HELES JOURNAL
Online ISSN : 2434-0243
Print ISSN : 1347-6343
Volume 16
Displaying 1-3 of 3 articles from this issue
  • Yukiko OHASHI, Noriaki KATAGIRI
    2017 Volume 16 Pages 3-18
    Published: 2017
    Released on J-STAGE: May 10, 2018
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    In this study, a corpus-based study was undertaken to examine a) whether there is a variation in teachers’ utterances in terms of language and types of instruction in English classes in elementary schools, and b) whether the amount of elementary school students’ impression remarks after class (reflections) varies according to the amount of explicit instructions from their teachers. The materials for the analyses are based on elementary school classroom corpus compiled by the authors and the students’ reflection data gathered from the questionnaire called “reflection sheet” completed by each student. The study examines the differences in the amount of students’ reflections according to the explicit instructions in their English lessons using cluster analysis and Mann-Whitney U tests. The corpus showed a variation among classes in terms of the explicitness of the teachers’ instructions. Also, statistical results showed that the students with more explicit instructions tended to generate more reflections than those who received a small amount of explicit instructions on both word and phrase levels. The implications of this study suggest that explicit instructions facilitate elementary school students’ reflections, which is expected to lead to their learning. Qualitative considerations also suggest that teachers as well as assistant language teachers integrate interaction-based explicit instructions with communication so that their instructions can lead to the learners’ awareness of English lexical items learnt in class.
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  • A Comparison among the Publishers and the Factors of the Differences of Task-likeness
    [in Japanese], [in Japanese], [in Japanese], [in Japanese], [in Japane ...
    2017 Volume 16 Pages 19-34
    Published: 2017
    Released on J-STAGE: May 10, 2018
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    The purpose of this study is to investigate how and why communication activities of English textbooks in junior high school differ according to the publishers and grades in terms of task-likeness. Nine researchers have analyzed the English textbooks of three grades published by six major publishers, and used the criterion of task-likeness based on Usuda et al.(2014). The results showed that Publisher A was rated the most task-likely of all the publishers. Publishers A, B, and F were, moreover, rated much more task-likely than Publishers C, D, and E. That is, the bipolarization of task-likeness was observed among publishers. With regard to the grades, we found that the textbooks in Publisher A became more task-likely, as the grade goes up, and this tendency was not observed in the other publishers. We also indicated the factors of the differences of task-likeness among these communication activities with some examples.
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  • Activities performed by parents at home to support advanced biliteracy
    [in Japanese]
    2017 Volume 16 Pages 35-50
    Published: 2017
    Released on J-STAGE: May 10, 2018
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    The rapid globalisation has led many school aged children to face the difficult task of acquiring literacy skills in two or more languages. In the literature, it has been repeatedly pointed out that choices parents make in their child upbringing affect the linguistic developments of such children in various ways. However, these studies focused on the overall trend and the detailed strategies and beliefs that parents use in their child upbringing are yet to be explored. This study aims at describing such strategies and beliefs that parents have in order to support the development of biliteracy in a qualitative manner, by means of interviews to four mothers of Japanese-English bilingual students acquiring biliteracy at an advanced level. Through SCAT analysis of the interview data, six concepts were observed across the families, which are hoped to provide some guidance in the child upbringing of bi/multi-lingual children.
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