The aims of the present study are two-fold: one is to classify students’ attitudes and/or strategies while reading media texts in English and the other is to check whether different reading attitudes affect post-reading essay assignments. A total of 103 university students participated in the study, answering a reading attitude questionnaire and submitting six essay assignments. The results of a factor analysis and a cluster analysis on the questionnaire show that students were classified into three types, depending on the levels of critical reading and literal reading orientations.Further, the ANOVA on the essay assignments indicates that the average scores were significantly different according to the reading types. Although the study needs further replications to generalize the results, it will contribute to the discussion on the concept of “media awareness” and the method of measuring and/or evaluating it in the English education context.

This paper identifies the notion of English as a brand through the ideas of a brand from Brand Theory in the fields of marketing and sociology. In brief, my conceptualisation of English as a brand represents a unique social phenomenon in Japanese society, whereby English functions as a fashionable accessory or lifestyle. Through ‘wearing’ or ‘sporting’ English, people, institutions and companies are proving their identity as ‘internationalised’, ‘cool’ and ‘fashionable’, all of which are highly valued socially in Japan. Analytic approach of this study combines Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with Linguistic Landscape (LL). Whereas theoretical framework to identify the notion of English as a brand is Brand Theory from marketing and sociology, which provides with detailed components of a brand. I will use LL for data collection and analysis for clarifying how the conceptualisation of English as a brand is represented in signboards, and CDA for considering the ideology embedded in the notion of English as a brand and its ‘implicit’ effects to Japanese society and people.

Language awareness, a useful and innovative concept in many fields of social science and humanities, is especially critical in cases of marginalized languages (and/or language varieties). In marginalized languages/varieties, linguistic attitudes towards them influence the choice of languages in various domains and social settings. Language awareness not only serves as a useful tool in language education, but may also effectively change linguistic attitudes in a speech community. Introducing the case of Hawai’i Creole, an English-lexifier language spoken in Hawai’i, this paper demonstrates the role language awareness plays in shifting linguistic attitudes towards the marginalized variety in dynamic multi-linguistic situations. More specifically, the following issues are discussed; 1) how is language awareness related in education of creole language speakers, 2) how have language awareness been implemented in education in Hawai’i, and 3) how have activities outside of education raised language awareness in Hawai’i.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the shifts, or changes, in languageappearing in Japanese-English news translations. Because of the surge in popularity of Japanese pop culture overseas, the number of Japanese news articles translated into other languages has been increasing. As for Japanese-English translations, some translation shifts are inevitable during the translation process partly due to the nature of each language. The author classifies the shifts in language in Japanese-English news translations. 146 Japanese articles and their English translations were chosen to compile a parallel corpus. After an initial analysis by concordance software, a sentence-to- sentence analysis using the theoretical framework of “explicitation”, “translation strategies for intercultural translation” and “transediting” was done.

Translation has been an outcast in the language teaching theories of the 20th century. But now there is a strong interest in revisiting it, especially in European countries spurred by CEFR’s increased emphasis on the notion of “mediation.” However, theoretical accounts and methodologies to introduce translation into language teaching have not been fully committed. According to Gutt (1995), translation is a process of finding “interpretive resemblance” beyond the surficial differences between the two languages concerned. The author firmly believes that among all kinds of translation, subtitle translation is particularly conducive to teaching students the notion of mediation in the process of searching for interpretive resemblance between the source and target texts. This paper uses Relevance Theory to analyze subtitle translation by university students and provides an observation and discussion on how and why subtitle translation contributes to the enhancement of Japanese EFL learners’mediation competence.

This paper discusses the output phase in interpreting process, and underlying ability which enhances interpreters’ notetaking in consecutive interpreting (CI) in terms of the Cooperation Model proposed by Tomasello (2008). In previous studies, the issue of which ability helps consecutive interpreters facilitate notetaking in CI is still open. Through the scrutiny of professional interpreters’ consecutive notes, it is clear that the notations are diagonally structured and reflect semantics of the original speech. Based on these notations, interpreters re-express the original speaker’s intention with pragmatic heuristics.

This paper presents the results of a metacognitive self-regulation awareness intervention (Vandergrift, 2004) on L2 listening skill development at a university in Japan. Educational psychology literature indicates that metacognitive self-regulation is an important predictor of a learner’s academic success (Pintrich, 2004). L2 literature suggests that metacognition influences English proficiency (Goh, 2000), but research on L2 listening is limited in EFL contexts. This study focused on Global Studies majors at a university in Japan. Data were collected at the beginning and at the end of the 2013 academic year using TOEFL scores. The investigation examined how the experimental group, who had been given a metacognitive self-regulation awareness intervention, improved their listening skills in comparison with the control group, who had not. The data were analyzed statistically and interpreted, also by drawing on interview data. The results suggested that the metacognitive self-regulation awareness intervention was effective for L2 listening skill improvement.

This study presents three methods of helping pupils of an elementary school acquire literacy skills and examines how they responded to the methods. The three methods were an international exchange program, a learning-through-movie program, and a play method. To analyze the pupils' answers to open questions, text mining software was used. For the first open question, "Write the reason why you think writing and reading practice is useful," the most frequently used word was "writing" followed by "learn" and "enter one's mind". The word "writing" was used most commonly with "enter one's mind". For the second open question, "Write your impression of foreign language activities," the most frequently used word was "fun" followed by "a foreign language (English)," "Toy Story (a movie)," and "Peach Boy (an English play)." Few students mentioned literacy learning for this question; however, considering that most students regarded the activities as fun, these approaches are thought to be meaningful in helping pupils learn writing skills.

This study investigated the effectiveness of a reading-aloud instructionpackage to the improvement of English performance. Participants were approximately170 first- and second-year Japanese college students whose English performance is considered as “Low” according to the placement test. The participants were divided into two groups: Group 1 and Group 2. Group 1 served as the experimental group in the first semester, and as the control group in the second semester (switched the role). The reading-aloud instruction package consisted of 1) reading-aloud practice, 2) slash reading, 3) cloze test, and 4) concurrent practice of reading-aloud and transcribing, and was applied to the experimental group intensively for three months. The results of statistical analysis of pre- and post-tests in TOEIC Bridge^® showed significant improvement in English in the experimental groups in both semesters. Pedagogical implications and limitations of this study were also discussed.

This paper is a pedagogical report on an undergraduate “Media English” class designed to promote media awareness among students. It includes two research presentations made by the students, as well as the course description and the syllabus of this class. One presentation is titled “Comparative Analysis of News Reports on Minority People,” in which comparison is made among news reports from several countries about the rights of sexual minority people along with the discussion on the need for media literacy at the present time. The other presentation is titled “Comparison of Science News Coverage,” in which the “PM 2.5” issue is discussed to analyze how terror and anxiety have been incited when the news about invisible and dangerous substances has been reported. A suggestion is given about how we should make objective judgment on science news by comparing several news sources from different countries.

ICT (Information and Communication Technology) offers versatile usage in classrooms and comes in many different forms. This paper presents an observation and reflection of students' questionnaire results of a web based English class conducted from December 2012 to February 2013. The class was successful in terms of an engaging setting, and received over 80% of students' approval. Yet, class design appears to have room for improvement. Also there seems to be a gap in computer usage between what teachers think is useful and what students want to use. This paper first examines the concepts and previous classroom use of ICT, and then the class setting is explained and discussed with the survey results.