The purpose of this study was to determine the degree to which native English speakers and Japanese English learners employ the cues of syllable duration to discriminate compound words from nominal phrases. Two compound words (greenhouse and goldfish) were selected as the target words, and the first syllables were lengthened by 20 ms, 40 ms, 60 ms, 80 ms and 100 ms (2 words x 6 steps). Twenty-two native English speakers (ES) and 24 native Japanese speakers (JS) were asked to decide whether or not 12 kinds of sound stimuli constituted a compound word. The results showed that the difference between the groups in their responses to greenhouse and goldfish was significant and that responses to the stimuli as compound words also differed depending on the duration of the first syllables. Although neither groups tended to show an innate or intuitive sense of the absolute value of syllable duration that would enable them to discriminate compound words from nominal phrases, they appeared to take into account the ratio of the duration between the first syllable and the second syllable. The native Japanese speakers appeared to be more sensitive to the given acoustic variables.

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This paper reviews research on various factors of willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language (L2), and discusses antecedents of unwillingness to use English among Japanese youth. Past research identified the critical role of learners' own beliefs in their WTC, but little research has been done on how particular types of self-belief are negatively related to WTC. The present study introduces Higgins' self-discrepancy theory into WTC research and proposes that the lack of WTC is associated with discrepancy between actual self-concept and ought standards imposed by other people. Using questionnaire data collected from 249 university students, structural equation modeling was performed to evaluate two proposed WTC models distinguished by whether communication opportunities arise inside or outside the EFL classroom. The results of this study support both proposed models that integrate English anxiety, motivation to learn English, perceived present communication competence, and future communication competence. Pedagogical implications for treating psychological problems leading to decreased WTC are discussed.

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This study examined how seductive details, interesting but unimportant text information, influenced expository text comprehension of Japanese EFL learners. Whereas inserting seductive details originally aims to motivate learners to read complicated expository texts, past L1 studies suggest that such information distracts their attention from the main ideas of the text. In this study, 123 Japanese university students read an expository text either with or without seductive details (the +SD vs. the -SD condition), and then completed immediate and one-week-delayed recall tasks. The results of the recall tasks showed that the learners' attention was strongly drawn to the seductive details, regardless of their English reading proficiency. However, the seductive details did not hinder the learners' comprehension of the base text and main ideas. While the seductive details did not affect the quantity of text comprehension, detailed comparisons showed that they influenced what the learners remembered from the text. These findings suggest that seductive details do not always work negatively in expository reading, and the relationships between seductive details and surrounding contexts are closely relevant to whether seductive details have positive or negative effects.

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Readers often make inferences about the likely outcomes of events described in the text (i.e., predictive inferences). However, these inferences are sometimes inconsistent with the following text. In this case, readers need to revise their inferences for successful comprehension. This study investigated Japanese university EFL students' text comprehension when encountering the context disconfirming their predictive inferences. In the experiment, participants read several short narratives where a predictive inference was initially induced but later disconfirmed. Participants' eye movement data were collected to examine real-time comprehension processes during reading. Participants' text memory was also assessed by a sentence recognition task after reading. The results of the recognition task showed that readers had difficulty eliminating disconfirmed predictive inferences from text memory. More importantly, eye movement analysis suggested that both higher and lower proficiency readers immediately detected inconsistencies between drawn inferences and the context disconfirming the inferences during reading; however, lower proficiency readers experienced more difficulty in integrating the disconfirming context into current comprehension. These results suggest the difficulty specific to less proficient EFL readers.

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This study examined whether word-context semantic similarity computed by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) predicts the performance of incidental L2 vocabulary learning. LSA is relevant to the usage-based model of language learning, which premises that learners obtain lexical knowledge from the information about how words are used in context. In the experiment, 153 Japanese undergraduates were given 20 target words with contexts whose proposition had higher or lower semantic similarity to those words (HSS vs. LSS context) in the lexical inference and multiple-choice glosses tasks. A Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) test was used to assess incidental gains in word meaning and usage knowledge. The analyses of the task performances showed that the learners inferred the target word meanings from the HSS contexts more successfully than from the LSS ones, but obtained similar scores between the two context conditions in the multiple-choice glosses task. Nevertheless, the VKS results demonstrated that the HSS contexts greatly contributed to the incidental gains in word meaning and usage knowledge. Thus, LSA predicted the outcomes of incidental vocabulary learning, which indicates that the learners acquired lexical knowledge from usage-based contextual information.

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This study aimed to develop and validate a scale to measure the Grammatical Carefulness (GC) of foreign language learners. GC, by its definition, refers to psychological, behavioral, and meta-cognitive traits of a learner, and it entails highly controlled, cautious, analytical, and time-consuming language use. By conducting a set of questionnaire surveys targeting Japanese junior high school, high school, and university students (N=2,288), a Foreign Language Grammatical Carefulness Scale (FLGCS) with 14 items, written in Japanese, was developed and tested for its factorial structure, reliability, convergent, content, and criterion validity. The results demonstrated that FLGCS yields three factors: (a) phonological, (b) lexical-syntactic, and (c) pragmatic carefulness, with a high reliability for each. The factorial validity was also supported by using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Further, a set of analyses confirmed various types of validity. The evidence for the validity is as follows: (a) the linguistic experts (n=10) consistently judged that all the items properly referred to each factor in an appropriate linguistic sense, (b) FLGCS showed correlations with learner beliefs, consistent with theoretical expectations, and (c) FLGCS correlated to the scores of a C-test, and with the time to finish the C-test. The applicability of FLGCS in EFL teaching and research will also be discussed.

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The present study attempts to demonstrate that explicit instruction, more precisely, proactive deductive explicit instruction, can be effective for Japanese university learners of English (university JLEs) to notice and comprehend the features of the particular items as in the distinction between transitive-intransitive verb structures. There are two reasons for this assumption. One is that in the first place most JLEs do not clearly know the rules of transitive and intransitive verbs. The other is that analytic ability and English proficiency of university JLEs are sufficient to understand instructor's grammar explanations of the rules. It has been found that JLEs often produce and accept ungrammatical sentences such as *The magician disappeared the rabbit. The researchers gave explicit instruction on the transitive and intransitive verb distinction to 45 university JLEs, focusing on their structures and meanings three times over a period of three weeks (once a week) for about 25 minutes each time. The participants completed a 40-item grammaticality judgment task before, immediately after, and 5 weeks after the series of instructions. The results showed that our assumption was valid for some participants but had little effect for others. These results are discussed in detail.

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This study investigated the factor structure and learner profiles of the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC^[○!R]) Listening and Reading (LR) and TOEIC^[○!R] Speaking and Writing (SW) tests to derive information needed to appropriately use tests of the four skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. The TOEIC^[○!R] LR and SW test scores of 106 Japanese learners of English were analyzed for this study. Results suggested a unitary structure behind the four-skill scores, indicating that these separate scores can be combined into one total score. In addition, the results of cluster analysis suggested learner classification according to the pattern of gaps between skill levels into the following four groups: (a) learners who have similar levels in all four skills (14.15%); (b) those who have both higher-level writing than other skills and higher-level listening than speaking (19.81%); (c) those who have higher-level reading than speaking (37.74%); and (d) those who have higher-level writing than reading (28.30%). Finally, the implications of these results for teaching and testing are suggested.

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The purpose of the present research is to examine how quickly and accurately Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners can make appropriateness judgments for second language (L2) requests. Previous studies in interlanguage pragmatics are limited in that they did not distinguish between types of pragmatic inappropriateness and also in that they used only offline measurement through questionnaires. The present study therefore distinguishes two types of pragmatic inappropriateness in L2 utterances (under-polite and over-polite) and measures the reaction time of learners' appropriateness judgments. The participants were 45 Japanese university students; they were asked to judge whether the presented L2 requests were appropriate or not in the situation, as quickly and accurately as possible. Six appropriate requests, five under-polite requests, and five over-polite requests were judged. Further, the degree of inappropriateness in under- and over-polite requests was manipulated from slightly inappropriate to very inappropriate. As a result, it was found that speed and accuracy of appropriateness judgments depend on the degree of (in)appropriateness of requests. In particular, extremely over-polite utterances were difficult for L2 learners to process.

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The present study investigated the effect of oral reading, listening and repetition on incidental L2 word-level memory trace formation of Japanese learners of English. The study adopted an experimental procedure under the incidental learning paradigm. Thirty-two participants with high proficiency in English, mostly consisting of graduate students, were tested individually. A rhyme decision task was utilized in the study session and a recognition test was implemented in the test session. The data gained from the recognition test were collected and analyzed to measure the memory performance. The results revealed that the words which were instructed to be read aloud in the study session scored significantly higher in the memory test. On the other hand, the words which were presented both visually and auditorily at the same time bore a significantly lower score in the memory test. It was concluded that oral reading strengthens the L2 word-level incidental memory trace. The negative result observed for the conditions featuring listening was discussed further and two possible factors affecting the result are explained.

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The main purpose of this study is to examine a refined method of analysis to elucidate the process of grammatical morpheme acquisition. For decades, the majority of "morpheme order studies" have applied the accuracy-based group score method (GSM) following Dulay and Burt (1973), despite its two potential methodological weaknesses: ignoring oversuppliance and neglecting L2 proficiency. However, the two potential weaknesses have not been empirically tested to a sufficient extent. Therefore, it is still unclear whether the GSM explains the morpheme acquisition process for EFL learners. Through a corpus-based investigation of verbal morphemes in 60 essays written by Japanese university students, two major results were obtained. First, the accuracy orders in general did not change regardless of whether oversuppliance was included. Second, the accuracy orders, however, differed considerably when taking both oversuppliance and L2 proficiency into account. Additionally, it was found that this was especially due to the frequent overuse of the third person -s by high proficiency learners, whose production was significantly more complex than lower proficiency learners. The findings suggest that syntactic complexity could affect accuracy development. Therefore, not only accuracy but also complexity should be taken into consideration in discussion of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes.

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This study examined the effects of task instructions for facilitating the construction of global coherence in the text, focusing on learners' processes and products of reading comprehension. A total of 23 Japanese university students read two expository texts in both (a) the control condition (read a text freely) and (b) the task condition (read a text in order to answer the theme of the overall text). They spoke their thoughts aloud as they read and later recalled the text. The results showed that the effects of the task instructions did not appear in learners' processes during reading. On the other hand, the task instructions facilitated the learners' text comprehension after reading. Moreover, the relationships between processes and products changed according to the task instructions. These results indicated that EFL learners had difficulty changing their reading processes according to given instructions; however, they constructed coherent text representations through engaging in the given task, and this consequently led to better text comprehension.

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This study focused on how task repetition with form instruction influences proceduralization and accuracy of linguistic knowledge. Two experimental groups repeated narrative tasks in practice sessions. In each session, the Repetition + Noticing group was given time to find and correct errors in the instructional material distributed after the first task, and then they repeated the first task. Conversely, the Repetition group just repeated the first task. The control group was not given any repetition sessions. After the sessions, two posttests were given: posttest 1 with completely new pictures and posttest 2 with the same pictures as the pretest conducted in Session 1. It was found that: (1) at posttest 2, although all groups spoke with fewer errors than at the pretest, the Repetition group performed best; (2) whereas only the experimental groups spoke more fluently than at the pretest, the fluency of the Repetition group was better; and (3) at posttest 1, although all groups spoke with more errors than at the pretest, the control group spoke less fluently both than at the pretest and than did the experimental groups. This study implies (1) the effectiveness of practice using task repetition for facilitating proceduralization and accuracy, and (2) the possible effectiveness of form instruction during task repetition for producing more self-correction in performance as well as its negative corollary impact on them compared to task repetition only.

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The present study examined effects of two kinds of familiarity (inference ideas and text content) and L2 reading proficiency on EFL readers' on-line (i.e., during-reading) causal inference generation from expository texts. Fifty-five Japanese university students participated in the experiment and read texts that varied in familiarity: Familiar (FA), Partially Unfamiliar (PU), and Unfamiliar (UF). The combined measure of reading times for target sentences and response times for inference questions revealed that low-proficiency readers failed to make on-line causal inferences regardless of familiarity condition, but high-proficiency readers made the inferences during the reading of FA and PU texts. In addition, error rates for inference questions suggest that low-proficiency readers generated the inferences when answering a question, that is, when the task required them to do so. Together, these findings reveal the conditions in which EFL readers make causal inferences during expository reading. Pedagogical implications are discussed in terms of the interplay between the reader and text.

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The priming method was recently introduced into the field of L2 studies as a new psycholinguistic tool to capture how and to what extent L2 learners possess their implicit knowledge or proceduralize their knowledge of specific grammatical structures. However, this line of studies exclusively explores the productive dimension, but not the receptive dimension, which is said to be better to obtain a deeper insight into the implicit knowledge (Jiang, 2007). In consideration of this, the current study investigated whether L2 learners can utilize syntactically driven algorithmic processing with implicit knowledge through a self-paced reading task with syntactic priming. Twenty highly proficient Japanese learners and 18 native speakers of English engaged in a phrase-by-phrase self-paced reading task after reading prime sentences. The results indicate that: (1) Japanese EFL learners seem to be able to utilize syntactic processing with implicit knowledge in terms of dative alternation; and (2) learners process sentences more "deeply" than natives under certain conditions. The results are discussed in terms of semantic/heuristic processing (good-enough processing) and syntactic/algorithm processing.

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This study investigated the effects of different numbers of options (four-option vs. three-option) on different listening tasks (picture vs. dialogue vs. monologue). The data were collected from 118 Japanese university students and were analyzed from the perspective of item difficulty, discrimination, reliability, and distractor performance. The results indicate that the number of options had no notable impact on item difficulty in picture and dialogue tasks, but had a significant effect in the monologue task. The results also suggest that the number of options had no great impact on item discrimination and reliability in all tasks, and that the number of items containing all discriminating distractors was different between the three tasks. The overall findings provide evidence that task difference is an important element in the study of optimal number of options and the development of multiple-choice listening tests.

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By the use of grammaticality judgment tasks in two conditions (untimed and rapid), the present study examined Japanese EFL learners' explicit and implicit knowledge about the countability of common and material nouns. It is well known that Japanese EFL learners exhibit long-lasting difficulty in attaining knowledge of countability. However, previous studies have not taken the explicit/implicit distinction of L2 knowledge into account. Hence, the present research conducted a grammaticality judgment study, targeting highly proficient Japanese EFL learners (N=18). The stimuli consisted of both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences including number agreement errors with two conditions (common vs. material nouns; k=12 for each). The results of a two-way ANOVA (task type: untimed and rapid, by the stimuli type: common and material nouns) clearly revealed that there was a statistically significant interaction between the two factors, showing a large effect size. This suggests that (a) there was no effect of task type on the material nouns, which might lead to the conclusion that the participants were not aware of the countability of material nouns, even as explicit knowledge; (b) the accuracy score of common nouns substantially declined, which means that the countability of common nouns was not fully acquired as implicit knowledge.

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The present study investigates whether the working memory capacity of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners affects text comprehension and cognitive load among three reading modes (silent reading, listening-while-reading, and oral reading). Since the three reading modes require different input and output processing, one may assume that readers perceived different cognitive loads in each reading mode. In this study, 63 Japanese EFL learners took a reading span test to measure their working memory capacity, and read in one of the three reading modes, performing a written recall task as a measurement of comprehension. A questionnaire measured the learners' perceptual cognitive load during reading. The findings revealed that individual working memory capacity affected EFL reading comprehension regardless of reading modes, which reconfirms the importance of working memory capacity on EFL reading comprehension. However, the findings suggest that working memory capacity did not affect perceptual cognitive load: Learners with large working memory capacity perceived almost the same cognitive load as those with small capacity, but they were better at adequately allotting their cognitive resources. Finally, cognitive load results are related to text comprehension. This paper concludes with suggestions regarding adequate situations of introducing different reading modes.

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The importance of teacher motivation arises at a time of renewed interest in the motivational theory and research on English education. However, there has been no systematic focus on the factors that influence teachers' motivation for teaching English, their strategy of engagement for maintaining their motivation, and the degree to which their motivation influences their classroom instruction. This study examined the relationship between the types of teachers and their opinions on effective motivational strategies. A total of 106 English teachers in Japan were asked to rate the effectiveness of 62 motivational strategies. Participants were divided into five groups based on the results of cluster analyses. The differences among the clusters on the effectiveness of the motivational strategies were significant even though the average scores were relatively high in all strategies. These findings implied that the teachers considered motivational strategies on English teaching effective, regardless of the groups. Additionally, the teachers in different groups had different ideas on what strategies would motivate them. This study is designed to provide information for individuals possessing, maintaining, and heightening their motivation for job engagement as English teachers as well as to apply contemporary research on motivational strategies to the current and future understanding of English teachers and their motivation.

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The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of environmental factors on Japanese primary school teachers as language learners. Regarding environmental factors, we focused on regional conditions of the areas in which teachers are living and working, and the cultural and social contexts in which individuals have lived. Regarding language learner factors, we took a particularly close look at language learner beliefs (i.e., cognitive dimension) and language learning motivation (i.e., affective dimension). The results were considered within the framework of Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). A questionnaire was distributed to primary school teachers and was answered by 200 respondents. Using a cross-sectional study method, subjects were classified into groups by attribution, and then compared statistically. Results suggest that most of the participant teachers are at least somewhat motivated to learn a foreign language. They also suggest that environments closer to the individuals may have some impact on their affective dimension and larger contests at the social level may have some influence on their cognitive dimension.

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Kasahara (2010; 2011) showed that learning a known-and-unknown word combination was superior in terms of retention and retrieval of meaning to learning a single unknown word. However, these studies examined only one type of combination: adjective (known) + noun (unknown). The present study examined the effectiveness of known verbs as cues to remember unknown nouns. This study compared verb (known) + noun (unknown) combinations with adjective (known) + noun (unknown) combinations, employing two groups with the same vocabulary size. The participants in each group were asked to remember 20 two-word combinations consisting of different known cues (adjectives or verbs) and the same unknown target nouns. The experiment gave the participants a five-minute encoding phase and two immediate recall tests: Test 1 asked them to write down the L1 meanings of the targets; Test 2 asked them to write down the L1 meanings of the combinations. They took the same two tests one week later. The results showed that verbs helped the participants to retain and retrieve the meanings of the target nouns as effectively as adjectives.

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The study aimed to explore the impacts of three types of test and interlocutors' proficiency level on the test scores of Japanese learners of English participating in a single-speaker task, paired oral discussion, and group oral interaction. The assessment was carried out utilizing the criteria of the CEFR-J (Tono, 2013), the Japanese version of the Common European Framework for Reference (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001). Five raters assessed 24 university students' oral performance. The ratings were then analyzed utilizing multi-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM), and the author confirmed that the raters fit the model for the subsequent main analysis. In the main analysis, first, the MFRM indicated that the speakers scored higher in the group oral interaction compared to the single-speaker task and paired oral discussion. Second, the MFRM analysis showed significant differences across test types and proficiency levels. In addition, the raw score analysis revealed a certain disparity in terms of proficiency levels in that the middle-level speakers received higher scores in the paired and group oral interactions compared to the lower- and upper-level speakers. With regard to the paring and grouping conditions, it was difficult to identify any particular tendency, as various phenomena were seen. Third, the rating criteria showed that the scale was over-segmented for assessing the speakers and invited further investigation.

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Main idea comprehension is an important aspect of successful reading (Grabe & Stoller, 2011). Readers understand the main idea of a paragraph based on the subordinate details (e.g., Ushiro, Nakagawa, Kai, Watanabe, & Shimizu, 2008) and a superordinate main idea summarizing the whole text (e.g., Murray & McGlone, 1997). Although readers are not likely to rely on either of these types of comprehension alone, few previous studies have examined them simultaneously. Therefore, the present study investigates how EFL readers' representations reflected these types of main idea comprehension, comparing complete texts. Seventy Japanese EFL university students read six texts, each including a text-level main idea, paragraph-level main ideas, and details. They then completed an immediate recall task with either a detail (micro cue), a text-level main idea (macro cue), or no cue (control). Two weeks later, 40 of them recalled the texts on the basis of the same cues. The micro and macro cues improved (a) total recall rate in the delayed task and (b) recall rate of the paragraph-level main ideas regardless of recall time. The macro cues were more effective than the micro cues in these cases. The results demonstrate that both subordinate and superordinate comprehension, especially the latter, contributed to representations in the delayed task and representations of paragraph-level main ideas.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of instruction in self-regulated learning strategies on English writing revision by Japanese university students. Regarding activating four processes of English writing revision, there were significant differences in Task Definition (t = 2.75, p < .05), Evaluation (t = 2.32, p < .05), and Modify Text/Plan (t = 2.97, p < .01), while there was no statistically significant difference in Strategy Selection. In addition, a revision test revealed that finding local errors (t = 2.62, p < .05) and correcting global errors (t = 3.14, p < .01) were significantly improved, while finding global errors and correcting local errors were not improved. Moreover a significant difference (t = 4.32, p < .01) was found in the investigation of the teacher's evaluation of paragraph writing. Free written reflections showed the effects of this study qualitatively as well. From these various aspects of analysis it could be surmised that instruction in self-regulated learning strategies is effective in activating the process of English writing revision and improving the ability of English writing revision.

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In the present study, collaborative learning was conducted with less proficient English learners in university, with the aims of increasing their motivation to learn English, engaging them in the learning process and improving their achievement in an official test. Firstly, this study investigated problems found in previous studies on collaborative learning with less proficient learners, which appeared to prevent the learners from gaining motivation. Secondly, a course of lessons applying solutions for these problems was conducted weekly with three classes of university sophomores over the course of a semester. The changes in the students' attitudes toward learning were examined with questionnaires, and changes in their academic outcomes were measured using an official achievement test. The findings suggest that collaborative learning has an effect, not only by producing a positive attitude toward learning in less proficient learners, but also by helping them to maintain this positive attitude over the course of a semester. In addition, the learners preferred this learning style, which in itself improved their overall motivation and academic outcomes.

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The purposes of this paper are to report on the development of a listening comprehension test based on the Textbook "Hi, friends! 2", and to show the listening comprehension ability of sixth graders who took this test. In order to familiarize pupils with the sounds and basic expressions of foreign languages, we attempt to develop a listening comprehension test to measure how sixth graders acquire their listening comprehension ability after 35 hours' of foreign language activities in one academic year. The test we developed can be considered as an achievement test, and consists of six types of questions, evaluating the degree of children's listening ability from the viewpoints of these six question types. The results of the test gave us the opportunity to improve our lessons. An analysis of the data shows that "bottom-up listening" is easy for children, but that it is difficult for children to listen to summaries of the contents. We have to construct our lessons so as to improve children's "top-down listening" abilities.

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One of the critical points at issue for the improvement on the present state of English teaching for senior high schools in Japan is to help students enhance their motivation to learn English proactively. In this practical report, an English teaching model was developed to foster such attitudes through the subject of English Communication I. Some of the operating procedures the model employed were: a core performance task, three consecutive tasks, and genre-based writing instruction. A teacher of a commercial high school taught her students based on the model for 12 months and administered a questionnaire, which showed advantages of the model in enhancing her students' proactive attitude, learner motivation, and autonomy, as well as a significant increase in the students' test results. The learner' responses revealed the effectiveness of such teaching devices as preview activities, meaningful tasks, student-teacher conferences, and reflective activities.

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Action research is an effective tool for improving classroom teaching. In this study, the authors introduced an extensive reading program in English language classes at the university level. They attempted to improve teaching practices by verifying the effects of the program, using both quantitative and qualitative data analysis, through an action research project. The project was conducted in three classes taught by the first author at a private university in western Japan throughout an academic year. Two cycles of the action research were implemented, and each cycle included 12-week teaching practices. A separate set of hypotheses for each cycle was formulated on the basis of the results of the preliminary investigation, classroom observation, verification of previously formed hypotheses, and literature review. Only once in each cycle, slight changes were made to teaching practices at the halfway point, on the basis of students' reactions to the instruction. This study reports the processes and results of our yearlong action research project. Moreover, based on the results, the usefulness and challenges of action research are discussed.

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