Fastwriting is known as one of the best techniques for extending quantity of writing. Also, some researchers state that commenting on ideas is an efficient feedback for compositions. This study attempts to determine the effects of fastwriting with teacher's comment feedback on essays of Japanese EFL junior high school students in terms of fluency, accuracy, and quality. The subjects wrote practice-essays for 8 weeks in a fastwriting style or a normal style. The students in the fastwriting-group were given comment feedback, whereas the other group corrective feedback. The pre- and post- tests were analyzed from the four viewpoints such as the total number of words, the mean length of T-units, the total number of words in error-free T-units and the ratio of error-free T-units in total T-units. In addition, the post-tests were rated by three Japanese teachers and three native speakers of English. The results showed that fastwriting was useful for improving both fluency and quality. Accuracy seemed not to be improved by corrective feedback. Fastwriting technique and comment feedback might be incorporated into junior high school classrooms as a helpful method to conduct and sustain free compositions.

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A word as a fundamental unit of language consists of meaning(M), sound(S) and spelling (O:orthography). In the present study, language learners' knowledge of the word is assumed as composed of six underlying abilities to interrelate these three components, i.e. M⇄ S, S⇄O, O⇄M. By positing these six abilities, the ability required to use a word in a certain speech form, either spoken or written, or either receptive or productive, can be well described as one of the six abilities, depending on which of the three elements (M, S, O) are to be related. Under the above assumption, the attempt was made to reveal a clear and total picture of the vocabulary knowledge of Japanese learners of English by measuring and comparing the six abilities. Six kinds of tests were conducted toward fifty-one subjects. The data obtained were analyzed with the focus on the following two points: (1) how six abilities are balanced and (2) how six abilities are related to English proficiency levels of the learners. Some of the major findings are : (1) Receptive abilities (OM, SM) were superior to productive ones (MO, MS), as is often noted, and the ranking showed that, both in reception and production, the subjects better performed on the tasks involving orthography (O-input, O-output) than on the tasks involving sound (S-input, S-output), and (2) Principal components analysis including items with interactive effects showed that the subjects with high English proficiency performed better in SM and SO than the subjects with low English proficiency, suggesting that auditory accuracy and the ability to convert a phonetic code into an orthographic code seem to be an attribute for a learner to be successful in learning English in Japan.

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When talking to non-native English speakers, it was found that, native speakers, in order to avoid or repair communication breakdowns, used more interactional modifications (confirmation checks, comprehension checks, clarification requests, self-repetitions, other-repetitions, and expansions) than in the discourse with other native speakers (Long, 1980b). This paper attempted to analyze and compare the interactional modifications (IMs) employed by ALTs and JTEs to manage and activate dialogues with Japanese EFL junior high school students. More specifically, two major purposes of this study were: (1)to determine whether any difference exists in the use of IMs between ALTs and JTEs. (2) to determine the effects of tasks on the use of IMs by ALTs and JTEs. Participants for the data analyses included ALTs, JTEs, and students from eight junior high schools. Two types of two-way tasks were administered. On both tasks, each teacher was required to interact with three learners. The conversations were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. The variables were eight kinds of IMs, i.e., self-expansions, self-repetitions, other-expansions, other-repetitions, confirmations by repetition, confirmations by paraphrase, clarification requests, comprehension checks plus wait-time which lasted more than three seconds given by the teachers. ANOVA and Chi-square Tests clarified: 1)The ALTs exploited more of the IMs that demanded expansions, while the JTEs employed more of the IMs that required repetitions. 2)The JTEs used more clarification requests than the ALTs to deal with incomprehensible utterances of the learners, while the ALTs exploited more confirmations by paraphrase. 3)The ALTs gave the students longer than 3 second wait-time more frequently than the JTEs on Task 2. 4)Some different IMs were more prevalent on the different task. These results provide JTEs with some tactics to interact better with the students to foster their positive attitude towards communicating in English.

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The purpose of this study was to develop courseware for effectively teaching a large number of lexical items to Japanese college students of English. Our first attempt was to develop a vocabulary teaching system which promotes effective learning and long-term retention of the target words. The completed system is composed of a set of sub-systems and a supra-system. The sub-system defines a series of tasks students are to achieve to learn a limited number of lexical items. It is composed of twelve steps of tasks in four stages. The tasks are designed to incorporate all the activities proposed by three major theories of learning. The supra-system defines the plan of the studies to be done with the sub-system. We introduced the principle of spaced practice into the supra-system. Fourteen weeks after the subjects studied 374 lexical items with the system in 14 weeks, 85 percent of the target items were retained.

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The conception of language threshold has become the base of the hypothesis that successful transfer of L1 reading skills to L2 reading could be 'short-circuited' by insufficient L2 proficiency. This hypothesis was speculated further by Alderson (1984), who suggested that, although L2 reading may be related both to L1 reading and L2 proficiency, 'it is a language problem, for low levels of foreign language competence.' Furthermore, Hudson (1982) and Carrell's (1983a) study found that skill-transfer to L2 reading is not saliently observed for advanced learners. These arguments could, therefore, be integrated as a further hypothesis: the effect of the transfer of L1 reading skills can be seen only between two kinds of thresholds, i.e. lower language threshold and upper language threshold. In addition, Carrell (1984a) studied the different effects of rhetorical organisation to L2 reading comprehension and found that textual factors, rhetorical organisations in this case, can be another important variable in L2 reading, as well as readers' factor such as L2 proficiency. The present study first attempts to examine how these two kinds of language threshold levels operate in L2 reading performance of EFL learners and then tries to investigate how the operations of these threshold levels could vary according to the difference of rhetorical organisations. The results show that the evidence for two kinds of threshold levels was quite observable. In some rhetorical patterns examined in the study, background knowledge effects could be recognised for the groups with medium level of L2 proficiency. In other words, L2 proficiency turned out to be a significant predictor to the effects of prereading activities, and hence, this finding supports the existence of two kinds of threshold levels which are assumed to make the effect of skill-transfer undiscernible for levels of L2 proficiency outside both thresholds.

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It is often said that it is crucially important for elementary learners of English in Japan to take intensive oral lessons in order to improve their oral-aural skills. At most junior high schools, however, teachers do not give carefully organized, systematic oral lessons which could drastically improve learners' skills. The purposes of this study are to clarify how much effect the oral instruction done at the school has on the students' aural perception skills and to present lessons focused on teaching the sounds of English as well as developing communicative competence. The lessons of the introductory period consist of the following two stages: 1) Twenty hours of lessons where basic sounds, vocabulary and structures are taught without showing the students the written sounds. 2) Twenty hours of lessons where twenty aural perception drills are given as well as the written sounds and textbook reading exercises. Aural perception tests were given three times to investigate the effects of these two stages, and the results have shown that both stages are statistically effective in improving the students' aural perception skills.

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This paper reports on the effect on test reliability of converting selected response dichotomous items into polychotomous ones. A 34-item test was administered to 90 Japanese university students who were instructed, in addition to choosing one correct option for each item, to choose one of three confidence level ratings-3 (definitely sure), 2 (not very sure), or 1 (wild guess). 6-point-scale polychotomous data were produced by combining response correctness data and confidence level ratings in such a way that a correct response with higher confidence was scored more highly than one with lower confidence. Item analyses revealed that incorporation of confidence level ratings generally improved the overall item reliability, replicating the results of an earlier study (Shizuka 1999).

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The present research approaches indirectly the elucidation of L2 speech planning and execution processes, the method of which is to examine when, where, how, why, and what kind of "repetitions," "filled-pauses," "pauses," and "self-initiated corrections" take place in L2 speech, using Fathman (1980)'s categorization. 15 Japanese university students' English speech produced through the task of "reporting" was analyzed from a syntactic point of view for "repetitions," "filled-pauses," "pauses," and "self-initiated corrections." The results indicated that 1) semantic (topic selection or general meaning) and syntactic planning may be conducted before the precise lexical items have been selected, 2) L2 speakers start to speak without having planed what they are going to say and edit their speech while speaking, 3) L2 speakers simultaneously monitor their speech, and 4) these process might be universal.

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This study made an attempt to verify the claim that Japanese EFL learners do not always acquire English grammatical features immediately after classroom instruction. The researcher examined the time gap between instruction and acquisition of five grammatical items (the present tense, to-infinitive, passive construction, relative clause, and the subjunctive mood). The result we obtained from two kinds of tasks (free composition task and translation task) showed that students needed at least more than one year to acquire a certain grammatical feature and the time length from instruction to acquisition is different from item to item. We also obtained a few interesting results by analyzing our subjects' errors in the translation task. One is that learners were sometimes influenced by Japanese expressions to choose which item to use. Another finding is that they were confused in choosing an item by other grammatical items that belonged to the same grammatical category such as tense and aspects. These findings challenge the way in which of evaluation is usually made by Japanese teachers of English; that is, while Japanese learners of English need a certain period of time to acquire a grammatical item, teachers tend to test their abilities of that particular item and expect to acquire it soon after the instruction.

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This study is made of high school students reading English short stones in two conditions: with dictionary and without dictionary. The results found that learners in the dictionary condition group outperformed their peers on a word-meaning matching vocabulary test. Especially students with lower level vocabulary knowledge received much higher scores than those of counterparts in a without dictionary condition. However, in a reading comprehension test, the mean score of the dictionary condition group was lower than that of the without dictionary group. This article ends with discussion and implications of these conflicting results.

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