This study, first of all, examines how frequently the basic word 'get' is used in an authentic English text. Sesame Street is chosen because this program is one of the most popular TV programs for American children and almost all the American children learn some English through this program in their early years of life. This study analyzes the collocations of got in this program using the classification system proposed by Tabuchi (1990) and compares them with those of the Japanese junior high school English textbooks which are one of materials the Japanese students first encounter in their English-as-a-foreign-language learning experience. There are tremendous differences between the two kinds of text in the collocations of 'get.' The collocations using 'get' in the textbooks can cover only about 48 percent of all the collocations used in Sesame Street. In addition it also compares those two types of collocations with those of the corpus made from the English compositions the Japanese junior and senior high school students wrote. As we can imagine, the students used only the patterns they have learned in the textbook and their corpus showed an extreme inclination to Use the "get + adv pattern" (47.2%). Based on those findings, we discuss its implications for language acquisition and language learning in the final section for our bettor communication with native speakers of English at a deeper level.

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The objective of this study was to determine the success of a course of listening instruction administered at junior high school level. A specific feature of this listening course was the mixture of graded tasks and the varied learning resources that the students used while they were being presented with natural spoken English. Four independent groups of students, two third year classes (76 students in all) and two second year classes (81 students in all), took part, in classes for approximately six months. To measure the efficiency of the course, a listening comprehension test and a cloze test were given to the third year students, and a cloze test to the second year students before and after the instruction. The average improvement obtained by the third year students was 55 points in the comprehension test and 53 points in the cloze test, and by the second year students, 48 points in the cloze test. The effect of learning was retained even after 60 days after the instruction. The students also showed improvement in a test of listening to new material by 20 points in a comprehension test and 8 points in a cloze, test Learners' self-evaluation questionnaires also revealed the efficiency of the instruction and the students expressed positive impressions of the instruction in the classes.

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This article examines the linguistic transfer of writing strategies from first language (L1) to second language (L2) in writing. Contrastive rhetoric studies have become considerably more complex over the last 25 years and are explored in a number of the different directions related to written discourse across cultures. The beginning of this article will provide an overview of recent studies in contrastive rhetoric. The written discourse of four Japanese speakers will be closely examined, analyzing sentence structure and organization. The different organizations of the English paragraph are discussed from a cultural perspective, while the different structure of sentence is approached from a linguistic perspective. The study shows that L1 writing strategies influence L2 writing even though the subjects are advanced students who seem to know English rhetoric well. Lastly, I will mention the pedagogical implications of contrastive rhetoric studies in the current writing instruction in Japan.

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This paper aims to examine the validity of translation form L2(English) into L1 (Japanese) as a language testing procedure. Especially after deciding to introduce Oral Communication in senior high school in 1989 translation tests have come under criticism. However, they have been used in Japan. We need much more empirical research in order to discuss translation tests and find good ways to use it. This survey was designed to compare the validity of the translation test with that of a question-answer in Japanese test, which was composed by the present writer. Another aim of the study is to identify the following two types of testees for both the translation test and a question-answer-in-Japanese test, as follows: Type A: testees who comprehend the text but get a low score on the test, Type B: testees who can obtain a high score on the test, but do not actually comprehend the text,in it. Eighteen raters rated the translation test and the question-answer-in-Japanese test taken by 108 Japanese undergraduate students. The paper reveals that the tests proposed by the present writer were better than the translation-tests(form L2 into L1).

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ne the effects, of error feedback and revision on essays of Japanese EFL learners Eighty senior high school students are required to write short English essays within 10 minutes in class over a nine-week period. They hand in their essays each tame and. one week later the essays are given back. The students are divided into four groups, depending on whether or not they are given error feedback, or whether or not they are required to rewrite, as shown below Group A required to rewrite With error feedback Group B no need to rewrite with error feedback Group C required to rewrite without error feedback Group D no need to rewrite without error feedback The pre- and post- tests are analized according to the following criteria. (1) holistic evaluation by two EFL writing teachers, (2) text length, (3) mean T-unit length, (4) mean error-free T-unit length, and (5) ratio of error-free T-units in T-units (2) and (3) are for fluency measures while (4) and (5) are for accuracy measures. The results indicate that there was no significant difference among the four groups. The feedback groups (Group A and B) and the non-feedback groups (Group C and D) also showed no significant difference As for the revision groups (Group A and C) and the non-revision groups (Group B and D), however, some significant differences were observed, the former outperformed the latter in terms of accuracy, while the latter outperformed the former with respect to fluency These results lead to the conclusion that EFL learners' own revising has more influence on their writing quality and quantity than error feedback from their teachers.

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The subjects arc 83 junior high school teachers in Yamanashi. They were asked how they deal with mixed-level groups in their classes and filled out questionnaires on the beliefs. As for data analysis, teachers were divided into three groups by the years teaching. The questionnaires included the following six aspects of teaching teaching paces (student-centered vs teacher-centered) , teaching styles(heuristic vs explanation) , use of materials(textbook-centered vs flexible use) , homework(required vs not required), teaching processes(rigid vs flexible). We prepaid mainly two research questions in this study: 1) whether or not teachers take different levels of students into consideration on planning teaching processes in their classes. 2) Whether or not the differences between teachers about teaching careeres rake their teaching netted for mixes-level students different The results showed that teachers think they need to adopt different methods for different levels of students, a result which doesn't vary according to years in the teaching field.

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This paper attempts to analyze and compare the language of requests made on the telephone by native speakers of English and Japanese speakers of English in terms of their politeness strategies. Each of these groups consisted of four subjects who were involved in two tasks, where role-play was used to elicit the conversation data. The first task was to make a request of her/his professor to write a letter of recommendation and the second task was to make a request of her/his friend to proofread a paper. It was found that native speakers of English used various politeness strategies to maintain a desirable human relationship in each situation. On the other hand, Japanese speakers of English used very few of these politeness strategies, which night lead to a negative image of the speaker, the paper concludes with the implications of this research for English education and with the call for farther research in discourse analysis of daily conversation.

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In this study, the effects of passage difficulty level on reading strategies employed by Japanese EFL learners were examined. Two passages of different readability levels (10th-grade level and 6th-grade level by the Flesch formula) with the same content and length were prepared by rewriting the original expository text from an ESL reading textbook. The original passage concerning the psychology of shoppers, which is at the 10th-grade level, was carefully selected in order that all the subjects in this experiment would have equal background knowledge on the topic. Using easier vocabulary and grammatical constructions constituted the easier version of the passage, which is at the 6th-grade level. 210 Japanese high school students were divided into two groups: Group R10 read the original passage and Group R6 read the rewritten and easier passage. The two groups of students answered the same questionnaire on reading strategies that used a 1-5 Likert Scale(1=strongly disagree, 5=strongly agree) after reading their passages of different readability respectively. As a result of a factor analysis performed on the obtained data, five factors were identified and were named respectively, further analysis using ANOVA revealed that (1) students who read the easier passage(R6) had a better understanding of the structural aspects of the text, and (2) students who read the original but difficult passage(R10) were more focused on the information in the text. These results reflect the difficulty that EFL learners have in bottom-up processing and imply that acquiring a certain level of ability in bottom-up processing is necessary to use top-down processing skills effectively in EFL reading comprehension.

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In this paper, we explored the possibility of developing EFL learning lists based on the frequency data obtained from both L1 and L2 corpora. We especially focused on the learning list of irregular verbs originally developed by Grabowski and Mindt (1995), which was based upon L1 corpora (Brown and LOB) only arid investigated if we could optimize the list by comparing the findings from L1 corpora with those from the Japanese EFL Learner (JEFLL) Corpus data. We also argued that further steps should be taken to monitor the interlanguage to see how these irregular verbs are actually used in L2 learners' performance data. For this purpose, we investigated how irregular verbs were actually used in the learner corpus to see if there was any difference in the rate of correct use of these verbs regarding the classifications based upon the Vendler framework. The results were not very conclusive, due to the treatment of the past tense only, but still showed an interesting possibility of using a learner corpus for monitoring learner performance after introducing the items to be acquired. The paper concludes that while the primary source of target language performance is L1 corpora, L2 learner corpora have a great potential to provide valuable data for optimizing and monitoring the learning items for L2 learners.

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This paper deals With the evaluation of speech performances in an English speech contest for Japanese university students. The purpose of this study is mainly two-fold. One is to investigate the consistency or stability in the ranks given to each contestant by the two judge groups, officially-invited judges and student judges. The agreement rate in scoring within and between the two types of judges was inspected. The other is to find the underlying factors that may affect the speech evaluation by means of a factor analysis. The conditions for speakers to be highly evaluated were also examined. There Was little consistency between the two judges, and within the official judges, which resulted m lower rank-order correlation coefficients and lower inter-rater reliability. On the other hand, within the student judges results were found to be relatively stable. Concerning the affecting factors, the first factor, that most affected the overall evaluation, was vocal elements (pronunciation, fluency, voice-control, etc.) followed by contents of speech, and higher points were given to these items Apart from vocal elements, physical movement was also found to be the factors for speakers to be ranked higher.

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