This paper reports a study conducted to investigate lexically-motivated variability in the acquisition of basic sentence structures among EFL beginners. The subjects were 150 first-year junior high school students. Nine basic sentence structures were chosen for this purpose and transformed into a partial translation test. For each sentence structure two different types of target sentences were prepared for translation; those with familiar lexical combinations and those with unfamiliar ones. An analysis of the results of the translation test revealed a significant degree of lexically-motivated variability in the acquisition of basic sentence structures among the subjects. It also revealed that slow learners are generally more vulnerable to surface lexical variation than good learners. Implications of these findings for SLA research and second language teaching are also discussed.

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This paper is concerned with three psychological aspects of word guessing: (a) "contextual constrainf'of texts, (b) "decontextualization"of contextual cues and (c) "problem-solving strategies"for word guessing. An experiment was carried out in which subjects were asked to infer words in cloze procedures, and they were also asked to report on how they came to infer the words. An analysis of these self-reports suggests (a) word guessing should be viewed as a complex interplay among the above three elements and English proficiency of learners; (b) heuristic and procedural strategies should be recognized as characteristic of low and high proficiency learners; and (c) word guessing should be related to the question of how deeply people understand textual contents as well as the English ability of learners. These findings will be discussed in conjunctions with several issues of word guessing and word acquisition.

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Recently, many researchers such as Dulay and Burt (1972), Burt and Kiparsky (1972),ErvinTripp (1974), Ellis (1981) and Krashen (1981, 1982) have supported the assumption that the process of L2 acquisition is similar to that of LI acquisition. In other words, they argue that if an L2 learner is exposed to large quantity of linguistic data he will acquire a second language in a manner similar to the way in which a child acquires a first language. Krashen sees comprehensible input as the necessary condition for L2 acquisition. He claims that the LAD will function properly if only an L2 learner receives "comprehensible input" containing structures that are a bit beyond his current level of competence. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether a second language can be acquired in a manner similar to the way in which a child acquires a first language when an L2 learner is exposed to comprehensible input. For that purpose, this paper discusses whether four elementary school children involved in a short-term experiment are in the process of acquiring a second language, that is, obtaining communicative competence, on the basis of the four communicative competence components proposed by Canale (1983).

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This paper examines 'cognitive demands' of tasks as a possible cause of interlanguage(IL) variability. It begins with the definition of cognitive demands, and goes on to investigate their influence on cognitive operations involved in speech production. It will be suggested that the level of cognitive demands may be one of the external determinants of the learner's variable use of linguistic knowledge. This paper then identifies and examines several elements of cognitive demands, while simultaneously seeking to establish an analytic frame for assessing pedagogic tasks in terms of these demands. Such aspects as the degree of abstractions which tasks require the learner to make, and the range of meanings which tasks allow the learner to express, will be discussed. Finally, this paper specifies the danger inherent in 'unrestrained' forms of task-based approaches to second language(L2) teaching, and then suggests that regulating cognitive demands may be one way of evading that danger.

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Currently, overseas study programs sponsored by various institutions are very popular. This paper will empirically evaluate the language development of a selected group of students who participated in a five-month-program in California. In order to examine how exposure to the target speech community affects the Japanese EFL learners' language development, the following three major areas will be covered in this study: 1) fluency, 2) syntactic complexity, and 3) pragmatic competence. After returning from the above-mentioned program, the students are consistently praised for their improved language skills by those who have spoken with them in English. However, their intuitive impressions may be misleading. Our results show that the area of greatest improvement was in fluency. Despite the noticeable shift in their language performance, the participants' linguistic and pragmatic development was very limited. An appropriate evaluation of these overseas study programs offers an opportunity to clarify the objectives and the value of such programs.

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A number of studies have attempted to determine the writing mechanism of EFL/ESL writers. However, only a limited amount of research with an empirical approach has been offered, and this has hindered the generalization of each study's findings. This paper reports a study which investigated to what extent L1 writing ability and EFL proficiency contribute to the quality of EFL composition written by Japanese university students. Forty students were asked to take an English proficiency test and then to write two compositions on the same topic; one in Japanese and the other in English. The scores ofholistic evaluation of the students' L1 and EFL composition and scores on a language proficiency test were examined by correlational analysis, multiple regression analysis and factor analysis. The study showed that EFL proficiency accounted for the quality of EFL composition better than L1 writing ability did.

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By now, considerable numbers of empirical studies have addressed the issue of accessibility to Universal Grammar in second language (L2) acquisition. Among them, the investigation into the role of Subjacency in adult L2 acquisition has not come to a definite conclusion. In general, learners are reported not to have the native-level of grammatical intuition, while at the same time they do not seem to make judgements in a completely random manner. We discuss the possibility that the functionally-defined notion of dominance may have potential to give an adequate explanation of the observed learner behavior. The consideration carries the implication that complete explanation of the highly complicated matter of L2 acquisition will not be achieved without referring to functional properties of language.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the question of how Japanese affects the production of passive sentences in the task of translation from Japanese into English given to Japanese learners of English. The Japanese sentences used in this study, twenty in total, are classified into three categories: (I) syntactically non-passive sentences whose corresponding English sentences are expressed in the passive voice; (II) sentences which are expressed in a voice construction other than the passive; and (III) indirect passives and causatives. The subjects in the study, 232 senior high school students and 79 university students, were given the task of translating the twenty Japanese sentences into English. The results of the study showed that the subjects' production process was influenced by the type of Japanese sentence given, suggesting that the subjects did not comprehend very well the agent-patient relationship that a verb indicates. Especially, for the indirect passives and the causatives, similar kinds of confusion were observed as to the direction of the action which a verb signifies and the direction of the influence between an embedded event and a passive or causative subject.

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This paper describes two experiments which examine how Japanese university students process syntactically ambiguous sentences in English. In Experiment 1, four sentences including prepositional phrases (PP) were presented visually word by word along with VP-biasing, NP-biasing, and Neutral contexts. The results showed that the preference toward VP attachment is not always observed, and the context affects the processing slightly. The results also showed that no significant difference is observed between English majors and non-English majors. In Experiment 2, sentences containing (1) NP_1 and NP_2's NP_3, (2) VP + NP + Relative -Clause + Adv., (3) Adj. + NP_1 and NP_2 constructions were presented in the same way as in Experiment 1 along with three kinds of context. The results showed that the extent to which context affects the processing of sentence parsing differs in each kind of sentence.

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The study investigated the relationship between English language proficiency and the ability to understand a well-organized prose passage which describes the four main causes of crime increase in New York. The subjects were divided into two groups (two groups of 16 each: one of skilled readers and the other of less skilled readers) based on a cloze test. The results of the experiment showed that the subjects were better able to recall the key points of the passage correctly than the details, and that there was a significant difference between the two groups in the recall of key points while the difference between the two groups was smaller in the recall of the details. Correlational analysis and ANOVA analysis indicated that syntactic and lexical knowledge were major factors differentiating the two groups. ANOVA analysis also showed a significant difference between the two groups in the recall of POINT1 and POINT2, but there was not a significant difference in the recall of low-level details except for DETAIL1. Overreliance on top down processing seems to explain the better performance of the less proficient readers in POINT3 and conversely their poorer performance in DETAIL1.

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The process of pronoun understanding in skilled and less-skilled EFL learners was investigated based on approaches used in L1 studies. Japanese university students at two different levels of English language proficiencies as determined by a standard test were asked to read the sentences which included the pronouns he or she, and their reading times and comprehension accuracy were measured. The result showed that the less-skilled learners read the sentences focusing on the morphosyntactic information of the pronoun, whereas the skilled learners encoded the semantic information as well as the morphosyntactic cues. The reasons why the skilled learners performed better are discussed.

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