Language testing and its assessment are indispensable for many EFL teachers to check how well their students have been learning English for a certain period of time. IELTS has long been well-known as a high-stakes test that can assess the four skills of learners of English separately on a highly reliable evaluation basis. In fact, it is a gatekeeper for the examinees who are applying for universities or colleges abroad. Especially, reading skills, one of the receptive skills along with listening skills, involves great many complicated learning strategies that the EFL teachers need to keep in mind. In order to help the learners of English improve their reading abilities in the IELTS reading section, the EFL teachers have to be aware of what kinds of steps or procedures the test developers would take. This is exactly the starting point for me to investigate how we should design a high-stakes reading test in the future. This case study is based on an empirical study conducted with my graduate students enrolled at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. I would like to clarify the aim of the trial IELTS reading test and its assessment by taking a sequence of procedures and analyzing it qualitatively and quantitatively.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between Japanese university students’ class community and their peer review activities in an EFL writing class. Their average TOEIC score was 675. They were asked to engage in peer review and write comments about their classmates’ essays in the left-hand column of the Peer-editing Sheet in class. In the right-hand column, they specified how they would respond to their peer reviewers’ comments. This study’s data mainly consists of their feedback and responses in the Peer-editing Sheet and their final interviews. From their comments and responses in the Peer-editing Sheet, they are observed to have gradually incorporated “a third person’s point of view” into their evaluation of their own essays toward the end of the period of study. Their interviews seem to imply that reading others’ essays brought them various educational benefits such as raised awareness of their readers perspective, how to improve their writing by observing others’ essays, etc. Finally, based on the “educational benefits” that a community can produce, it is proposed that peer review activities should be more extensively utilized in order to help learners grow as autonomous writers.

Task-Based Language Teaching using Computer-Mediated Communication is popular in improving learners’ communicative ability. There are many advantages of this approach including enhancing students’ autonomy, self-learning etc. (Lee & Ahn, 2016). However, there are limited studies in this field (Kitade, 2006; Stockwell, 2010), so more research needs to be conducted. This study investigated lexical diversity and syntactic complexity in TBLT using synchronous and asynchronous CMC. In the study, 18 advanced learners of English worked on decision-making tasks in small groups, using both modes of communication. Lexical diversity and syntactic complexity (the mean length of sentence, clause, and T-unit) were analyzed quantitatively. A T-test was used, and the findings indicated no significant difference regarding lexical diversity between the two modes. Conversely, statistically increases in syntactic complexity were found when considering all three variables in relation to the asynchronous CMC. These results suggest that different modes of CMC have the potential to develop different aspects of second language learning.

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) has long been axiomatically referred to as “the mistress of mystery,” but it is not widely known that this world-famous author was also a poet. She had sent her poems to The Poetry Review, some of which had been printed in the magazine before she made her debut as a mystery writer with her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). Furthermore, she had a collection of poems—The Road of Dreams (1925)—published through a presumably private-funded way five years after she got into the storytelling business. This means that her creative impetus in her early years was basically for poetry. Then, what on earth brought Christie, who had started writing poems during her adolescence, to the genre of detective novels? How did poetry come to terms with mystery in her case? In this paper I would like to elucidate these issues by examining Christie’s early imaginative visions represented in her poems and to reveal some connection between her poetry and stories. My main focus is, above all, on her attachment to the characters in pantomimes, such as Harlequin, Columbine, and Pierrot, which is clearly seen in her poem ‘A Masque from Italy’ that might be a prototype of her later narratives.

In the course of Iago's seduction of Othello, he never proclaims explicitly that Desdemona has sexual relationships with Cassio. He, however, gives Othello clues, and makes him think himself. In the first half of his “poisoning,” his clues are basically linguistic, and in the second half, his clues are "generally-accepted" ideas and the situations in which Othello is placed. During the whole procedure, the audience is always aware of Iago's black intention to ensnare Othello and Othello's restricted scope of understanding. The audience sees Iago who proceeds his machinations totally as he intends without damaging Othello's trust to him, and it also sees Othello who is entrapped to destruction, not knowing Iago's true nature. Thus, while the audience's sympathy to Othello is controlled, it also appreciates Iago's malignant nature in his extremely efficient command of language.

This paper is concerned with nonrestrictive relative which-clauses that occur as unembedded dependent clauses, such as Which is a good thing. , Which reminds me..., etc. Although nonrestrictive which-clauses are generally regarded as more frequent in written English compared with speech, the unembedded type of which-clauses (henceforth, Which-clauses), literally independent of and separated from the preceding main clauses, are especially common in conversation and sometimes found in dialogue in fiction and very informal news texts (Biber et al. 1999). Biber et al. (1999) points out that unembedded dependent clauses are connected with the evolving nature of conversation and that Which-clauses are allowed because of the relative link that signals a close connection to the immediately preceding text. However, in order to clarify the whole picture of the occurrence of Which-clauses, further investigation is needed in terms of the general characteristics of spoken English on the one hand and the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of Which-clauses themselves on the other. In the course of discussion, it becomes clear that the speaker’s real-time information processing during conversation, as well as certain functional and pragmatic properties of Which-clauses, is the key to finding out why they occur in informal English.

Mikhail Bakhtin says that we are usually unaware of the fact that we are under the pressure of incontestable linguistic norms. As long as we live only with our mother tongue, we don’t have to face the language as a norm, but there are some exceptional situations where a language appears as a normative form. One of these situations is foreign language learning. Studying a foreign language includes not only absorbing new vocabulary but also acquiring a norm, namely syntax. Acquiring a norm always comes with conflict. While conflict is a thing that we should avoid as much as we can, it is indispensable for us to gain a new insight about the world. In recent foreign language learning, there are some social factors that help learners circumvent the conflict that they are supposed to struggle with in acquiring a norm. In this article I consider what this learning environment brings about. It affects people’s sensitiveness to language, which leads to the belittling of linear recognition of the world around us and things that are going on within us. Language as a norm will be a minimum premise we should share if we try to maintain dialogical communication with others.