In the field of reading research, the role of reading strategies has attracted attention both in L1 and L2. Most research points out that good readers can make use of certain strategies that poor readers cannot utilize. Therefore, studying the use of reading strategies employed by Japanese EFL learners in advance will be necessary to teach them the techniques they need in order to better understand English text. The purposes of this research are (1) To clarify the characteristics of reading strategies employed by Japanese high school students, and (2) To find the differences in the use of those reading strategies between tenth-grade students and twelfth-grade students who are more accustomed to reading English than tent-hgraders. 163 Japanese high school students, 78 tenth-grade students and 85 twelfth-grade students, read the same typical expository text to raise their awareness about reading strategies. After reading the text, they answered a questionnaire using a 1-5 Likert Scale(1=strongly disagree, 5=strongly agree). Then, factor analysis was performed on the data obtained from the questionnaire. Six factors were extracted and were named respectively. Further analysis using ANOVA clarified that (1) twelfth-grade students are more analytic and pay more attention to the structural aspect of English than tenth-graders when reading an expository prose, and (2) Twelfth-grade students are less conscious of their emotion and opinions than tenth-grade students when they read an expository prose. These results reflect the importance of having a solid grounding in bottom-up processing in L2 reading. As for the effects of cognizance of one's own emotions and opinions in reading an expository text in L2, further research considering the learners' proficiency level, text type, and the purpose of reading will be necessary.

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It is often pointed out that, in the past, international education in Japan lacked a global perspective. Recently, however, there has been a growing trend to introduce world issues from a global perspective into English textbooks authorized by the Japanese Ministry of Education for junior and senior high school students. The present research examines whether the above-mentioned trend can also be found in "Foreign Affairs" classes, for which there are not yet any English textbooks authorized by the Ministry of Education. The ultimate goal of "Foreign Affairs" classes is to cultivate students' international understanding. Nation-wide research was conducted by sending questionnaires to English teachers who were in charge of "Foreign Affairs" classes in 210 senior high schools. It was found that teachers tried to use teaching materials emphasizing a global perspective, and to introduce global issues as topics by using presentations, discussions and debate techniques to cultivate students' international understanding, even if they didn't have authorized textbooks on which to base their classes. From this result, it may be said that the global perspective suggests a future direction for international understanding within English education in Japan.

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This is an empirical study to examine the efficacy of giving learners information on "error perception and interpretation," which is defined in this paper as "how native English speakers perceive or interpret errors made by EFL learners." Japanese learners of English sometimes make such an error as "How do you feel her?" when their intended meaning is "How do you feel about her?" In this case we assume that it would be more helpful for the learners if they are presented with its error perception and interpretation ("How do you feel her?" means " 'How do you touch her?' in a sexual meaning.") than if they are only given its correct expression ("How do you feel about her?"). We predict if learners know how native English speakers perceive and interpret the errors which learners make, there is a strong likelihood that they will not make the same errors thereafter. Katagiri (1997b) investigated the efficacy of presenting all the learners in intact classes with the information on error perception and interpretation, and no statistically significant positive effect was found. The present research investigated the efficacy of presenting only the learners who made errors of which possible perceptions and interpretations by native speakers the instructors gave. No statistically significant positive effect of presenting the learners with information on perceptions and interpretations of their actual errors was found.

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The importance of "idioms" is often pointed out in teaching or learning English as a foreign language. But in reality there exists nearly no reliable "idiom list" which is selected based on a frequency count of English idioms. Although the need is obvious, not much advance has been made in this field. In order to find out the causes, a literature research has been carried out. From this research, it has been shown that one of the causes lies in the definition problem of English "idioms". In spite of many theoretical approaches, no unified definition has ever been made. Each definition has its own idiom category and differs in the precise idiom coverage. A clear-cut distinction between "free combination", "collocation" and "idiom" is also said to be difficult to be made. Within A Course of Study by the Ministry of Education in Japan, there is no reference to "idioms", only "collocations". According to the description, "collocations" to be taught must be selected on the criterion that they are "basic". Because no list of "collocations" is concretely given, however, selection must inevitably be relied upon by the teacher's subjective judgement When it comes to the frequency count of English idioms, other problems raise their heads in turn. First of all, a large corpus must be prepared because each idiom is not remarkably high in its frequency of occurrence. Secondly, unlike "words", idioms to be counted must be selected prior to their retrieval. Thirdly, the algorithm of the retrieval must be considered because idiom components can sometimes change their forms and also their positions. If appropriate solutions can be found for the problems clarified above, an effective "idiom list" can be expected to be made in the near future.

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This paper reviews the literature and integrates the findings in divisibility/identifiability of L1 and L2 reading skills, and presents a hypothesis concerning L2 reading tests. Whether reading ability can be broken down into component skills is an issue which has long divided reading researchers. Review of the literature reveals what can be almost termed a chaos of results. However, if we distinguish between psychological and psychometric unidimensionality, the apparently conflicting results could converge nicely into a clear picture. That is, reading ability could be considered psychologically multidimensional but psychometrically unidimensional. It may follow that at least for measurement purposes, it is not too unreasonable to treat reading as a unidimensional trait What underlies this virtual unidimensionality of reading ability might be the fact that different levels of reading processes draw on the same cognitive resource, namely, working memory capacity. The capacity theory of comprehension proposed by Just and Carpenter (1992) provides a plausible account for this unidimensionality in the psychometric sense. Since one's working memory capacity is a function of his/her lower-order processing efficiency in their framework, one hypothesis for L2 reading tests would be that for the purpose of revealing individual differences in overall reading ability, we may well concentrate on measuring the reader' s lower-order processing efficiency.

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Japanese intermediate students of English read an English short story in one of the four text reading conditions: Guessing exercises (provision of gussing unknown words as a pre-reading activity), Marginal Glosses (provision of L1 translations of unknown words), Dictionary (accessing a bilingual dictionary), and Control. The results found that learners in gussing pre-reading activity and marginal glossing groups outperformed their peers on the form-meaning connection tasks administered immediately after they had read the text. Furthermore, this difference didn't disappear on the retest two weeks later. This article ends with recommendations for effective ways of teaching vocabulary through reading.

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