In this paper we present a case for integrating communication and culture in team teaching, since we believe that promoting the integration between communicative language teaching (CLT), culture teaching and team teaching, the three major streams in current English language teaching (ELT) in Japan, will increase the potential of each stream for attaining the general objective of our ELT, i.e., developing cross-cultural communicative competence in English. First, we will discuss the strategy for integration between CLT and culture teaching, and then between team teaching and culture teaching, and finally between CLT and culture teaching. We will also report on the experimental lesson we conducted in order to realize the integration of communication and culture in team teaching.

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Gender and cultural differences in "information-request" strategies between Japanese and Americans were examined. In total, 2650 information-request tokens were analyzed, which occurred in 12 hours of conversation between 36 pairs of Japanese and American women/men in Japanese. The results reveal that in intercultural communication situations, Japanese are more likely than Americans to change their information-request strategies according to their conversation partners. The data also show gender differences in strategies. Based on the results, practical implications will be discussed for the teaching of intercultural communication at schools.

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Recently, within the paradigm of Communicative Language Teaching, Communication Strategies have begun to attract attention from researchers. However, there is little agreement on the nature of Communication Strategies and the factors which influence their use. To answer these questions, the relationship between Japanese EFL Learners' proficiency and their use of Communication Strategies was investigated in the present study. Thirty-two university students were asked to take an English proficiency test and then to describe a picture in English. The results of the analysis show that the listening ability of subjects had some connection with the frequency of their use of Communication Strategies. Added to this, it also became manifest that High Proficient leaners could use more 'Paraphrase' than Low Proficient learners.

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The pressing need for internationalization in Japan has proven to learners of English the importance of acquiring intercultural communication competence, but they face numerous obstacles, one of which is ethnic stereotypes. Thus, based on our previous research (Ihara & Moriizumi, 1995), this paper explores the value dimension of stereotypes held by Japanese junior and senior high school and university students toward four ethnic groups of White Americans, Black Americans, Chinese and Japanese by employing the semantic differential. The survey divulged the following three points. First, stereotypes are based on three factors: personality, cultural background, and physical appearance. Second, those who have had direct contact with a specific group tend to hold more favorable images than those who have not. Third, Japanese students evaluate White Americans more favorably than the other three groups with some exceptions, while they exhibit ethnocentric attitudes toward the other three groups. Taking these into consideration, we propose several suggestions for improving English language education in terms of the subject matter of textbooks and classroom teaching.

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This study investigates the difference between top-down processing to comprehend the outline and bottom-up to comprehend the parts through three video materials. An earlier pilot study showed the comprehension of the outline to be possible for students even if the details of the content could not be understood. The experiment first measured the partial comprehension mainly by a multiple-choice test, but included dictation and consolidation as well. A correlation between the outline and multiple-choice test indicated that there was a difference between these two comprehensions because the correlation was low for the comprehensible video materials and nonexistent for the uncomprehensible ones. The same result was found on consolidation and dictation. A second result was that if the video materials corresponded to students' listening comprehension level, the comprehension of the outline showed a close relationship with the partial comprehension. However, the uncomprehensible video materials did not lead to any relationship between the comprehension of the outline and the partial comprehension. Implications of the findings for evaluating and teaching listening comprehension are suggested for video materials.

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189 Japanese and 289 Chinese junior high school students were surveyed to assess their motivation and attitudes for studying English. The results showed that the Chinese students had higher interest and involvement than the Japanese students in English studies. They showed relatively higher achievement, but were less satisfied with their attainment and felt it necessary to exert more efforts than the Japanese. The Chinese are basically instrumentally motivated, i.e., English is seen as an instrument for a future career. Their intense interest, involvement and efforts are pragmatically-oriented and integrated into a single-dimension value. In contrast, the Japanese have multi-dimensional motivation, i.e., partly influenced by extrinsic factors such as entrance exams, and partly influenced by intrinsic factors existing in the learning process itself. Another big distinction is the fact that the Chinese students expressed a very weak longing or aspiration for English culture.

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This paper is concerned with two aspects of metacognitive knowledge: its developmental trend of "from overconfident to normal" and its elaboration mechanism of "metacognitive monitoring of reflecting on knowledge." Two experiments were carried out to explore the two metacognitive aspects of word knowledge, the results indicating that (1) junior high school learners of English who have high proficiency turned out to be significantly more confident in their word knowledge than high school and college ones, and (2) the metacognitive monitoring of reflecting on knowledge was found to be of psychological reality concerning learners' confidence, as a part of metacognitive knowledge, in word knowledge. These results will be discussed in terms of several issues associated with language learning.

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Development of communicative competence was situated as a basic principle of foreign language education in the Course of Study which was announced in 1989. In entrance examination English questions for high schools are expected to have suitability as means to evaluate students' communicative competence. Three levels in this research are set up to classify the questions: Level 1 (requires only linguistic competence), Level 2 (requires both linguistic and discourse competence), Level 3 (requires linguistic, discourse and sociolinguistic competence). Entrance examination questions for public high schools in 1992 and 1995 were classified into these levels and the totals were compared with each other. From the results two general tendencies become very clear: (1) the mainstream of the questions shifts from Level 1 to Level 2, (2) suitability of the questions as means to evaluate communicative competence progresses.

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The role of consciousness-raising (C-R) to grammatical rules in second/foreign language learning has been positively discussed. This article intends to extend the discussion by differentiating two different types of C-R to grammar: C-R to mapping rules and C-R to formal rules. Mapping rules serve to associate meaning with linguistic form. Formal rules describe the formal system of a language. It is argued that C-R to the former, which occupies the central part of the learning task, is made possible with the help of C-R to the latter. This theoretical position may be called a 'catalytic' interface position. Also argued is that in order to activate the catalytic interface, learners must be provided with comprehension activities in which they comprehend the meaning of input given to them.

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The study demonstrated the effect of countability (countable vs. uncountable)as well as the effect of noun type (concrete vs. abstract). The result showed that article accuracy for concrete nouns was higher than that for abstract nouns in both countable and uncountable environments. The study also found that indefinite articles were more difficult than definite ones when both were modified by phrases or clauses. Furthermore, it was found that the proficient group was more accurate than the less proficient group in memorized-chunk structures, indicating a general tendency of the subjects to become dependent on them as their acquisition progressed. Finally, both groups were equally accurate in the selection of the definite article in subject position NPs introducing old information.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the characteristics of teacher talk and the development of spontaneous production ability in the Japanese-speaking children learning English in a kindergarten immersion program. This was done by comparing the teacher talk of two different English-speaking teachers, L and R. These two classes were almost the same in terms of size, children's age, and curriculum. A comparison of the children's L2 development in the two classes revealed that the children in one class produced more creative English, whereas the children in the other used more set phrases. It was hypothesized that this difference may have been due to a difference in quality of L's and R's teacher talk. Analysis of their teacher talk confirmed this hypothesis.

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Following a brief review of recent trends in research on learning styles and cognitive styles, this paper reports on a preliminary study which examined learning style preferences of high school EFL learners and teachers. A questionnaire about 20 types of English language teaching/learning activities were given to more than 3,000 high school English teachers and students to interpret their perceptual learning style preferences in accordance with Reid's (1987) initial application. The results show the learning style preferences for Japanese high school English teachers to be similar to those of Japanese samples in previous studies, while those of Japanese EFL learners demonstrate significantly different distributions. The results also indicate that some factors such as students' school levels, school types and gender do influence their learning style preferences, while teachers' factors do not seem to. The implications for teachers of Japanese high school EFL learners are also discussed.

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The purpose of this study is to develop an objective way of evaluating speaking ability of students of English by using sets of four pictures originally invented by Upshur. In reference to the past literature, a test consisting of twenty sets of four pictures was invented. This test was conducted as a pilot test for forty-one high school students, focusing on the following three points : to solve a time limitation problem, to compare the relation between its results and the results of an interview test with a native speaker, and to see what pictures were easy to respond to as well as what pictures were difficult to respond to. The results suggested some instructions and pictures needed to be revised. The correlation with the interview test was 0.78. After the test was revised according to the results of the pilot test, it was conducted with another class to check the reliability of the test. Its average item discrimination index turned out to be 0.35. Also the results highlighted some test items with low item discrimination power and high item discrimination power. The results suggested, as well, that some test pictures may cause students to make errors through interference from their first language.

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This study compared reading strategies between L1 and L2. Verbal protocols of seven female college students obtained by think-aloud were analyzed. The students read four narrative texts, two in L1 (Japanese) and two in L2 (English). They consisted of an easy text and a difficult text in English, and two easy texts in Japanese. The protocols were classified into twenty categories and the strategies were compared between texts. The results supported the existence of an L2 linguistic threshold and the transfer of reading strategies from L1 to L2. It was observed that the readers used various kinds of inferencing strategies both in L1 and L2. Distribution of the inferences suggested a difference between L1 and L2 reading process in terms of the relation between literal understanding and inferencing. The protocols also suggested a compensation for weak L2 language ability by L1 reading ability.

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The purpose of this article is two-fold: (1) to analyze Oral Communication (OC) textbooks regarding gambits and routines (G&R) and their tasks from a strategic point of view and (2) to design strategic tasks for acquiring and developing G&R for promoting oral communication. G&R play a significant role in helping beginners cope with communication breakdown or silence and in facilitating oral communication. In this paper, the sources of communication breakdown or silence experienced by participants and the solution to repairing and maintaining communication using G&R as communication strategies (CS) will be discussed. For textbook analysis, CS are originally categorized into three main frameworks: Production Strategies, Comprehension Strategies, and Interaction Strategies. From the result of the analysis, it was found that there were few CS used in textbooks and therefore we need to design communication strategic tasks which utilize G&R. The key concept to keep in mind when designing tasks is to use a variety of tasks to elicit interaction according to three stages.

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