This paper reports on a longitudinal study which examined how Japanese EFL learners have changed their attitudes towards communicative and non-communicative activities after one year. A 1-5 Likert scale questionnaire containing ll examples of activities of English lessons were replicated to the same subjects in Kimura (1995) as well as to newly participating subjects. Compared with the results from one year before, the present survey observed significant differences of impressions in both high school teachers and high school students. The results also indicated interesting discrepancies among teachers, high school students and university students.

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Recently great focus has been placed on the teacher's role. However, the teachers' decisionmaking process in the planning stage has been unclear. The purpose of this present paper thus is to explore teaching activity selection and the influences of some factors on activity selection (teachers' backgrounds and teachers' views toward the material in the textbook) by analyzing the results based on 153 responses from junior high school teachers in Nagano Prefecture to a questionnaire. The first finding is that teaching activities are categorized into five activity types: traditional, comprehension, communication, intercultural, and multimedia. Among the five activity types, the traditional and comprehension activity types are significantly frequent. Then the communication and intercultural types follow. Lastly, the multimedia activity type is the least chosen. The second finding is that activity selection is highly dependent on the teachers' views toward the textbook material, but not their personal and academic backgrounds. These findings lent support to the argument of the important role of teachers.

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This article will suggest criteria for the evaluation of learners' cultural competence within the framework of English teaching. The author assumes that the idea of 'respect for other cultures' is the most important criterion. Through a survey of culture-related articles and books in language education, it will be shown that this assumption is valid. Firstly, an examination of the concepts of 'culture', 'respect', and 'respect for other cultures' will reveal elements common to each of them. Secondly, a survey of the literature concerning the evaluation of culture, or of evaluation itself, will reveal general trends in the study of culture-related evaluation. Thirdly, resulting from the application of taxonomic procedures, the author will introduce the hierarchical stages of evaluation. Lastly, the author will present an evaluation chart derived from investigation and experimentation. Such a chart will be a helpful introduction to English teachers for evaluating their students' 'cultural respect'.

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This paper is an attempt to demonstrate that English and Japanese subtitles can be successfully combined for use in the language classroom to enhance language learning. Following a review of the research findings on the use of closed captions as reading and vocabulary materials, this paper examines the addition of previewing questions and combined use of both subtitles as a possible approach to make closed captions more accessible and comprehensible to learners. In order to get student feedback, a brief survey of 144 students was conducted, and the results indicate that overall, they felt less nervous and learned more target vocabulary items, referring to both subtitles as they needed. The paper concludes that Japanese subtitles, though often viewed negatively in English education, can be successfully used in various activities as an effective use of L1 in language learning.

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The purpose of this study is to analyze Nation's Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) to check its validity, to develop a vocabulary size test for Japanese EFL learners and to give a portion of it to a sample of learners to compute the reliability of the newly developed test. According to the four surveys of VLT, four problems were pointed out; too high a ratio of loan-words in Japanese, difficulty in understanding the definitions of words, inadequacy of employing word family counting, and the use of classical vocabulary lists. Based upon these findings, a Japanese version of vocabulary size test was developed and given to 817 students at junior high school, senior high school and university levels. The results of this test showed that forms [1], [2] and [3] have a relatively high reliability coefficient, while forms [4] and [5] have some room to be improved. Further improvement of this test is suggested for future research.

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Investigating correlates of skilled listening comprehension in English would provide suggestive data and implications for measurement and instruction of listening comprehension. One candidate for a good predictor of listening comprehension is efficiency (speed or accuracy) of English spoken word recognition, but empirical data is limited. Thus, four types of test were administered to the participants: Phoneme identification, word recognition, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. Results indicated that the number of correct responses in the English spoken word recognition test accounted for 57% of the variance of listening comprehension test scores. Accuracy of word recognition was affected significantly by word frequency. Components of lexical processing and its role in listening comprehension are discussed together with their implications for language learning and testing.

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This study analyzes differences in the production and perception of the "deleted" English [t] for English-speaking and Japanese-speaking subjects. There is a widespread misconception that the [t] disappears in sentences such as "I can't teach" or "I can't come". However, the [t] does not actually diappear, but is rather replaced by a silence. The English [t] is implosive in fast speech in sentences such as "I can't go" - i.e. the plosion (release of air) of the [t] is replaced by a silent hold phase. For instance, there is only a short duration between the words "can" and "go" in the sentence "I..can..go", whereas this duration is significantly longer in the sentence "I..can't go". Japanese EFL learners often simply delete the plosion of the [t] without replacing it with silence. They are unaware of this intraoral release, and thereby misperceive/are misperceived when listening to or saying a phrase that includes deleted [t]'s such as the [t] after the auxiliary verb "can". The present experiment indicates that English speakers are significantly more uniform in their perception of duration cues for the 'deleted' [t] than Japanese subjects, and that the hold phase of the 'deleted' [t]'s is substantially longer for the English speaker than for the Japanese speaker. However, Japanese learners are able to acquire the correct timing for this prolonged hold after instruction and auditory input.

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What makes English intonation by Japanese EFL learners unnatural, sometimes even at an advanced level? Three factors should be considered: English as their L2, Japanese as their L1, and their learning environment. Intonation in each language is systematically different from that of other languages; in that it consists of the mostly identical components, which are realised with a different degree of priority, following the same order of assigning suprasegmentals in discourse. In Japanese, word accents, pauses, and fewer tone choices are typical, as a result of realising word accents, prominent syllables, and tone choices (in that order) and keeping the order of priority in their assignment in their realisations. On the contrary, in English, as pitch use at the discourse level (intonation) has first priority over other elements such as word accents, which can be more flexible in their realisation than in Japanese. This difference should be recognised by the learners, who may well have a foreign accent. In an EFL environment like Japan, discourse intonation as a key element in the English speech system needs to be focused contextually and systematically furthermore.

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The present study describes the nature of text structure prediction strategies used by skilled native readers of English. In spite of extensive research on SL strategies in recent years, existing characterizations of comprehension strategies are of limited use in constructing models of strategy use and acquisition and also in making useful pedagogical suggestions. As a way of improving SL comprehension strategy research and instruction, this study first presents descriptive findings related to 18 skilled native readers' text structure prediction behaviors, and discusses the types of expectations generated under specified conditions as well as linguistic and contextual cues that trigger the expectations. The descriptive data are then formalized in terms of IF-THEN production rules, and a pedagogical prediction task is also proposed as an application of the descriptions.

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This paper reports on the results of psychological analyses of errors, self-revision, and effect of feedback on English compositions by Japanese learners of English. A simple "picturedescription" experiment was carried out in which subjects were asked to write compositions, revise them by themselves, and correct errors which were indicated by feedback of underlining. It was found that subjects were able to correct only 6% and 45% of errors without and with feedback, respectively. These results will be discussed in terms of several issues, such as "implicit vs. explicit" grammatical knowledge, "declarative vs. procedural" knowledge, and "definitional vs. contextual" word knowledge, providing some insights into teaching writing skills.

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Japanese is basically a topic-prominent language whereas English is a subject-prominent language. Because of this typological difference between the two languages, Japanese EFL learners seem to frequently transfer the topic-comment structure of their native language when producing English. This paper is an attempt to investigate whether Japanese EFL learners' interlanguage will progress from a topic-comment form to a subject-predicate form as their English proficiency improves. The focus is mainly on two syntactic properties: dummy or empty subjects ('it' and 'there') and subject-verb agreement, which are both regarded as basic characteristics of a subject-prominent language like English. The underlying question of this paper is whether Japanese EFL learners, instead of relying on the topic-comment structure, will more frequently produce sentences with dummy-subjects and correctly inflected verbs as they increase their English proficiency levels. To elicit data, a written translation task was given to Japanese EFL learners. Data produced by learners of different proficiency levels was analyzed in terms of their use of dummy subjects, subject-verb agreement, and topic-comment form.

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