Marginal vocabulary glossary in EFL passages is regarded as a useful tool of EFL learners for reading comprehension by teachers. It is especially the case with reading authentic materials. But, although reading with vocabulary glossary helps learners to understand texts, it leads them to decoding centered reading. In that case, they tend to read texts for details instead of global messages. Some practitioners insist that it is important for learners to think in English even reading and that learners read passages relying on English-English dictionary or English glossary. But the few data-based studies on that kind of dictionary and English glossary have proved evidence for the effectiveness of them in reading comprehension (Davis 1989:41). So the purpose of this study is to determine how monolingual vocabulary glossary facilitates EFL reading comprehension. The things to clarify are next four points: 1) What level of learners should monolingual glossary use be introduced from? 2 ) Is there some correlation between the frequency of referring to glossaries and the level of learners' text comprehension? 3) Are the kinds of vocabulary to refer different in different vocabulary level learners, or same? 4) What extent do learners referring to some words in the glosses acquire the meaning of these words after reading? To test these questions, three kinds of tests were conducted in a month. The main findings of this study were as follows: 1) The more reading proficiency they had, they got more benefits from referring to English notes in terms of reading comprehension. 2) The glossary referring behavior in reading didn't much contribute to the acquisition of vocabularies in the text. 3) The number of referring vocabularies while reading didn't correlate with the levels of text comprehension. This study's conclusion gave us some important suggestions for reading teaching. For example, it also suggested the optimal period for introducing learners to use monolingual English glossaries effectively.

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This study describes a computer writing course utilizing editing codes and reports the changes in student writing quality observed. Forty Japanese EFL technical college students wrote eight 1-3 paragraph essays over a 14-week period. On the first draft of each essay, teacher feedback was given in the form of editing codes, based upon which the second draft was produced. The first drafts of the eight essays were investigated in terms of (1) the total error ratio, i.e., the total number of errors divided by the total number of words multiplied by 100, (2) the error ratio of each of 26 error types, and (3) the relationship between the accuracy and fluency of writing. The expected tendency for errors to decrease was not clearly observed, except for mechanical errors. The most frequent problems observed were those involving mechanics, articles, verb pattern, verb tense, and number. No significant relationship between accuracy and fluency was observed. The implications for the classroom are discussed.

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The present study is aimed at examining how reading aloud is instructed in foreign language learning in some selected countries of the world, and investigating what factors have an influence on teaching/learning reading aloud , especially chorus reading. In this study we focused on class size and the form of each class, that is, whether instruction was individualized or directed toward the entire, and set up two assumption: 1) Full-class instruction is generally common to the countries where chorus reading is used in foreign language classes. 2) There is a general tendency to practice chorus reading in the countries where most schools have a rather large class size. The questionnaire and interview according to class size, form of class and reading aloud were administered to 48 informants from 40 countries. As for the first assumption, we found that half the countries which used full-class instruction marked the category "chorus reading is popular." Concerning the second assumption, it could be concluded that individual reading was popular in small classes, while, chorus reading was performed in large ones.

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A questionnaire survey on the use of an electronic dictionary(ED) was conducted toward Japanese teachers of English in junior and senior high schools. In this article, we attempt to analyze the results of the survey and to find notable trends. The results of each question weve analyzed from the following viewpoints; teachers' age and sex, the size of class they are in charge of (how many students are in a class), their experience of the ED use, etc. And in addition to these analyses, two assumptions were investigated: 1) Many teachers have a traditional principle that a dictionary should be a paper one(PD), 2) Female or higher age-group teachers have rather negative attitudes toward ED. The main finding is that ED is positively recommended by many teachers, especially junior high school teachers, who have ever used ED and who are in charge of small classes. Most of them were unfamiliar with ED before they used it for this survey, but their image of ED has positively changed. And ED was found effective for learners, especially for those beyond senior high school level. The two assumptions were not supported. Very few teachers had such a traditional principle, and as a whole, male and female teachers of all ages were attracted to ED. But more teachers should have participated in this survey so that the results can be safely generalized.

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