The present study aims to examine how teachers adjust their speech to interact in English with elementary school students in classrooms. Participants are four teachers involved in 5th and 6th grade Foreign Language Activities. Comparative analysis of the effect of teachers' language use (English and Japanese vs. almost all English) on linguistic complexity and the usage of interactional adjustment in teacher talk obtained the following three main results: The teachers who conducted the lessons almost all in English (1) adjusted their speech to make them shorter and less complex, (2) employed a larger amount and wider variety of interactional adjustment in terms of repetitions, comprehension checks and supportive gestures, and (3) elicited oral responses from students and facilitated student-teacher interaction by employing student-repetitions, translation of students' Japanese utterances, and display questions. This study also incidentally found that the teachers who avoided Japanese use were relatively reliant on students' Japanese use but encouraged the students to use English by showing their own positive attitude towards communication in English.

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Children who learn English through verbal input in Japanese elementary schools are exposed to many exemplars and are given the opportunity to imitate and repeat what they hear and to connect the meaning with the English sound. This procedure, termed "exemplar-based learning", contrasts significantly with rule-based learning. VanPatten(1993) claims that "form-meaning connections (FMCs)", an essential process for successful communications, makes for better input-processing. The rationales indicate that children's adaptation to FMCs may represent how children notice FMCs. One of the objectives of this study is to analyze to what degree children can notice FMCs to verb phrases (such as need an umbrella, give a flower to X) at certain grade levels. The results demonstrated that the more input children absorbed, the more successfully they noticed FMCs, even to previously unfamiliar verbs. Secondly, we examine whether children from 4^<th> grade and up merely memorize "chunks" or begin to develop analytical learning of schematized patterns (such as need X, and give X to Y). The result suggested that the higher graders might find some schematized patterns transiently, however, to identify children's schematization, further data will need to be collected.

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This study examines the effects of goal setting and self-monitoring instruction on students' goals in the classroom and motivation toward learning English. In order to promote autonomous learning, goal setting and self-monitoring instruction were integrated in the English extensive reading (ER) program in the classroom. Sixty first-year university students participated in this study. After 12 weeks of ER sessions, changes in three goal attributes-namely, specificity, difficulty, and commitment-were examined on the basis of goal setting theory (Locke & Latham, 1990). In addition, changes in motivation were examined on the basis of self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2002). Significant positive changes were observed in goal specificity and commitment as a result of the implementation of educational intervention. Moreover, students enhanced more self-determined forms of motivation. Therefore, these findings suggest that goal setting and self-monitoring instruction can motivate the students effectively and promote autonomous learning.

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There is a theoretical belief that shadowing will help learners pay attention to the phonological features of the aural input rather than to its contextual information. A previous study focusing on this issue indicated that success in repeating words in EFL shadowing was not improved by the natural context but rather by learner familiarity with the phrase. Thus, this study, using an original shadowing task and a questionnaire, attempted to reveal the role of phrase familiarity in shadowing, while comparing it to those of contextual information and of learner's proficiency level (i.e., lower and upper). The results clearly showed that learner familiarity with phrases (especially their phonological aspects) greatly improved the word repetition rates, whereas contextual information played a less important role. Moreover, they also indicated that the lower proficiency group depended more on phrasal knowledge than the upper proficiency group. These results suggest that shadowing practice may develop learner ability in phonological chunk, holistic, processing, an ability that may be basic to the improvement of all language skills. Additionally, it is assumed that instructions raising learners' strategy awareness may help improve their monitoring ability.

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The present study investigated to what degree native English speakers and Japanese English learners with different levels of L2 proficiency employ the cues of syllable duration and pause between syllables to segment words. 12 native English speakers (NES), 12 native Japanese speakers with high English proficiency English (JSH), and 12 native Japanese speakers with low English proficiency (JSL) participated in the monitoring task, which presented four kinds of sound stimuli (i.e., compound words, words whose first syllable was lengthened by 100ms, the original compound words with a 100ms pause between segments, and words with manipulated syllable duration and pause). Although the results did not show any significant effects or interaction of syllable duration and pause, they indicate different tendencies between the three groups. NES appeared to use acoustic information other than syllable duration and pause to segment words. And while JSH did not employ the same word segmentation strategy as NES, they showed a tendency to consider the relationship between syllable duration and pause to segment words. At the same time, it is highly likely that JSL were sensitive to acoustic information and relied on this sensitivity to detect words.

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The CEFR-J, a framework of reference for Japanese EFL learners based on the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), was publicized in the form of a temporary version in 2010 (Tono, 2010). The next research phase is two-fold: the validation of the can-do descriptors and the exploration of the possibility of its implementation. The present study focuses on the latter, estimating the readiness for the implementation of the CEFR-J in junior high schools (JHSs) in Japan. A survey was conducted to examine whether the 30 language tasks stated as Al descriptors in the CEFR-J were experienced by 447 JHS students. The results show that over 50% of the participants said that they had experienced 28 out of 30 activities, suggesting that the current pedagogical practice in JHSs is relatively compatible with the learner-centered, action-oriented approach, which is one of the tenets of the CEFR. On the other hand, results also revealed that a few language tasks students actually did in class were not perceived as having been experienced, suggesting that raising students' awareness as language users may be one of the key issues in the integration of the educational philosophy of the CEFR.

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Recent studies have revealed that confidence will prevent defensive pessimists, who account for more than 20 % of the whole, from learning. Defensive Pessimism is a sub-classification of defensive strategies involved in anxiety. Educational individualization demanded more knowledge concerning the exact relationship between defensive strategies and anxiety, which was not well unraveled. In addition, the scales of anxiety along the temporal dimension were not constructed, though each type of defensive strategy was predicted to possess a different liminal zone of anxiety toward their prospects. This study aimed to construct the scales of anxiety along the temporal dimension and to reveal the relationship between defensive strategy and anxiety. Two hundred sixty 10^<th> graders responded to a questionnaire on anxiety and protective strategies. As main results, first, the constructed scales of anxiety and defensive strategies had α reliability coefficients from .67 to .82. Second, all types of defensive strategies were positively related to Imminent Anxiety. Third, procrastinators were negatively related to Long-term Prospect Anxiety and Anxiety about Scholastic Marks of English Classes. Fourth, defensive pessimism was positively related to Long-term Prospect Anxiety.

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The present study examined how Japanese EFL readers revise their situation models, focusing on two factors: (a) learners' reading sub-skills, and (b) the causal structures of stories. A total of 76 Japanese undergraduates read stories which required them to revise their interpretation of the stories during reading (i.e., situation model revision), then they performed sentence verification and recall tasks. The readers' success with the situation model revision was assessed using the combined data on those tasks. The results showed that reading skills needed for successful revision can be explained by the two textual factors specified by causal network analysis: the explicitness of the revision clues (± explicitness) and the complexity of the causal structures in each text (± simplicity). Specifically, higher level reading processing (e.g., making inferences) was needed for readers to revise their situation models when they read a story which did not include explicit revision clues (i.e., - explicitness), whereas lower level processing (e.g., paraphrasing) was needed when reading a story with a complicated causal structure (i.e., - simplicity). It is suggested that teachers should carefully take into account students' reading sub-skills and the causal structure of a text when requiring them to flexibly interpret the text.

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This study examined the impact of EFL learners' proficiency differences on their CMC interaction in two types of tasks. First, 114 university students were divided into three pairs: the higher proficiency learner (H)-lower proficiency learner (L) pair, the H-H pairs, and the L-L pair. Each pair performed a symmetrical convergent task. Second, they were split into four pairs: the higher proficiency sender (HS)-lower proficiency receiver (LR) pair, the lower proficiency sender (LS)-higher proficiency receiver (HR) pair, the HS-HR pair, and the LS-LR pair. Each type of pair completed an asymmetrical convergent task. In the symmetrical convergent task, the L in the H-L pair generally surpassed the L in the L-L pair in fluency and adequacy. In the asymmetrical convergent task, the LR in the HS-LR pair generally surpassed the LR in the LS-LR pair in fluency.

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Finland has long been attracting attention of researchers and educationalists worldwide due to her constant top-level achievement in the PISA. It is not so well known, however, that Finland has also been ranked among the top-level countries in the TOEFL performance, implying that her English language education at school is highly successful. This paper, based upon a previous research which acknowledged English textbooks as a significant factor contributing to the success of English language education at school in Finland, has analysed English textbooks used at primary and secondary schools in Finland in search of possible reasons for the success of her English language education at school. Four distinctive features have been extracted through the analysis of English textbooks, being endorsed by the author's own observations of English lessons at primary and secondary schools in Finland. Referring to these distinctive features of textbooks, implications for English language education in Japan are presented as a way of conclusion.

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In recent years, several researchers have examined how second and foreign language learners can benefit from the insights of cognitive linguistics. There are, however, two fundamental issues: learnability and teachability. This paper investigates those two issues, learnability and teachability, as they relate to a cognitive linguistics approach to teaching the English prepositions in, on, and at to Japanese learners of English. The results of two studies are presented in this paper. The first study investigates whether Japanese learners of English can obtain positive gains through a cognitive linguistics approach, which uses a central image schema and a semantically motivated network. The results suggest that a cognitive linguistics approach is pedagogically more effective than the traditional approach to teaching English prepositions, in which instructors make no attempt to elucidate the motivated nature of polysemy. The second study reports the results of a qualitative analysis of the opinions of the teachers at junior high and senior high schools about the new approach. The teachers think that a cognitive linguistics approach has potential, although they also experience anxiety about using a new approach. Based on the results of the two studies, this paper discusses the necessity to develop worksheets and teaching manuals that the teachers can easily use without possessing linguistic knowledge.

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Although making inferences (e.g., predictive inferences) during reading plays an important role in text comprehension, readers do not always make correct inferences and it is necessary to suppress the inferences when they are disconfirmed by the following context. However, the suppression of inferences has received little attention in previous research. Thus, the present study aimed to examine whether Japanese EFL readers suppress the inferential information which they activate during reading, focusing on predictive inferences. In addition, the effects of disconfirming the activated inferences on readers' text representations were also investigated. In the experiment, 37 Japanese university students read several sets of short narratives and engaged in probe verification and cued recall tasks. The result of the verification task showed that the activation of predictive inferences remained immediately after they were disconfirmed by the context. Moreover, the results of the cued recall task revealed that the disconfirmed inferences were not deleted but were maintained in readers' final text representations and that the disconfirmation had a negative impact on the comprehension of explicit text information. The present study suggests there is difficulty in suppressing the activated predictive inferences among EFL readers, and provides further understanding of the nature of inferential information in reading.

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The present qualitative study aims to construct a conceptual model of English teachers' reflective thinking stimulated by student feedback. Seven senior high and one junior high school teachers participated in this research to improve their English classes. The tool called "Questionnaire for Creating Comfortable English Classes" (QCCEC) was created (1) to elicit student feedback about English classes and (2) to facilitate teacher reflective thinking based on the student feedback. In order to analyze the teachers' written data obtained by email interview and finally propose a conceptual model of English teacher reflection, Modified Grounded Theory Approach (M-GTA) developed by Kinoshita (2003, 2007) was employed, using Structure-Construction Qualitative Research Method (SCQRM) (Saijo, 2007, 2008) as the theoretical framework for this study. The reflective thinking model generated suggests that examining student feedback would derive three categories: (1) deeper understanding of students, (2) deeper understanding of their teaching, and (3) teacher motivation for change and growth, all of which might lead to teacher professional development.

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To develop vocabulary skills, it is necessary for language learners to know how words are used in context. However, past studies have rarely investigated how learners mentally establish the relationship between lexical items and contexts. To examine whether and how they retain contextual information in relation to the lexical items, an experiment was conducted with 46 university students. They incidentally learned 10 pseudowords in a glossed context and were asked to recall as much contextual information as they could. As a result, the participants incidentally constructed the word-context association for 42% of the items, but the rate was reduced to 20% after a one-month delay. The data were further analyzed in terms of two contextual variables: context informativeness and imageability. It was found that word-context connections were significantly affected by the interaction between the two variables. The result suggested that when the learners were asked to recall contextual information, they depended on mental imagery aroused from context if the presented context had less informativeness. Thus, it was revealed that learners constructed word-context association through reading under the influence of the two textual factors. The research findings suggest teachers constantly provide students with contextual input that is sufficiently imageable and/or informative.

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Although lexical access is considered as a dimension of vocabulary knowledge, a test of such knowledge has yet to be developed and validated. In this study, an attempt was made to develop and validate a test that measures lexical access speed. A total of 303 Japanese university students and English teachers took the test and the results were compared with overall English proficiency. Further, a questionnaire was conducted with teachers to find out if they considered the test a measure of lexical access speed. The results revealed that although what the newly developed test measured showed moderate correlations with English proficiency, the test tended to show shorter response times for participants with higher proficiency. It was also revealed that the majority of the teachers felt that the test measured their lexical access speed or word recognition speed, even though they were not informed of the purpose of the test. The potential of the test as a measure of lexical access speed is discussed.

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In narrative reading, people understand the overall theme of the text as well as the content of the text. However, whether readers can automatically understand the themes or not has not been fully investigated. The aim of the present study is to examine the effects of reading goals on EFL readers' narrative theme comprehension. A total of 64 Japanese undergraduates took part in this study. They were randomly divided into the two reading goals (i.e., reading for theme comprehension/reading for recall) and performed a recall task and a theme comprehension task after reading four narrative passages that included implicit narrative themes. The recall production and the answers for the theme comprehension task were analyzed. The results showed that the participants in the theme comprehension recalled explicit textual information, especially outcome-related information, better than those in the recall condition; thus, this process contributed to comprehension of the narrative theme. These results suggest that, when given a reading goal for narrative theme comprehension, EFL readers understand the theme of the text strategically rather than automatically.

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This study examined how Japanese EFL learners process unknown words in a text while reading, with a focus on two factors: (a) contextual constraints, and (b) recall instructions of a contextual sentence. Thirty-eight undergraduates read 16 contextual sentences with target words in four conditions: strongly contextual constraints with or without a free-written recall task, and weakly contextual constraints with or without the same task. They then performed a plausible judgment task and a priming task to assess how they processed the words and whether the word information extracted from contexts were retained or not. The results showed that the strongly contextual constraints enabled the learners to predict the meanings of unknown words without any instructions of lexical inferencing; additionally, the recall task facilitated the identification of the meanings of unknown words even if they were weakly constrained. Interestingly, it is implied that the even weakiy contextual constraints might contribute to the immediate retention of identified meanings. These suggest that teachers should consider the interaction between contextual constraints and comprehension of given contexts, when requiring students of various proficiencies to learn vocabulary through reading.

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The present study investigated the effects of elaborative interrogation on EFL reading comprehension. The elaborative interrogation technique requires readers to clarify the relationships between the main idea in a text and other information by asking questions on the main idea of each paragraph (Seifert, 1993). In first language (L1) research, the effectiveness of elaborative interrogation has been widely supported. However, few studies have examined the effects on second language (L2) reading. A total of 49 Japanese undergraduate school students took part in this study. They were divided into four groups: control-upper (n = 11), control-lower (n = 14), treatment-upper (n = 11), and treatment-lower (n = 13). Their performances in a summary writing task were compared in order to examine the effects of elaborative interrogation on EFL readers of different proficiency. The main findings of this study were (a) the elaborative interrogation facilitated EFL reading comprehension, especially understanding of the main ideas of the text and other information related to them; and (b) the facilitation effect of elaborative interrogation did not differ according to participants' reading proficiency.

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This research addresses whether Working Memory (WM) capacity influences syntactic parsing strategies by using temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrases (such as "The boy read the book on the chair instead of the other books."). We used four types of expenmental sentences: minimal attachment and non-minimal attachment sentences, and two versions of modificand-prepositional phrase distance (i.e., short and long versions). The results showed that Japanese EFL learners, as well as L1 readers, find low non-minimal attached sentences more difficult to process than they do minimal attachment sentences. On the other hand, the length of the distance between the modificand and prepositional phrases does not affect processing performance. It was also found that the participants with a large WM capacity performed better than those with a small WM capacity, but they show the preference for minimal attachment regardless of WM capacity. This suggests that Japanese EFL learners, in the processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences with prepositional phrases, follow the Minimal Attachment Strategy regardless of WM capacity.

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This study aimed to explore the characteristics and developmental phenomena of Japanese learners of English along with their raters' perspectives relating to range in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001). One hundred thirty-five students at junior/senior high schools and universities carried out oral interactions in groups of three, and ten raters assessed the speakers, utilizing one of the criteria in the CEFR, range. The results of the analysis showed the highest correlation between the CEFR measures (scores) and the number of types, the Guiraud index, and the number of tokens per clausal-unit. Specifically, the Guiraud index provided a way of differentiating between the participants, including lower-level speakers, whereas the Type-Token Ratio (TTR) did not. The total number of formulaic sequences also showed clear developmental phenomena. The correlation coefficients between the CEFR measures and lexical indices were much higher than between the CEFR measures and syntactical indices, suggesting that lexical diversity could be a useful indicator of a wider range of speech.

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The purposes of the present study are (a) to investigate the spelling acquisition among Japanese high school students using various spelling tests and (b) to verify the acquisition order of English spelling with implicational scaling by comparing spelling test performance. The study employed five types of spelling tests, namely story form, timed dictation, list form, multiple-choice, and matching task. Statistical differences among five test scores indicated that the production type tests (i.e., story form, timed dictation, and list form) were more difficult compared to the recognition type tests (i.e., multiple-choice and matching task), which was in consistency with the previous studies. To verify whether the difficulty of spelling tests reflects the learner's acquisition order of English spelling, the statistical method called implicational scaling was utilized for the analysis. The results showed that this method was beneficial for understanding acquisition order of English spelling ability among EFL learners.

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The purpose of this study is to examine how L2 learners' collocation knowledge can reflect their proficiency of a target language. The experiment was conducted with 159 first-year university students, who took (a) an English proficiency test called the Computerized Assessment System for English Communication (CASEC) and (b) a collocation test named the Depth Test of Collocation Knowledge (DTCK), which was developed to measure the depth of participants' collocation knowledge. DTCK includes two types of test items: One asks test-takers to choose a word that collocates with the most frequent meaning of a target word, and the other asks them to choose a word that collocates with another less frequent meaning of the target word. We found the following: (a) There was a high positive correlation between CASEC and DTCK, which indicates that learners' collocation knowledge can be a strong indicator of their L2 proficiency; (b) the higher L2 proficiency was, the deeper L2 collocation knowledge he or she showed; and (c) the participants had more knowledge of the collocates combined with the frequent meaning of the target words than of the collocates combined with less frequent meaning of the target words, regardless of their proficiency.

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This study focused on how task repetition influences the oral performance of the same task and a new task of the same type. The influence of giving learners the opportunity to attend to forms after the 1st-time performance was also examined. The participants, university students, had five sessions in five weeks and performed the same narrative task twice in each session. In a session, while a control group (N = 13) repeated a task, an experimental group (N = 14) had time to attend to forms after the 1st-time performance. The 1st-time performance in Task 1 given in Session 1 was compared with the 2nd-time performance in Session 1 immediately after and the 3rd-time performance in Session 5 four weeks later, and with the performance of a new task of the same type in Session 5. Both groups performed the same tasks more fluently and accurately than they had the first task; however, the experimental group performed the same tasks and the new task of the same type more accurately than the control group. This study proposes the possible effectiveness of task repetition with the opportunity to attend to forms for language acquisition.

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Recent research investigating how the motivation to learn English can be enhanced has included several studies that discussed numerous motivational strategies (i.e., methods and techniques to generate and maintain the learners' motivation). However, in order for the outcomes of these studies to be fully utilized in actual classroom settings, they need to be used diagnostically and applied directly to the subsequent educational improvement. This study examined how English learners perceive motivational strategies, and whether instructional practice in keeping with the appraisal of these perceptions influences their motivation toward English learning. The results showed that (1) learners with different motivations appraised the effectiveness of motivational strategies in different ways, and (2) less motivated learners seemed to benefit the most from the instructional practice using motivation diagnosis as references. Based on the results, some educational implications and directions for future research are provided.

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The Ministry of Education issued the "Strategic Plan to Cultivate 'Japanese who can Use English" in July 2002, which regards STEP Pre-1 grade, TOEFL 550 and TOEIC 730 as the level of English proficiency that junior and senior high school English teachers should attain. Soon after that, the Ministry announced the "Action Plan to Cultivate 'Japanese who can Use English" in May 2003, and the plan states "English lessons should be taught mostly in English, ...", and "..., teachers should conduct their everyday class mostly in English, ...". The ministry apparently requires not only English teachers' level of English proficiency but also their ability to teach English with mostly English in class. Furthermore, Foreign Language Activities became compulsory in 2011 at elementary school, which means elementary school teachers are also required to have a certain level of English proficiency to lead the activities. Such background demands have a direct impact on the student teachers who are going to teach the language in future. They have to prepare for such demand. This paper reports an pre-service teacher education program designed and implemented to foster student teachers' ability to use classroom English in English classes.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors affecting the students' satisfaction and the grade of university's general English courses. All the English classes in the course were taught with the same syllabus, the same text books and the same tests. Twenty-eight questions with a five-point scale were created for the English course evaluation. Six hundred ninety-one students in 24 classes answered the questions at the end of the course. The students' final grades were evaluated with a six-point scale. The following three points were concluded from the results of the data analyses: (1) "The confidence of the improvement of English skills" affected strongly the degree of satisfaction, but not the grades. With a view of improvement of the English course, the revision of the grade criteria will be needed to be able to reflect "the improvement of English skills". (2) "The appropriateness of the class level and materials" also affected positively satisfaction. This result suggests that the appropriate placements in English classes might be very important on General English courses. (3) "The degree of diligence" was the most important factor in grades but it did not affect course satisfaction. "The degree of diligence" might be one of the most important factors to maintain the quality of the English course. Too easy course just for raising the degree of satisfaction of the course is not preferable for the English program. The balance between satisfaction and the grade should be considered.

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