Aiming at fostering the practical competence of pre-service students through direct contact with children, the "Friendship Jigyou [Friendship Program] (FP)" is supported financially by Ministry of Education from fiscal year 1997. To assess the students' learning in the FP with the emphasis on understanding about children, Nakayama originally developed the 3-D rubric through 3 criteria of assessment-the stage where learning occurs, the way the student looks at children, and the content of the acquired knowledge and understanding about children. By converting a scale to a scaled score, it was revealed that the learning could be assessed numerically with the rubric. Both the tendency of the correlation between 3 criteria and the possible contribution of previous experience to the learning were resulted in the analyses of assessment data. These indicate that the 3-D rubric was applicable to assess the learning in the FP type experiential activities.

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By making a comparative study on the past tense marking by Japanese and Chinese EFL learners, the present research aims to explore the validity of the Aspect Hypothesis and the factors influencing temporal acquisition. A four-way ANOVA was made with the cloze-type test score as the dependent variable, and first language, language proficiency, lexical aspect, and verb frequency as the independent variables. The results largely supported the Hypothesis with minor disagreement. Furthermore, effects of first language, lexical aspect and verb frequency were confirmed.

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The present paper attempts to introduce one possible method of developing valid and reliable rating scales on the basis of actual performance assessment data. The original impetus for this study was a realization of the strong need to establish an objective rating scale with regard to the quality of English pronunciation of the students in a teacher training course at university level. As a concrete procedure in developing the scale, descriptors (i.e., short descriptions) which characterize levels of pronunciation quality were first extracted from existing scales of language proficiency. Then, four high school teachers and two of the authors of the present paper used these descriptors in actual performance assessment and the results were analyzed in the Item Response Theory (IRT). Conclusions reached were twofold: (1) carefully developed descriptors can successfully convey certain meanings to their users (or raters); and (2) it is possible to make explicit the difficulty of what is meant in each descriptor on the basis of empirical indices which are estimated by means of the IRT.

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Knowledge of Romaji has the strong correlation with the ability to read and write English words in general. However, their detailed relationship has not yet been discussed. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between Japanese students' Romaji ability (both knowledge of Romaji and Romaji processing) and the sub-components of English achievement at an initial learning stage, setting the following questions: How strongly does Romaji ability affect on sub-components of English achievement such as grammar, composition, etc? How does the rate of the effect change with the time passing? Two sets of study were conducted for nine months to verify the above questions. The participants were 40 junior high school students in the first grade. Through the two studies it is found that Romaji ability, especially romaji processing, affects the sub-components of English achievement for almost all through the initial learning stage. Its effect is gradually reduced and remains stable about 0.35 in correlation.

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This study examines American approaches to the integration of music with various arts disciplines in elementary education. Insights are obtained through analysis of the USA "National Standards for Arts Education" issued in 1994 and the textbook series "Silver Burdett Making Music", which was produced according to the "National Standards for Arts Education", published in 2002. The results reveal that both the National Standards and Making Music series make use of the four fields of discipline-based art education, that is art production, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics, to integrate the framework of the arts disciplines, and use common points of the arts to integrate music with other media. These research findings may contribute to the design of integrated arts courses in Taiwan and Japan.

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