The present study examines the relative difficulties that Japanese EFL university students have in producing essays in four different modes - narration, description, exposition, and argumentation - and by doing so, the study attempts to explore the developmental pattern that EFL student writers are expected to undergo. The students' essays in the four modes were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results of the analysis revealed that narration and description are easier types of writing for Japanese EFL students, whereas argumentation is a mode that is more difficult to achieve. The numeral statistical analysis as well as in-depth sample analysis disclosed that the students seemed to have difficulty making a transition from the "knowledge-telling" model to the "knowledge-transforming" model of writing, proposed by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987). The students' argumentative essays tended to lack logical consistency, rational reasoning, and an objective point of view. The study argues the importance of encouraging the students to notice several differences between subjective and objective types of writing and of helping the students develop their academic writing skills to produce argumentation of better quality, which is an earmark of successful writing performance expected in a Japanese EFL context.

View full abstract

The present study aims to examine the effects of a ten-month extensive reading program on reading and listening comprehension. We also discuss whether there exists a relationship between reading and listening comprehension skills. The extensive reading program was implemented for all the first-year students of a senior high school in Tokyo. The data obtained from 114 students who attended the program were statistically analyzed and compared with the data obtained from 102 students who did not attend the program. It was observed that the group of the extensive reading program made gains in reading and listening comprehension on the posttest and outperformed the comparative group, second-year students, who had studied English for an additional year. A close examination of the reading scores revealed that the extensive readers made gains only on the easier texts (junior high school level) and not on the more difficult ones (intermediate senior high school level). In addition, with regard to the easier texts, correlations ranging from weak to moderate were observed between the listening and reading comprehension scores. However, with regard to the more difficult texts, no correlations were observed between the two scores. The improvement in reading and listening skills through the extensive reading program will be discussed in terms of cognitive language processing.

View full abstract

This study aims to measure the differences in the shadowing performance of Japanese university students with differing English abilities in the absence of or with encouragement to remember content for a recall task. In order to determine how Japanese EFL learners' shadowing performance is affected by the purpose of shadowing and speed of speech, the shadowing reproduction rate (RR) was calculated by transcribing all the recorded shadowing tasks at three different speeds and two purposes. An error analysis was also conducted both quantitatively and qualitatively. Results show a significant effect of semantic processing encouragement on shadowing performance for both ability levels in participants. Especially, upper-intermediate levels took more advantage of semantic processing encouragement in shadowing and demonstrated more semantically-related errors than lower-intermediate levels. In contrast, lower-intermediate levels produced more phonologically-related errors. Findings of this study show the different tendencies in working memory (WM) allocation to meaning and sound by shadowing condition and English proficiency.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between reading aloud ability and English proficiency. The reading aloud ability was measured by the software called 'Speak!' which can evaluate the sound produced by the subjects' reading aloud. The proficiency was measured by the standardized computer test called 'CASEC.' In Study 1, the reading aloud scores from 35 college students were used to see the relationship with their proficiency scores. The results indicated that a strong positive correlation was observed. In Study 2, a classroom instructional study, 36 college students practiced reading aloud 20 times and were evaluated by 'Speak!' every five times. The results showed that the more the subjects practiced reading aloud, the better the students' reading aloud improved. Statistical analysis indicated significant improvement between the first and third measurements, and between the third and fifth measurements. This proved that reading out loud repeatedly made differences in the 10th time to the 20th time, which follows a subjective claim about reading aloud practice.

View full abstract

The present study investigated the relationship between learners' sentence-processing speed and reading ability in their second language (L2). This study is based on the idea that sentence-processing speed is one of the crucial components of L2 reading ability. In this study, learners' sentence-processing speed is considered to be an index of basic English proficiency and is defined as the ability to quickly process easy and simple English sentences, rather than to comprehend difficult and complex English sentences. A speed test called the "time-oriented test (TOT)" was used in this study as a measure of learners' sentence-processing speed. Reading comprehension ability was measured using three types of comprehension questions: factual questions, referential questions, and inferential questions. This study examined the relationship between participants' TOT scores and reading comprehension test results, with respect to the three types of questions. The results showed that the participants with faster processing speeds performed better on inferential questions, although overall correlation between TOT and the reading comprehension test was not statistically significant.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of learning experience on second language (L2) word recognition of novice learners at junior high school. The participants were first-year students at a public junior high school in Japan. Five types of stimuli were used to measure reaction time in a two-choice reaction time task: hiragana recognition (HR), uppercase Alphabet recognition (UR), lowercase Alphabet recognition (LR), Japanese word recognition (JR) and English word recognition (ER). Their response time was recorded almost every three months (April, July, October, and February). The results showed that ER differed from the other conditions. Post-hoc tests revealed that although HR, UR, LR and JR did not change in ten months, ER was faster in July than in April, and it was faster in October than in July. ER developed in six months. In April, those who reacted slowly in LR (Slow Group) were slower in ER than those who reacted fast in LR (Fast Group). About ten months later, the Slow Group was still slower in ER than the Fast Group. It was suggested that L2 processing experience in the first six months is essential to improve L2 word recognition, and through various activities utilizing orthographic knowledge, learners with different writing system or orthography can develop their L2 word recognition abilities smoothly.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the developmental features of complexity in spoken performance by Japanese EFL junior high school students. The subjects were 60 Japanese junior high school students who had never been in any English speaking foreign country for more than one month. They were selected from 160 students at one school and categorized into two groups: the upper group (N=30), and the lower group (N=30) according to their English grades in the second term of the ninth grade. The spoken data was collected from their six interviews by ALT from the third term of the seventh grade to the second term of the ninth grade. Three measures were utilized for the analysis of complexity: the proportion of subordinate clauses to all the AS-units, the number of AS-units per turn, and the proportion of the formulaic expressions to all the AS-units. The result of the proportion of subordinate clauses showed the developmental feature in the second term of the ninth grade.

View full abstract

This study explores the impact of learners' pre-existing knowledge of loanwords on their English usage. An error identification and correction task, and a questionnaire were assigned to 86 high school students (27 first-year and 59 second-year high school students) and 34 university students in Japan. The data was analyzed in terms of the following two aspects: (a) influence of Japanese EFL learners' knowledge of English-derived words on their English usage and (b) a hierarchy of word difficulty among the five different types of loanwords. The finding has shown that negative transfer of English loanwords could be seen in learners' English usage. The study also found the existence of words' difficulty among different types of loanwords: Speech Modification > Semantic Modification > Wasei Eigo (Janglish) > Morphological Modification > Straightforward Loanwords ('>' means 'is more difficult than').

View full abstract

The present study aims to investigate the effect of rapid reading practice and its influence on Japanese EFL learners' perception of reading strategies. Seventy seven first-year high school students, whose text coverage was 99.3%, participated in the fast reading practice. One of the findings was that we confirmed the similar result as the previous studies, which means the average reading speed improved from 125wpm to 191.3wpm. We also found that self-confidence in the use of top-down strategies significantly improved after three-months of rapid reading practice. It was observed, however, that the repair strategies did not change. There might be a possibility that rapid reading practice in 1000 word-level texts, in which the density of unknown words is about one in 140 words, might not affect the use of repair strategies. It might be concluded that adding repair strategies to rapid reading training will increase effectiveness.

View full abstract