There are numerous English-based loanwords in Japanese, often called katakana words. Many teachers and researchers have advocated for using katakana words in English education, particularly for novice English learners. To maximize the teaching potential, teachers should consider the phonological differences between the English and katakana words. However, it has not been systematically explored whether native English speakers can comprehend the sounds of katakana words using a lemmatized word list. Therefore, the current study aims to fill this gap. First, we identified 769 katakana words from the first 1,000 words in the New General Service List developed by Browne, et al. (2013) by referring to a katakana dictionary. Second, we created an audio file of the selected katakana words. Third, we asked three native English speakers to guess the words after listening to the audio file while rating the intelligibility of each word. The analysis showed that among the 769 katakana words, 400 words were guessed correctly by all native speakers, while 120 words were not correctly understood by anyone. Additionally, 119 words could be easily understood. Based on the results, we discuss several points to consider when using katakana words in the English classroom.

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The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship, considering their lecture comprehension ability, between Japanese EFL learners’ use of academic listening strategies, and cognitive load in order to identify the way they self-manage their perceived cognitive load while attending English-medium lectures. A total of 12 participants performed an English-medium lecture comprehension task and took a stimulated recall interview to examine their academic listening strategy use. Their perceived cognitive load was quantitatively assessed through a questionnaire survey. The results demonstrated that the perception of extraneous load prevented the use of metacognitive strategies, especially selective attention strategies. In addition, the perceived extraneous load increased the number of cognitive strategies the participants used, especially top-down strategies. The study also found that learners' academic listening strategy use depended more on lecture comprehension ability than on their perceived cognitive load. The learners with higher comprehension ability tended to predict content before and while listening, while those with lower ability tended to rely on bottom-up strategies, especially reconstructing the missed parts by relying on words and phrases that could be decoded.

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This is a preliminary study aiming to develop and validate an elicited imitation test (EIT) to measure Japanese English language learners’ pragmatic routine knowledge (Pragmatic Routine Elicited Imitation Test: PREI Test). Over the past few decades, EIT has been widely used to measure second language learners’ implicit grammatical knowledge and oral proficiency. A lot of tests have been developed to measure learners’ knowledge and proficiency in the field of second language acquisition to date. There are, however, few EIT tests to measure pragmatic knowledge of L2 learners. In this study, two pragmatic linguistic knowledge tests: the PREI Test developed by the author of this study and the pragmalinguistic (pragmatic routine) knowledge test developed by Roever (2012) were conducted to 13 Japanese university students for the purpose of examining the reliability and validity of the PREI Test. The results of equivalent-forms reliability showed that there was a satisfactory correlation (rs = .69) between the two tests, and it was indicated that the PREI Test can be used as a measurement to assess learners’ knowledge of pragmatic routines. The results also revealed some limitations of the preliminary version of PREI Test, such as rating methods and the number of items in the PREI Test, which should be further investigated in the future.

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