The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different types of feedback (direct correction, stamping, underlining) on the development of EFL learners' writing ability. The subjects (2nd-and 3rd-year junior high and 2nd-year senior high students) participated in the four-month program in which they wrote six in-class essays with different feedback. The results show that there was a significant relationship between feedback types and learners' grades. Especially direct teacher correction, which was found to be no more effective than the other feedback methods in the case of junior-high subjects, showed a significant difference in effect for the group of senior high students.

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In this article, it is argued that there are two kinds of natural developmental sequences in second language (L2) acquisition. The differences between them are discussed in terms of four dichotomic dimensions: monostructural vs multistructural, incomplete vs complete, descriptive vs explanatory, and nonimplicational vs implicational. Following this discussion, the first kind, exemplified by the sequence of the developmental stages of English negation, is contrasted in developmental terms with the second kind, which is typified by the developmental sequence of German word order rules. Each of these sequences is shown to have a different meaning or role in L2 acquisition, on the basis of which it is argued that the advocacy of naturalistic L2 acquisition in the classroom is not warranted.

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Rapid development and expansion of Japan's international transactions in every walks of life is making intercultural communication competence important for all Japanese. This paper is to present a way to develop one's intercultural communication competence through English education as a foreign language, utilizing English textbooks for junior and senior high school students. The basic framework is based on the combination of three phases of intercultural communication education (cognitive, affective, and behavioral phases) with the six goals of intercultural communication education presented by Ned Seelye. A sample teaching plan is included, and the material is taken from an English textbook used for senior high school.

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In this paper we report a study which compares the effectiveness of two teaching methods in an EFL writing class: a traditional grammar-translation method with the emphasis on accuracy and a discussion-based approach to writing with a focus on creative production and oral communication in class. The results of the experiment reveal that despite fluency-centered instruction the discussion-based class, as a group, outperformed the 'traditional' class on a grammar-translation test administered at the end of the school year. At present, many EFL instructors in Japanese high schools find themselves in a delicate situation. On one hand, the implementation of a New Course of Study in 1994 puts increased emphasis on the development of oral communicative skills. At the same time, however, teachers feel obliged to prepare their students for university entrance examinations in which L1-L2 translation and grammar tasks still feature prominently. In the words of Onoda (1994) "...to do both is to work at cross purposes... Hence the conflict." Writing has traditionally not occupied an important place in the English curricula of Japanese high schools. In their desire to synchronize the content of the writing classes with the demands of entrance examinations, teachers became overly concerned with skill-based instruction stressing grammatical accuracy, translation and sentence combining while neglecting the strategies for developing higher cognitive skills.

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The intention of this paper is to take a serious look at using songs in the classroom as an activity that can enhance language learning. In discussing the educational value of using songs, the study will demonstrate their usefulness in several areas of second/foreign language acquisition (SLA). The paper will also look at important features to consider when preparing song activities, and suggested activities will be presented. In order to get student feedback, a brief survey of 179 students was conducted for the purpose of measuring the learners views on interacting with song activities. In this study, the results are presented and analyzed.

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This paper is intended to encourage in-service teachers at secondary schools to view public speaking as a beneficial and inevitable addition to their teaching agendas by demonstrating that this particular activity inherently possesses qualities to boost students' efficiency in learning English. To be more specific, statistics indicate the relative importance of "memorization" work, in making speech activity function as an effective form of teaching/learning English. Memorization, if handled carefully, can, as in the case of language-educational performances such as "oral interpretation," be one of the highroads to success (Ohmi, 1984, 1988), and speech can, I argue, provide this mechanism just as well as oral interpretation, or perhaps even better. Examined are perceptions of college speech students who work on speeches in the hope of improving their English. So the slogan here is "learn from the successful."

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The TOBEC test (Test of Basic English for Communication) has been designed by the author to examine basic English language abilities for communication at junior high school level. The format of the test is based on Canale's (1983) theoretical framework for communicative competence with four major components: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the process of communicative test designing and to analyze the results of the TOBEC test from four main points of view: (1) student performance, (2) effectiveness of the test, (3) item analysis of multiple-choice items, and (4) answer analysis of an open-ended item. The paper concludes that the testing of communicative competence will become increasingly important in Japan and that further research in this area is required.

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This paper reports the results of an investigation into the intonational influence on politeness judgements of requesting forms in English and Japanese through a questionnaire survey. The result confirmed the hypotheses which were presented in our last article that (1) intonation has a greater influence on politeness judgements in English than in Japanese and (2) the rising tone has a tendency to be perceived as more polite than the falling tone in English, but such a tendency is not observed in Japanese. Moreover, the uniformity of the informant-group enabled us to demonstrate the relative tendency of English male/female and elder/younger group concerning the perception of intonation. The female and the younger group tended to distinguish between the rising and falling tones more clearly than the opposite group in informal situations. This tendency was not found in the Japanese group.

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Every year since 1985, over 10,000 students have returned from abroad to the Japanese mainstream of education (Ministry of Education, 1993) and no reversal in this trend can be expected in the future due to Japan's global economic and scientific leadership. A very limited number of experimental studies have been pioneered, however, with regard to assessing English communicative competence of returned students from overseas (returnees hereafter) on a multisite basis. This paper examines returnees' English communicative competence from multifaceted viewpoints in comparison with that of non-returnees1. The findings indicate that in some grammatical items, returnees showed outstanding competence, while in others, they tended to make as many mistakes as non-returnees do, suggesting some pedagogical implications for the classroom.

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Anxiety can be an element impairing the language learning process, consuming attention and cognitive resources that could otherwise be spent on learning. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the sources and treatment of anxiety occurring in language learning situations which may offer suggestions for English teaching. First part tries to reveal the sources of anxiety. Second part addresses the problem of how to manage anxiety. Those are done based on the existing theories and studies. Third part reports the questionnaire results I obtained, which indicate that most of the subjects feel anxiety in English communication with non-Japanese regardless of their English ability. The teacher's role is not only to give knowledge, but also to support and encourage students in speaking up in the target language by helping them to remove excessive anxiety and to build confidence. Good preparations in the classroom will contribute to positive attitudes toward speaking English in the real world.

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In the process of trial and error used to develop communicative activities which might facilitate better English learning, the authors have come to value the use of debating. Debate is one of the classroom activities that may lead students to effective communicative interaction because it requires the integration of the four language skills, and generates learner enthusiasm to take on a number of communicative challenges. This paper explores a practical approach to teaching debate as a communicative activity. We specifically examine three of the major problems that have prevented the incorporation of the teaching of debate in ELT in Japan. These are (1) having to master the rules which appear to be unique to debate, (2) the apparent difficulties of debate, and (3) the underlying Japanese mentality against debate-type argumentation. Our sustainable solution to these three problems is to adopt debate-oriented communicative activities in accordance with lesson objectives and to lower the degree of formality in these activities. We suggest a methodology which makes use of small communicative debating tasks in addition to full formal debating.

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The present paper reports the results of an exploratory study in which Bialystok's framework is applied so as to qualitatively assess the syntactic competence of Japanese EFL learners. The framework attempts to capture a learner's proficiency in terms of two dimensions, namely the dimension of analysis of knowledge and that of automaticity in the use of that knowledge. In order to apply the framework to learners' syntactic competence, the present study focuses on learners' knowledge of argument/thematic structures of two verbs and their use of that knowledge. This kind of structural information in verbs is supposed to play a crucial role in analyzing the syntactic structure of incoming sentences. The use of such information is observed in a number of experimental studies using syntactically ambiguous sentences. In the present study, two types of tasks are given to the subjects both auditorily and visually. The subjects' performance in these tasks is measured using the analysis/automaticity framework. Although the results are far from conclusive, implications of the present study for grammatical consciousness-raising are pointed out, and remaining issues are raised.

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