Learning EFL vocabulary in context is an essential process for the enrichment of the mental lexicon; however, past studies have shown that the level of success of contextualized learning is often different between groups with different levels of lexical proficiency. The present study explores the conditions under which a lower proficiency group can gain as much vocabulary knowledge as a higher proficiency group, focusing especially on the mental process of generating an image from reading contexts. The experiment was carefully designed to take into account (a) learners' lexical proficiency, (b) instruction on how to read the context, and (c) quality of provided context. A significant difference in scores on a context-cued word-recall task between the two proficiency groups was found only when the context was less imageable; when the groups were presented with more imageable contexts and instructed to try to imagine the situation described by the context (referred to as imagery instruction), the lower proficiency group's scores were equal to the higher proficiency group's. Based on the finding that imagery instruction did not reduce learning efficiency, no reason appears to exist to avoid vocabulary teaching that focuses on the meaning of a highly imageable context.

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The present study examined the question of whether L2 learners' scope of sentence planning varied according to the type of the subject phrase containing double nouns: coordinated noun phrase (e.g., "the dog and the table") and prepositional noun phrase (e.g., "the dog above the table"). An experimental technique in psycholinguistics, preview, was applied to investigate the extent of planning before speech onset and to clarify the magnitude of the effect of advance access to each noun in the subject phrase. The results revealed that Japanese learners of English at college level planned not only the head noun of a prepositional phrase subject (i.e., "the dog") but also the noun in the prepositional modifier (i.e., "above the table") prior to speaking. This result is in sharp contrast to the scope of planning by speakers of L1 English revealed by previous studies. We assumed that learners took the noun in a prepositional modifier into the scope of planning because of interference from the opposite word order between English and Japanese. Finally, two pedagogical methods are proposed to enable learners to plan a sentence following the word order in English.

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In 2006, an English listening test was added to the National Center Test for University Admissions (NCT) in Japan. We investigated whether including the Center listening test on the NCT has had positive washback on students' listening skills and attitudes toward studying listening. In Study 1, test scores of university freshmen dating back to 2002 were analyzed to investigate the improvement in students' listening skills. In Study 2, a questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate students' motivational aspects. The results revealed three findings. First, the test scores did not show a marked improvement in listening skills after the Center listening test was introduced. Second, the Center listening test might influence students in different majors to a different degree. Third, the majority of students favored the introduction of the Center listening test, and most were encouraged to study listening and felt their preparation had a positive effect on their score.

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This paper describes how explicit instruction in reading strategy affects Japanese EFL college students' strategy use and English reading abilities. Thirty-six intermediate proficiency EFL college students were instructed in five reading strategies, namely, phase reading, identifying referents, inferring unknown words, understanding signal words, and identifying main ideas and topic sentences. Instruction lasted for ninety minutes once a week during English classes provided over a four-month period. Presentation, exercises, mini-tests, and portfolios were provided to the participants. A general reading test and a questionnaire on the frequency of reading strategy use were conducted prior to and immediately after the four months of instruction in an experimental group and a control group. Moreover, in the experimental group, a pre- and post-reading strategy test was administered and additionally, a thinking-aloud protocol was used to determine the effects of the instructed strategies. Findings revealed that frequency of strategy use, but not reading ability, differed significantly between the groups. The strategy test revealed there were differences of gains in score among the five strategy sections. Students' awareness of strategy use was markedly increased by the instructed activities. In terms of reading attainment through strategy use, some strategies may be more difficult to acquire than others.

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Finland has attracted a great deal of attention from educators all over the world mainly due to her continuous excellence in the PISA, but Finland has also succeeded in fostering high-level English proficiency among her EFL learners in spite of the relatively small number of lesson hours given to learners from primary school through upper secondary school, about two-thirds the number of lesson hours Japanese EFL learners receive during the same period of schooling. In order to find out factors conducive to Finland's success in bringing about highly competent English learners, a questionnaire study was conducted against Finnish university students and English teachers. In this questionnaire, the participants were asked to evaluate the importance of the fifteen success factors extracted from the review of the literature and the field study conducted in Finland. These fifteen success factors have been fairly well endorsed by the participants except one factor (the EU's language policy for globalisation). It has also been disclosed that the teachers tended to be more positive in their evaluation than the students although there exists a high correlation between the teachers' and the students' responses.

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The present study examined how Japanese EFL learners infer the meaning of unknown words from discourse information, focusing on their depth of vocabulary knowledge (DVK) and availability of contextual cues for lexical inferencing. A total of 70 Japanese undergraduates performed a lexical inferencing task in a single sentence and a text (i.e., sentence-based and discourse-based inferencing tasks). In both inferencing tasks, five target words were presented to the participants with or without local cues (+Local and -Local conditions): +Local strongly constrained the inferable meanings of target words and -Local did not. The participants' responses were scored by a 3-point scale: unsuccessful, partially successful, and successful. The scores showed that (a) EFL learners can infer the meaning of unknown words more successfully by using local and global cues than by using only local cues, and (b) EFL learners with greater DVK can make a better use of the global cues than those with smaller DVK. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis showed that (c) the learners changed non-working local cues into effective ones in discourse-based lexical inferencing by connecting local cues with available discourse information.

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When L2 learners encounter unknown words in a text, they must narrow down the possible inferable meaning of those words based on contextual information. However, it remains uncertain how specific meaning is strongly inferred according to a context during reading. This study examined how the strength of contextual constraint affected the specificity of activated lexical inference and its activation level in a semantic relatedness judgment task with 52 Japanese undergraduates. Two kinds of contextual constraint were distinguished: those that strongly constrained the inferable meaning of unknown words and those that did not. The results showed the complicated effects of contextual constraint and L2 reading proficiency on lexical inference specificity and its activation level. Specifically, in the strong constraint context, high L2 proficiency learners strongly activated the specific meaning of target words, while low L2 proficiency learners could not narrow the possible meanings down to the specific ones during reading. In the weak constraint context, the general meaning of target words was strongly activated regardless of the learners' L2 reading proficiency. Together, these results suggest that teachers should understand the benefits of contextual constraint to the specificity of lexical inferences activated in reading comprehension for practical reading instructions.

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This study focused on how task repetition influences proceduralization of linguistic knowledge. The participants performed two narrative tasks once a week. All participants were given the same picture stories for the first task and had time to notice errors after the first task. At the second task, the Repetition group (N = 14) was given the same picture story as the first task whereas the No Repetition group (N = 14) was given a different picture story from the first task. One week after Session 4, two posttests were given: posttest 1 with completely new pictures and posttest 2 with the same pictures as the pretest conducted in Session 1. At the posttest 1, the fluency of both groups was similar; however, the No Repetition group spoke less fluently than at the pretest whereas the Repetition group retained their fluency. Furthermore, the Repetition group spoke more accurately than at the pretest whereas the No Repetition group showed no difference. The Repetition group also spoke more accurately than the No Repetition group. At the posttest 2, both groups spoke more fluently and accurately than at the pretest; however, the Repetition group spoke more fluently and accurately than the No Repetition group. This study implies the possible greater effectiveness of task repetition with noticing for facilitating proceduralization rather than no repetition with noticing.

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In narrative reading, readers not only understand specific information in the text but also activate thematic inferences to understand the main points or messages in whole texts. However, given that L2 or EFL learners require greater cognitive loads than L1 readers for lower-level processing such as words and sentences, it can be difficult for them to comprehend the overall meaning of the text. Moreover, the factors that affect the thematic inference process have not yet been fully examined. Therefore, the present study examines the process of thematic inference activation in EFL reading by taking into account learner and text factors. The reading time method was adopted in pilot and experimental studies to measure learners' reading process. Japanese EFL undergraduates performed a self-paced reading task with texts that had a thematic inference target. The results of the pilot study confirmed that learners could automatically make thematic inferences during the reading process without strategic instruction. Moreover, the experimental study showed in detail the process of thematic inference activation, indicating that (a) learners activate inferences when outcome-related information in the text is presented, and (b) upper and lower proficiency readers differ in the process of thematic inference activation.

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The aim of the present study is to reveal some of the cognitive processes of spoken language production of Japanese EFL learners by examining whether syntactic priming found in sentence completion tasks (i.e., monologues) can also be found in scripted interaction tasks (i.e., dialogues). There were 54 Japanese EFL learners and 17 L1 English speakers involved in the study, with the data of the latter being used as a baseline. The participants sat face to face with a partner (i.e., the experimenter) and performed a picture matching task where they described pictures alternatively with their partner and judged if the pictures on both sides were the same or different. The results show that, overall, L1 English speakers used the same structures as those produced by their partner significantly more than Japanese EFL learners did, unlike the results of previous studies using sentence completion tasks in the case of prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures. This might be because the interaction tasks in the present study required the exchange of information (i.e., meaning) and the construction of syntactic structures at the same time. Such tasks might have put a higher cognitive load on Japanese EFL learners, who lack automaticity in sentence processing. The paper goes on to discuss the possibility of using syntactic priming to promote implicit learning of syntactic rules for language production.

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The present study investigated how the similarity features between texts (i.e., similarity types, causality) and L2 reading proficiency affect EFL learners' reading comprehension through analogical transfer. To clarify the process of analogical transfer as well as the quantity and quality of information comprehension facilitated by this process, a recognition test and recall task were administered. The results showed that analogical transfer occurred in EFL reading comprehension. However, each process in the series was influenced by different factors. Accessing and mapping processes were driven by the causality between texts. Meanwhile, the process of encoding the analogical information to the EFL learners' text representations was mainly driven by the surface similarity between texts. Moreover, it was revealed that the transfer of causal structure from the source analog to the target representation effectively enhances text comprehension, but it requires a certain level of L2 reading proficiency.

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Previous studies have revealed a relationship between demands on cognitive resources and inference generation during L2 reading (Horiba, 1996; Yoshida, 2003), but few studies have further investigated this relationship with a focus on specific types of inferences. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine how predictive inference generation among EFL readers is affected by cognitive load during reading. The experiment was conducted with 36 Japanese university students. In a dual-task that required participants to hold word lists in memory while reading short narratives, predictive inference generation was measured with a lexical decision task and a probability judgment task. To vary demands on readers' cognitive resources, the word lists included either three or six words. The results of the lexical decision task demonstrated that readers activated predictive inferences when no word lists were being held in memory, but inference generation was impaired when readers had to maintain lists of three or six words, suggesting that the generation of predictive inferences can be resource-demanding for EFL readers. The results of the probability judgment task also suggested that reduced cognitive resources specifically affected the automaticity of inference generation and the time required to construct inferences. Based on these results, some implications were provided for EFL reading instruction.

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The present study aims to examine how the lexical retrieval process affects oral sentence production of second language (L2) learners through a syntactic priming experiment. Forty six Japanese EFL learners participated in a picture description task. The participants were divided into four proficiency groups. They were asked to read the prime sentence aloud, and then to describe a picture with a single sentence. In total, 60 different pictures were used. The participants encountered each picture twice during the experiment. The pictures were shown with the objects' names written on the pictures (with-word condition) one time, and were shown without the names written (without-word condition) one time. Overall, the syntactic priming effect was observed in the without-word condition. When compared by proficiency, the upper intermediate groups exhibited syntactic priming effects both in the with and without-word conditions. The priming effect was found only in the without-word condition, in the lower intermediate group. No syntactic priming effect was found in the upper or lower groups in either condition. Considering the residual activation account, the results indicate that the way the combinatorial nodes are activated differ depending on the learners' proficiency. The results also indicate that syntactic activation is suppressed when lexical processing requires a greater cognitive load.

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The present study investigated effects of agreement type and morphosyntactic regularity on L1-Japanese learners' acquisition of explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge of the English plural morpheme. We adopted a timed grammaticality judgment task (TGJT) to measure implicit knowledge and an untimed grammaticality judgment task (GJT) for explicit knowledge in order to observe differences between learning difficulties in each type of knowledge. Twenty six participants completed the two tasks, and the scores were submitted to a three-way ANOVA (task types, agreement types, and morphosyntactic regularity). Only the main effect of morphological regularity was statistically significant in TGJT, while the interaction between agreement type and morphosyntactic regularity was observed in GJT. This result indicated that the two linguistic factors affect the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge in different ways.

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This study focuses on attitude change in Japanese pupils' communicative attitudes at one elementary school in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. The writer surveyed the 5th and 6th grade pupils' communicative attitudes and other attitudes from the end of the 2007 to the end of the 2009 school years. The data were collected three times to examine pupils' attitude changes over three years, depending on their genders and grade. The study found that pupils' communicative attitudes tended to decrease as the number of English classes increased. As their communicative attitudes also had a tendency to decrease slightly according to age, it seemed that pupils could not foster positive attitudes toward communication. Concerning gender, girls had more positive attitudes toward communication, while those of boys decreased more in three years. This study also tried to find a relationship among their communicative attitudes and other variables, and the result showed that pupils' communicative attitudes were affected by their attitudes toward learning. The study concluded that if pupils have confidence and belief in learning and an interest in foreign languages, they can maintain positive attitudes toward communication with others who have different ideas or different cultural backgrounds.

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Peer review is a useful technique even for EFL learners to improve their writing skills (Liu & Hansen, 2002). This study investigated eighteen Japanese university students to find the effects of peer review from the perspectives of writers and reviewers. From the former perspective, the results showed that proficient writers incorporated more comments into their essays. In addition, writers with good organization, style and overall writing skill chose comments that they need to improve their essays. However, from the perspective of the reviewers, due to their habitual tendency to focus on form, writing ability had no positive effect on the way they choose the comments when they gave comments to their peers. That is possibly because form-oriented L2 instruction could have an influence on students, resulting in a focus on grammar even in peer review. Therefore the research implied that in these kinds of EFL settings, intensive peer review training and proper guidance are essential to change their focus on various aspects of writing.

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This study investigated the effects of anxiety on speaking performance in a case study approach by analyzing learner language elicited in a stress-inducing speaking task and examining the influence of anxiety measured in real time as they performed the task. Six Japanese university students learning English at the pre-intermediate level participated in the study. Each participant was asked to make four short speeches in English in front of the others. After each speech, their anxiety was measured with a five-point Likert-type scale. They were also asked to reflect on their task process and write a report on how their anxiety affected their performance. The results indicated that anxious participants lacked fluency, accuracy, and expressiveness in their speeches. For future research, increasing the number of participants and refinement of measurement of anxiety as well as more control of learner characteristics were considered to be necessary.

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This study investigated whether phonological representation and knowledge of letter-sound correspondence rules of romanized Japanese influenced Japanese elementary school students' word recognition. The participants were Japanese third-grade elementary school students who were tackling English word recognition. The 20 English words which were presented to the participants were organized into four Word Groups. Word Group 1 consisted of the English words whose phonological representations could be easily built based on the knowledge of letter-sound correspondence rules of romanized Japanese and had already been acquired by the participants before the experiment. Word Group 2 consisted of the English words whose phonological representations were easily assembled based on the knowledge of romanized Japanese but had not yet been learned by the children before the experiment. Word Group 3 was composed of the English words whose phonological representations were not easily formed with the knowledge of Japanese romanization but had already been learned by the children before the experiment. Word Group 4 consisted of the English words whose phonological representations were not easily constructed based on the knowledge and had not been obtained yet. The effects of phonological representation and letter-sound correspondence rules on written word recognition are discussed.

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This paper focuses on an investigation of test fairness using bias analyses in the teacher employment examinations (TEEs). In order to become an English teacher in public schools, candidates are required to pass both the first and the second tests. This paper exclusively focuses on the second test, assessment of candidates' teaching performance via microteaching. A purpose of microteaching is to assist teachers in identifying their weakness and in improving their teaching skills (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2008). However, Grossman (2005) and Monk (2008) show serious concern about the use of microteaching for assessment and selection purposes. Therefore, it would be worth investigating the extent to which scores given by raters (employers) would have an impact on candidates (i.e. employment decisions). For this purpose, bias analysis techniques were conducted to investigate interactions between raters and candidates. Four raters (two experienced English teachers and two local education board officers) rated 100 candidates. Data were analyzed using FACETS, a multi-faceted Rasch analysis program (Linacre, 2005). Results imply that scores given by the raters might have a direct impact on employment decisions. This paper discusses issues with the use of microteaching in the light of test fairness in TEEs.

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In the current Japanese EFL context, the promotion of communicative competence has been highly recommended, and hence the importance of task based language teaching or the use of output activities is focused heavily on due to its possibility to enhance not only language proficiency and use but also learners' motivation to learn English and willingness to communicate. However, there has been not so much research investigating the effects of open tasks on the development of communication variables. This study attempts to reveal whether or not learners' communication variables would change through a seven-week long debate project. The results indicated that from a global perspective learners' trait and state willingness to communicate and communication apprehension did not significantly vary whereas their trait and state perceived communication competence significantly developed. This study also discovered that from an individual perspective the debate was more effective for those who were less oriented toward communication. It ends with some pedagogical and future implications.

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Under the new Course of Study announced in 2008 and 2009, Foreign Language Activities started at primary schools in 2011, the number of English lessons increased from three to four classes a week at lower secondary schools in 2012, and English lessons are going to be taught basically in English at upper secondary schools in 2013. Considering such a political emphasis on the development of students' English communicative ability, it is critical to foster teachers' professional expertise to teach the language. This is not only true for in-service professional teachers but also pre-service student teachers who learn at teacher training colleges to become future English teachers. Yamamori (2012) reported a practical program specialized in fostering student teachers' ability to use classroom English in English lessons. In order to improve the program, this case study pursues how the student teachers, who had studied in the program before teaching practice, recognized their ability to use classroom English during teaching practice.

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