The purpose of the currentstudy is to investigate the correlation between reading in Japanese, especially in childhood, and English proficiency. Although several previous studies have discussed the importance of reading in building solid mother language ability, little is known about how reading in Japanese influences English learning. The author had 336 EFL learners complete a questionnaire, and held interviews with some of the respondents, mainly those who used to read extensively in their childhood and currently claim a high level of English proficiency. Through the qualitative analysis of the interviews with EFL learners, this paper attempts to clarify the effects of reading in Japanese and how it improves linguistic performance both in Japanese and in English. It also offers some suggestions for the future development of English language education based on its findings.

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The purpose of the present study is to explore the dynamics between English pronunciation teaching in elementary schools and the teacher’s belief concerning foreign language activities. In this study, the author observed 61 lessons of 5th and 6th grades taught by a mid-career junior high school English teacher and interviewed him to collect the data of his lesson reflection. The analysis of classroom discourse and the teacher’s reflections on his lessons showed that (1) his major concerns were the importance of communicative activities, motivation for learning, and keeping all children’s understanding and participation of activities; (2) he had some routines to teach articulation, stress, and intonation of words and sentences that children used, (3) his belief and ways of pronunciation teaching were generally constant, but extemporaneous and elastic in the case that he noticed children’s unintelligible pronunciation or anxiety about pronunciation during his lessons.

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This research note presents the problems Japanese learners of English face when reading literary texts in university-level general EFL courses. The list of the problems is organized based on the review notes and learners’ reading performance records of the author’s six-year teaching practice. The problems shown include: pinning down the referents of demonstratives and paraphrased expressions; grasping relations of sentences without any help of discourse markers; understanding expressions with unique lexical choices for describing the fictional world or characters’ actions, feelings, and behaviors; having literal comprehension of the passages describing the fictitious world, characters’ appearances, and their actions; elucidating implicit meaning from objective correlatives; understanding the motives of characters’ actions described in the text; and understanding grammatical constructions in the text. This paper also presents the points which did not cause problems in the students’ literary reading against the teacher’s expectations. They include: noticing contrasts in the text and considering their literary effects; understanding metaphors and metonymies; understanding expressions with some words or phrases omitted; reading between the lines based on wholistic understanding of the text; and understanding the symbolic meaning of the entities and events in the text.

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This study investigated whether people with greater English proficiency are more highly skilled as English teachers. To determine this, a group of undergraduate teaching students (n = 34) took two tests: (1) a 34-item checklist of English proficiency and elementary school English teaching skills, and (2) an English vocabulary size test. The findings showed that four items measuring English proficiency (e.g., I can get a good score on an English examination of the national center test for university admissions) and no items measuring teaching skills (e.g., I can arouse students’ interest and motivate them) were significantly correlated with vocabulary size. Thus, no data positively supported the belief that highly English-proficient people have better English-teaching skills. These results suggest that professional examinations and training programs for elementary school teachers that excessively focus on English proficiency need to be reviewed.

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Academic Enrichment Programs have been continuously introduced at UC Berkeley campus (UC Berkeley) from 2004 to the recent years. Those programs were designed to give challenging opportunities for undergraduate students. “Discovery Learning” is a new campus wide challenging approach at UC Berkeley to give new opportunities that students can learn through both inside and outside of the formal curriculum. The task force headed by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost with Vice Chancellor of Undergraduate Education commissioned a discovery survey to better understand how each academic unit currently defines the “Discovery Learning” that leads to cumulative discovery experience for its undergraduate students. In the survey, the “Discovery Learning” has four types: Research, Creative work, Community engagement/field studies, and Entrepreneurship experiences. This paper focuses on the “Discovery Learning” started from 2018 at UCBerkeley. This paper reviews the discovery survey and then searches similar new trials at their peer institutions. The purpose of this paper is to review those new trials in the United States and to find some suggestions for undergraduate education.

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Unlike American universities, where tens of thousands of professional staff work enthusiastically with pride, Japanese universities employ few people with advanced professional skills and specializations. In fact, there are only two kinds of staff at Japanese universities: instructors and administrators. In recent years, however, the Japanese education ministry and many Japanese universities and colleges have begun nurturing specialized staff in more in-demand areas—such as admissions officers, research administrators and academic advisors—because competition between universities has intensified domestically and globally. As for academic advisors, the statistics indicate that currently, as few as 25.5% of Japanese universities employ academic advisors, and only another 7.6% of Japanese universities want to do so in the near future. The purpose of this paper is to show what kinds of interests and roles academic advisors have in American universities. The study also aims to clarify some lessons from the US for Japanese universities in terms of the future of academic advisors.

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The purpose of this study is to examine requests in business scenes of the movie The Devil Wears Prada, using the Politeness Theory by Brown and Levinson and “requests” framework proposed by Leech (2014). Brown and Levinson propose five strategies, (1) without redressive action, baldly, (2) positive politeness, (3) negative politeness, (4) off record and (5) Don’t do the FTA, in which (1) without redressive action, baldly , (3) negative politeness and (4) off record are related to requests. On the other hand, Leech (2014) categorizes requests in The Pragmatics of Politeness as “Direct strategy”, “Indirect strategy”, “Hints” and “Pragmatic modifiers”. The requests to be analyzed include not only general requests but also instructions and commands. In conclusion, the present study has demonstrated that Miranda, who is portrayed as a devil-like boss working in the fashion industry, tends to use “imperatives” to express business affairs effectively and “question hints” in terms of sentence forms, although irony is sometimes conveyed in indirect expressions.

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The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between ethnic schools and the identity construction with the focus on a subset of Zainichi Koreans who affiliate with the pro-North Korea group Chongryun (the General Association of Korean Residents) and received education from Chongryun-affiliated schools. This study adopts an empirical qualitative method based on in-depth interviews with thirty-seven Zainichi Koreans as well as field observation which were conducted between 2007 and 2010. The findings of this study show that Chongryun Koreans still share the collective identities despite decline of Chongryun’s unifying force. Their identities are based on a sense of belonging to the ethnic schools and the local Korean community, which has displaced allegiance to North Korea and Chongryun as the major force that unites its members. For some of them, their Zainichi Korean identity is not separated from a sense of being part of Japanese society. This study of a subset of Zainichi Koreans is one example of an ethnic minority group in a global context and it seeks to contribute to the wider understanding of ethnicity and identity formation in contemporary societies.

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With the progress of globalization, the world is being diversified. The importance of communication skill by the English language and “English plus one more language” is increasing. There is a deep-rooted belief in Japanese society that it is enough to be able to use only English. In recent years, quite a few universities have stopped offering the second foreign language as a compulsory subject. However, despite this trend of emphasizing English, the number of students taking second foreign languages has not decreased every year, and the number of students taking the Chinese language in particular has been even increasing. What are the criteria by which students choose a second language, and what significance should a second language education suited to the present age have? This paper investigates the current status of Chinese language education as a second language in Japan by conducting a questionnaire survey of Japanese university students taking Chinese as a second language .We also conducted a similar survey of Chinese university students taking Japanese as their second language. This paper examines the problems of Chinese language education as a second foreign language in Japan today by comparing and analyzing the differences in the purpose of learning, motivation, and learning methods of the second foreign language among university students in both countries.

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The purpose of this symposium is to seek crucial elements for fostering language learners through an overview of the narratives of the authors, and create an opportunity to develop professional teacher perspectives on language teaching and learning in the classroom. In the recent educational reform in Japan, new Japanese Courses of Studies for primary, junior high, and senior high schools have already been announced. These demonstrate the importance of a consistent educational essence in English instruction. In this symposium a university lecturer who has long experience of English teaching at public junior high schools, another university lecturer who has researched lesson practice in elementary schools, a high school teacher who has experienced several types of high school, and an English learner who studied under two of the presenters in her junior and senior high school days, narrate “English education” from their own standpoints. The triangulation of their narratives enables us to view the landscapes of language teaching and learning in the classroom. Understanding English education through their narratives gives us a different lens to view language teaching and learning in the classroom lives of teachers and learners.

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