The COVID-19 global pandemic had a devastating impact on grassroots exchanges between Japan and the United States. In particular, the educational impact of the postponement of the departure of JET Program participants and the postponement or cancellation of various study abroad programs that resulted from Japan’s border restrictions has been immeasurable. This paper examines the future of student exchange between Japan and the U.S., taking into account the various effects of the border restrictions, input from those involved in Japanese language education, and the actual experiences of students and others in the U.S. since the relaxation of these measures. This paper will also introduce the JET program, which plays an important role in English education in many Japanese schools, from the perspective of a coordinator of the program in the U.S. The paper will also discuss what is expected of ALTs, including JET program participants, and the outlook for English education in Japan’s national curriculum guidelines.

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This study examined the effects of experience-based learning on Japanese EFL learners’ (JEFLLs) relative clause processing. Forty-six JEFLLs, comprising a relative clause group and a contrast group, participated in four sessions involving a pre-test, a repeated exposure, a posttest, and a delayed-post-test conducted one day after the exposure. During the exposure session, the relative clause group read 40 subject relatives (SRs) and 40 object relatives (ORs), answered comprehension questions, and were given correct answers, whereas the contrast group read 80 sentences without relative clauses, and then went through the same procedure as the relative clause group. In the test sessions, the participants read 12 SRs and 12 ORs in a self-paced word-by-word manner and answered comprehension questions. Their accuracy rates for the comprehension questions and reading times in the matrix verb region were compared between the groups and between the clause types. The results showed that the relative clause group read better than the contrast group and underwent more facilitation for OR than SR, indicating that JEFLLs benefited from repeated exposure and that experience-based learning could facilitate sentence processing adjustment as well as implicit learning.

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The primary purpose of this longitudinal study was to investigate the degree to which complexity, accuracy, lexis, and fluency developed under pre-task planning and on-line planning, which is defined as planning that occurs while learners are performing the task (R. Ellis, 2003), conditions involving task repetition, within a single session and throughout one academic year. Low-proficiency Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) (n = 15) performed an oral narration task three times within a single session and repeated similar narration tasks eight times during the academic year. The results showed that the learners’ syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, syntactic accuracy, and oral fluency increased by repeating the same task within a single session. Furthermore, their syntactic and lexical complexity also increased significantly by repeating the same type of task over the year; however, their oral fluency and syntactic accuracy did not increase throughout the year. These findings support the importance of pre-task planning, on-line planning, and task repetition for improving low-proficiency learners’ oral proficiency in EFL classrooms.

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Although connecting complementary or conflicting information across texts is key to constructing coherent and integrated mental representations of multiple texts, few English as a foreign language (EFL) studies have been conducted on this issue. This study aimed to explore EFL readers’ cognitive processes in forming connections among multiple texts and examine effective interventions, specifically focusing on highlighting. Twenty-nine EFL learners were asked to read four sets of multiple texts with complementary and conflicting main ideas under two conditions using a within-subjects design: (a) reading only—reading without following any extra instructions—and (b) highlighting—reading while highlighting any connections that they noticed across texts. The results indicate that reading conflicting texts promotes more crosstextual connections than reading complementary texts. Think-aloud protocols showed that evidentiary and contextual connections were significantly greater in conflicting texts than in complementary texts. The highlighting tasks induced significantly more evidentiary and thematic connections than the reading-only condition. The results can help teachers understand how students should read multiple texts and use highlighting tasks to better comprehend them.

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Student engagement is one of the hottest research topics and is referred to as the “Holy Grail” of learning (Sinatra et al., 2015, p. 1). Although much attention has been paid to the relationship between student engagement and academic achievement, integrating these two variables has not been conducted in the context of second language acquisition. This study synthesizes previous research that quantitatively examined the relationship between dimensions of student engagement (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and others) in second language learning and academic achievement. We searched for previous studies representing the relationship between the two variables in terms of effect size r. Out of the 1,373 studies that included “engagement” in the title, keywords, or abstract, 18 articles were eligible for the meta-analysis. The results showed that the correlations between overall, behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and others, and academic achievement were r = .23, .24, .26, .16, and .23, respectively. We also analyzed the language learning context as a moderator and found correlations between the specific unit or general context and academic achievement, respectively (r = .39, and .22). Implications for future research based on the results of this study, as well as discussions on limitations will be discussed.

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This study reviews the introduction of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in Japanese universities. Focusing on two types of EMI contexts (one targeted at Japanese students, and the other offered primarily to international students), the study investigates how much Japanese students’ motivation to learn English and their proficiency in English predict EMI success, operationalized as final disciplinary exam scores as well as their intrinsic motivation to study the discipline in English (EMI intrinsic motivation). Questionnaires were administered to assess motivation and elicit other information including TOEFL scores at the beginning and end of the semester (or quarters). Results show that English proficiency predicted final test scores at one university and that initial English learning motivation predicted intrinsic motivation to learn in EMI settings at both universities. After dividing the participants into two groups based on a given proficiency threshold level, we found that the higher proficiency group comprehended lectures to a significantly larger extent and obtained significantly higher final test scores than the lower proficiency group. Attitudinal differences between the two groups were also noted. We suggest that methods used in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) may be useful in assisting comprehension and enhancing EMI intrinsic motivation.

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This study reports a literature review of reading comprehension research and discusses researchers’ interpretations of the term ‘Metalinguistic Awareness’ (M-AW). In an attempt to propose a rigorous definition of M-AW for future research, M-AW was examined in terms of ‘level’ of awareness and agreement of ‘scope’ (target of awareness). Based on previous research, the present study proposes two predictions: (1) The current definition of M-AW does not refer to the level or degree of awareness; thus, interpretations have varied among researchers; and (2) Expanding aspects of M-AW and/or the scope (target of awareness) results in differences in interpretation. The research questions of this study were as follows: (a) What level of awareness do the researchers intend?; (b) What scopes do the researchers intend?; and (c) What is a rigorous definition of M-AW in the study of reading comprehension? This study concludes with the following suggestions: The rigorous definition of M-AW is the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of language, which requires an ‘Understanding’ level of awareness. Furthermore, aspects of M-AW should be restricted to morphological awareness, syntactic awareness, and orthographic awareness.

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