according to the frequency bands from Level 1 to Level 8, each level containing 1000 words. The results show that frequency bands can provide an implicational scale for the difficulty of words up to Level 4. Beyond Level 5, however, the scores for each level remained the same. The second experiment asked 40 English teachers about the difficulty of the target words used in the first study. The results showed that the number of the words judged as "difficult" by more than three of the teachers increased gradually up to Level 4, but beyond this level the number of difficult words in each level remained the same. However, when we took a different data analysis approach by modifying the definition of "difficulty" to "judged as such by more than 50% of the teachers", we discovered a conflicting result; the "difficult" words continued to increase even after Level 4. Conclusions are drawn about these two apparently contradictory results.

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This study aims to investigate how noticing forms in relevant input presented immediately after output encourages learners of English to take lexical items into their IL systems. Twenty nine university students, classified into 3 proficiency levels, took part in an experiment, in which they worked on guided composition, and then took notes of what forms they had noticed in looking at relevant input presented immediately after output. The participants were asked to work on the same guided composition in the following week to examine how they retained lexical items from the relevant input. The results are: 1) The output-input process leads advanced learners to retain more lexical items; 2) The uptake is promoted when: i) the participants analyze a form in the relevant input syntactically, and/or ii) the participants perceive a form in the model as being in contrast with its counterpart in their own output and realize ungrammatical or less appropriate status of the latter; and 3) The output-input process helps learners gain lexical knowledge on use.

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To increase learners' vocabulary size, using morphological knowledge is useful. It has been suggested to lead to a 1.6-2 increase in a vocabulary size. There are three kinds of morphological knowledge, abbreviated RK, SK and DK. RK is relational knowledge, referring to the knowledge of the relationship between morphologically related words (e.g., happy and happiness). SK (syntactic knowledge) refers to the explicit knowledge of syntactic functions of suffixes (e.g., -ness). With DK (distributional knowledge), learners become aware that to which part of speech a certain suffix attaches. A previous study (Sakata, 2006) has shown that Japanese EFL learners experience developmental stages through RK→SK and that those learners have rather sufficient RK. This present study investigated how four independent variables (the presence of contexts, the semantic relatedness of the base words and derivatives, the difficulty of suffixes and the difference in frequency between base words and derivatives) affect the RK ratio as a dependent variable. The results showed that contextual help and utilizing semantic relatedness needed a minimal vocabulary size. Suffix difficulty didn't affect the RK. Frequency affected all vocabulary size groups' RK.

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The Semantic Transfer Hypothesis (Jiang, 2000), formulated to explain a stage of vocabulary development in the second language (L2) mental lexicon, claims that learners automatically exploit first language (L1) semantic information in L2 use. It is claimed that existing L1 semantic information is automatically detected and new foreign language (FL) forms are subordinately connected in the L2 mental lexicon. In this study, English word pairs sharing the same L1 translation equivalent (Japanese) and word pairs that have different L1 translations were presented to Japanese advanced EFL learners in a semantic judgment task. Participants reported significantly faster reaction times (RTs) and less error percentage with the same translation pairs than with different ones. These results--along with the measure of the degree of semantic relatedness between each pair--were interpreted as evidence for the automatic use of L1 semantic information in the L2 mental lexicon.

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In the last few decades, second language vocabulary acquisition has been an interesting topic of discussion for researchers and teachers. Vocabulary learning, rather than being a peripheral area in second language learning, is one of its core aspects. Thus we should pay more attention to vocabulary learning itself and vocabulary learning strategies (VLS). The purpose of this article is, therefore, to investigate the effects of strategy training in the learning of English vocabulary. Firstly we review earlier research findings concerning VLS. Secondly we examine, experimentally, the effects of strategy instruction on the learning of English vocabulary by Japanese junior high school students as beginners. Following this we discuss the issue of how strategy instruction affects the acquisition of English vocabulary. Finally, based on the results of the experiment of strategy instruction on them, we conclude this article by stating that vocabulary strategy instruction is highly effective for Japanese junior high school students as beginners learning English vocabulary.

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The effect of instructions on pragmatic development has often been a focus of studies on interlanguage pragmatics. However, the instructions applied in these studies have not been thoroughly discussed and thus have not been expounded upon any further than the familiar dichotomous instructions; e.g., implicit/explicit teaching. For this reason, the author reviews the previous studies that dealt with the effect of instructions, focusing particularly on Japanese EFL learners, and attempts to recategorize them into more appropriate approaches. By doing this, a guideline for the effect of instruction on pragmatic development can be proposed for future research so that the limitations concerning these studies can be addressed. Initially, this paper defines the study on the effect of instruction since numerous studies unfortunately failed to confirm the effect of instruction but confirmed the teachability of certain pragmatic features. Second, it sorts out instructions in these studies based on their purposes, revealing that the traditional explicit/implicit dichotomy may not necessarily be feasible. Third, it discusses the part of pragmatic competence for which the newly categorized instructions are effective. Finally, the paper concludes that these three considerations should be taken into account for further research on the effect of instruction on pragmatic development.

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The current study investigates whether explicit instruction of paraphrases as a communication strategy (CS) improves EFL learners' syntactic accuracy of speech production. For that purpose, 30 undergraduate students participated in this study. 15 of them performed as an experimental group receiving explicit instruction focusing on using paraphrases with relative clauses (RCs) to avoid communication breakdown. The other forms a control group without instruction of paraphrases, but just taking pre-, post-, and delayed tests. While the result of ANOVA revealed that using paraphrases with RCs did not contribute significantly to accurate speech production, it was shown that the experimental group did not increase their errors among three tests. Additionally, a multiple regression analysis showed that errors of morphemes and word omission influence the number of total errors per 1 analysis of speech unit (AS-unit).

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The aims of this study are to explain the theoretical background for designing a 'Strategic Competence Test' for EFL learners, and also to assess the 'Strategic Competence' of Japanese high school and college students. Communicative competence consists of several major competences. One of these, namely Strategic Competence, used to get little attention in foreign language classrooms. However, the importance of developing the strategic competence of learners has become increasingly recognized by many researchers and practitioners. This paper presents the brief theoretical background to the design of a 'Strategic Competence Test,' based on the idea of Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell (1995). The test was conducted with 264 Japanese high school students and 245 college students, so that the results would show us which specific strategies are familiar to Japanese students and also what differences are seen between the two groups. The results of the study encourage us to promote the learners' knowledge about communication strategies for getting involved in conversations more actively.

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This study explores whether Japanese EFL learners, too, find the processing of Garden Path (GP) sentences difficult and whether the capacity of L2 Working Memory (WM) limits the L2 learners' ability to deploy semantic and syntactic cues in parsing sentences. The result showed that Japanese EFL learners find GP sentences difficult to understand and that the former use semantic information as clues to avoid the difficulty in processing GP sentences, regardless of WM capacity, which is inconsistent with the L1 study. These results may stem from the e-f score, which reflects the speed-accuracy trade-off in the high-and low-span groups. Therefore, we propose using the efficiency score (p-e score), which takes processing speed into account.

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The aim of this paper is to investigate the difficulties Japanese EFL learners encounter in reading various post-modifications. First language (L1) psycholinguistic studies show that difficulties to comprehend sentences with relative clauses are attributed to processing difficulty of these structures. It is possible that the difficulties Japanese EFL learners encounter in reading such complex sentences can be also caused by processing difficulty, but little research has been conducted so far to examine this possibility. In this study we conducted a self-paced reading task to examine how Japanese EFL learners process English sentences with post-modification structures. The results of our experiment suggest that the ease/difficulty in comprehending these sentences for Japanese EFL learners also depends on processing difficulty. The detailed reading time analyses reveal that particular regions in the sentences are responsible for learners' processing difficulty. It could be a result of the violation of the canonical word order and/or the absence of relativizers.

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With the purpose of identifying strategies to be taught in junior high schools, the present study (a) investigates the relations among hesitation phenomena in students' utterances, their linguistic proficiency, and their anxiety over English conversations, and (b) explores students' use of Conversational Strategies. To this end, proficiency tests (consisting of Listening (section) and Structure & Reading (section)), four-point-scale questionnaires for measuring anxiety, and a four-minute interview task were administered to 37 JHS students. The results show that (a) students lacked turn-taking skills, (b) linguistic proficiency had much to do with speech rate, (c) pause length was relevant to students' anxiety, and (d) students rarely used Conversational Strategies like 'Asking for Repetitions', 'Fillers', and 'Paraphrasing'.

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Recently, language testing research has thrown more and more light on the nature and function of performance tests, compared with traditional paper-and-pencil tests. This new focus is closely related to a world-wide trend in education, namely, the introduction of criterion-referenced assessment and the harmonizing of this with norm-referenced assessment. In fact, in many countries or regional organizations (such as the US, the UK, the Council of Europe etc.) scales of language proficiency have been created to provide a more reliable foundation for subjective assessment in oral interview tests. Of course, first and foremost, these scales need to be valid (in accordance with assessment purposes), reliable (regardless of the assessors, the 'assessees' and the testing occasions), and practical (for actual use). On the basis of this background, the present study attempts to develop an English oral proficiency scale by means of Many-facet Rasch Measurement (MFRM) analyses (Linacre, 2004), in order to make it possible for Japanese teachers of English to make reasonable judgements about their students' performance, even in classroom settings.

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This paper reports from a three-year study which looked into the effects of experiencing an English program at the elementary school level at a later stage, namely, at the junior high school. The study followed a group of students who had a systematic introductory program, and a group who did not, for three years at their junior high schools, and periodically observed their behaviors in their English classes. In the final year of the study, the students' English test scores were looked at, and their psychological states were measured by a questionnaire. This paper reports the results of the data collected by the questionnaire. The data seem to show that the group with the introductory experience was better motivated and had less anxiety toward learning English, and that more of them went through the three years of formal English study without developing severe negative feeling. Although the better results cannot be solely attributed to the introductory program, they give the author enough to claim that such a program at the elementary school level would assist more children to learn English successfully at later stages.

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In the present yakudoku-method centered English language education in Japan where English is learned by replacing it with Japanese, students are forced to memorize large vocabulary lists by rote and have to rely on katakana pronunciation, both of which discourage them from learning English. Phonics instruction is effective in solving these problems because students become able to read and write English properly by connecting the letters of the alphabet with their sounds. The purpose of this study is to show that phonics instruction improves Japanese students' reading and writing ability, as well as raising their desire to learn English. Three kinds of experiments and a questionnaire were conducted here. The first 10 minutes of every class period was allocated to phonics instruction using a phonics textbook developed by this author. Through this six-month instruction, the students acquired word attack skills. The results of the experiments showed significant improvements in students' reading and writing abilities. The results of the questionnaire indicated that many students felt that phonics instruction had been useful to them, and that their reading and writing abilities had improved.

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This paper is a report on theme-based language instruction which seeks to integrate language acquisition and the learning of the target theme (i.e., "yutori education and the decline in the academic abilities of Japanese students"). In five consecutive 90-minute lessons, the participants learned about relevant major issues currently discussed (e.g., PISA 2003 results, economic gaps and academic gaps, the five-day school week, the reduction of Integrated Study Hours), and also advanced their acquisition of English through a variety of language learning activities (e.g., Listen & Tell, Multi-round Debate). Important characteristics of the main activities and curriculum organizing principles are described in detail, and the results of actual implementation are discussed, based on data from lesson observations, teacher and students journals, and questionnaires.

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