The present study aims to investigate the problems of Japanese high school students who are not good at English in view of reading strategies. This study involved 164 high school students studying at a non-academic public senior high school. The experiment consisted of two classes. In the first class, Metacognitive Questionnaires (MQs) 1 and 2 were given to the students. In the second class, MQs 3 and 4 were answered by the students, followed by a open-ended question. A factor analysis was applied and three factors were extracted. They are Factor 1, "Global Understanding Strategies," Factor 2, "Bottom-Up Strategies," and Factor 3, "Model Strategies." Factors 1 and 3 seem to indicate that even poor high school EFL readers may show the metacognitive awareness of global level reading if the level of the text is appropriate for them, opposite to what is generally believed. On the contrary, Factor 2 means the students believe that local level understanding is essential to read a passage. To choose a text which is not difficult for them and make the class focusing on both local and global level of the text should be desirable.

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The article reports on a study of the effect of three different types of schema activation, two pre-reading formats, an oral introduction of the story, a set of pre-questions and one non-pre-reading format, a text summary as a post-reading activity on the improvement in reading skills of 60 undergraduate Japanese EFL students. Before and after the 12-week instruction, reading comprehension tests were conducted to examine the improvement in reading skills. The analyzed data showed that no significant differences between two pre-reading groups emerged but the non-pre-reading group resulted in increased reading skills compared with the pre-reading groups. The results of this study indicate that the continuous use of pre-reading in the classroom does not produce an effect on the improvement in L2 reading skills. The reasons are discussed in relation to schema activation in the reading process.

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Learners' beliefs about the effectiveness of grammar learning were examined. As a preliminary analysis, interviews with college students were reanalyzed. The interviews were originally carried out with the purpose of eliciting college students' beliefs about English language learning in general. This reanalysis placed a focus on their views about grammar. It showed that although there are interindividual differences, there were also intraindivildual differences: learners had differing degrees of perceived effectiveness of grammar learning in different skills, i.e., speaking, listening, reading, and writing. This result led to a larger-scale study in which 168 junior and senior high school students rated on a questionnaire the perceived effectiveness of grammar learning for each of the four skills and solving test questions. Cluster analysis was employed in order to profile them based on the patters of their beliefs. Seven distinct clusters were found, each of which had unique patters of beliefs. Based on the results, it was assumed that learners had different views about the characteristics of the skills. They were also suspected to have judged whether grammar learning was compatible to the characteristics of the skills.

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This study examined how 71 Japanese junior high school students developed their speaking ability over a span of five months. A planned monologue was elicited that required the students to introduce themselves for one minute in English. Utterances from the task were transcribed and analyzed utilizing 1 1 measures that assess vocabulary, fluency, accuracy, and complexity, among others. The results indicated that overall the students significantly improved their vocabulary (the number of pruned tokens and types) and fluency (the number of words per minute). Those who had had higher vocabulary ability expanded the number of words that they used significantly, leading to more T-units, longer speech, and higher EBB scale scores (Koizumi & Kurizaki, 2002a) than those with lower vocabulary ability. Students with lower grammar ability improved their fluency (the ratio of repetitive words) and spoke for a significantly shorter amount of time. Those who had had lower speaking ability expanded their vocabulary (pruned tokens) and fluency (words per minute) significantly, producing more T-units and higher EBB scale scores. In contrast, those with higher speaking ability increased the complexity of their speech (the ratio of subordinating conjunctions) but gained significantly lower EBB scale scores.

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Proficiency tests have been carried out twice a year for many years in Kanagawa Prefecture. An ad hoc committee prepares the tests based on the national curriculum, which is changed almost every ten years, taking their students' English abilities into consideration. The importance of practical communication skills has been emphasized in the current curriculum since 1994. This paper verifies whether the proficiency tests are reflective of the changes in the curriculum, and whether the students' English level has been transformed. The proficiency tests are divided into five sections: listening, grammar and vocabulary, discourse, composition, and reading comprehension. As for listening sections, some contents of questions proved to reflect the changes in the curriculum. In this paper, the grammar and vocabulary components are particularly focused on, and the influence of changes in the curriculum on the results of tests is verified.

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The purpose of this study is to identify oral language development of 101 Japanese junior high school learners from the viewpoints of grammatical development at both the sentence level and the discourse level. (WH interrogatives, pronouns, and conjunctions were selected for analysis) The spoken data that were recorded for each student from November of the 1st year to March of the 2nd year were used for this study. The data consists of one-to-one interviews with an assistant language teacher. Some changes or developments can be observed from July to November of their 2nd year. The following were some features: accuracy rate of WH interrogatives, proportion of formulaic speech to the total number of WH interrogatives, the number of learners who used the subjective, possessive, and objective case pronouns correctly, and the number of learners who used the conjunctions 'when', 'because', 'so', 'but, and 'and'.

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Inference of unknown words for ESL/EFL learners is considered to hold a primary position in research fields. Many research studies have shown that the inference of unknown words as well as the context method to be important. However, the results of the studies have not always been consistent. Therefore, the most frequently used inference clues for Japanese EFL high school students were investigated in this study. As a result, out of all 10 items among the correct inference group, was the clue 2. the sentence that includes the target word. According to the frequency order, the clue 1. one or two words before or after the targetword, and the clue 3. a specific part of the passage except the sentence that includes the target word were listed. These 3 inference clues were classified as Contextual Clues based on the classification of Aizawa (1998b) which modified Haastrup's (1987). From this result, it was clearly found that Japanese EFL high school students could use local contextual clues without being taught. This suggests that if the training for inferring unknown words and strategy instructions were done along with teaching vocabulary and reading, then more effective use of context, (which includes global context), would be expected.

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In an EFL situation such as Japan, the natural input of spoken English is quite restricted. However, children are surrounded with a lot of alphabetical letters and words in their environment. This investigation intends to acquire a basic understanding of how much Japanese children actually 'know' about English letters and words. It also examines children's receptive knowledge, which they have learnt unconsciously from their social environment. In English activities in elementary schools, which were implemented in April 2002, the focus of instruction is put only on spoken language. However, it seems that it is possible to use children's receptive knowledge as well as their interests in English letters and words in elementary classrooms.

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Listening has been recognized as a basic and crucial ability for learners to acquire languages. Since the Ministry of Education (2002a) has called for Japanese students to gain more practical communication skills, communicative competence including listening and speaking skills has been emphasized more in English education. However, there still have been many problems securing class time for listening instruction. Thus, in this study, considering the situation which teachers are facing at present and recent research on the interdependent relationship between listening and reading skills, the role of written passage presentation in aural instruction was investigated. The results indicated that students' comprehension with aural-visual passage presentation was better than with aural only presentation. This paper discusses the combination of aural and visual passage presentation based on its practicality, efficiency, and cognitive effect.

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