This paper discusses a possible way of fostering note-taking skills, and reports how the author organized classes for this purpose. One possible difficulty in teaching note-taking stems from students' self-perceived lack of need for learning or improving their note-taking skills. Thus, the first thing students must do is to understand how well or how badly they take class notes. To make students aware of their ability, the author, gaining collaboration from other colleagues, assigned tasks to write papers on the lectures held at the same time in different places. Each student in the learning group was told to attend one of the lectures and then go back to her group to exchange information on the lecture. In the process of learning in groups, the students were expected to use their notes, and they did so. By analyzing the contents of "reflection sheets" written by the students, it turned out that many students, upon completion of the tasks, noticed how difficult it was to take notes and realized the importance of doing so in the future.

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The present study compared students' scores on their responses to an essay exam question in a content course with (a) three vocabulary-related objective indices and (b) holistic evaluations of the responses as Japanese compositions by Japanese language instructors. The results showed that the total number of morpheme tokens had the highest correlation with the course instructor's ratings. What this implies is the importance of expository skills to produce an extensive discussion using a large number of words. This, in turn, requires vocabulary skills, although in the context of L1 learning and instruction, vocabulary development has not been given much attention. It is suggested that we rethink the role of vocabulary instruction in Freshman Japanese courses, especially academic vocabulary development.

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The purpose of this research is to explore dictionary search skills training for remedial students focusing on their meta-cognitive activities. Nine students were divided into two groups depending on their English proficiency, and in order to examine their meta-cognitive activities, they were observed and interviewed in the process of their dictionary searching. The result shows the lower group uses less cognitive strategies than the upper group, and their searching behavior lacks meta-cognition. Accordingly, in order to improve their dictionary search skills, it is vital to develop their cognitive strategies and to nurture their meta-cognition.

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Last year the author's research team investigated 3587 college students from 13 universities and stated that one of the major factors which differentiate the upper from the middle and lower percentile groups was the use of cognitive strategies. This year using the same data as the last year, the author investigated the relation between their use of cognicative strategy and their intrinsic values among Japanese college students. The result shows that the cognitive strategic competence of the best performers and the middle group students are developed enough but the lowest students have not developed their cognitive competence and that the number of the intrinsic values is different among the groups. The higher the English proficiency of the students becomes, the more the number of their intrinsic values becomes. After analyzing the data, some coping instructions are suggested and educational implications are discussed.

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Despite the high demand of listening skills, both teachers and learners have been struggling with finding an effective way to teach and learn. This study focused on exploring effective teaching procedures to help learners who have listening problems with lower listening self-efficacy. A shadowing procedure with different self-assessment phases was examined. The two research questions were if two different phases would affect improvements of listening comprehension skills, listening self-efficacy, and costs in learning, and what problems learners would face after a whole set of shadowing sessions? The participants were 55 university students who were taking an English class as general education. Type A assessment phase was used for one group of 25 students, while type B assessment phase was used for the other group of 30 students. The results show that the type A phase, comprehension questions, is recommendable for its effect on listening comprehension skills and listening self-efficacy, and costs in learning. It was also found that learners still face several problems after the training.

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