This study explored the relationships between prospective EFL teachers' beliefs about pronunciation teaching and their self-perceived pronunciation ability. Fifty-four Japanese students at the faculty of education at a national university in eastern Japan completed a 15-week EFL teaching methodology course, in which one of the main focuses was to get them to appreciate the importance of good-enough pronunciation and to improve their pronunciation skills. At the end of the course, the students answered 7-point Likert scale questions on the pre- and post-course beliefs about pronunciation teaching as well as those on their pre- and post-course self-perceived pronunciation abilities. The results indicated that prior to the course the strength of negative beliefs about pronunciation teaching was negatively correlated with one's self-perceived pronunciation ability but that through the course the students generally became more positive toward pronunciation teaching and more confident in their own pronunciation skills. There was a weak correlation between the degree of change in pronunciation-related negative beliefs and that in self-rated pronunciation ability both induced by the course.

View full abstract

The current study, which follows an earlier study on bilinguals (Miura, submitted), attempts to explore individual differences among L2 learners in the experimental notion of the 'sustainability of listening comprehension (SLC)' that describes the ability of bilinguals to sustain their listening comprehension when they need to switch between the two languages and inhibit an interfering option. A new experimental paradigm where L2 learners listen to two languages binaurally and what they hear are semantically re/unrelated, called a 'bilingual dichotic listening task,' was developed and administered to investigate the SLC with regard to working memory capacity (WMC), L2 proficiency, age of acquisition, length of learning, and amount of exposure to each language. The findings of twenty-five participants demonstrated that comprehension in both languages was sustained without being interfered with by the semantic relatedness and the language to ignore. Significant causal relationships with the SLC were found between L2 proficiency and the amount of listening, but not between WMC. These results would indicate requirements for L2 learners to sustain listening comprehension.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine how English teachers evaluate students' speech presentation and whether their holistic ratings have some correlations with linguistic features by objective measures of accuracy, fluency, and complexity, and with students' peer evaluation. The present data employed are (a) transcribed utterances in speech presentation by 21 senior high school students, (b) an ALT's and a JTE's holistic rating scores, and (c) peer evaluation data from the classmates. The results of the study show that the holistic rating scores are significantly in correlation with measures of accuracy (i.e., the number of error-free clauses per clause), and other linguistic features (i.e., the number of words, the number of clauses, and the number of types). The results also indicate that the average of the two teachers' holistic ratings correlate to students' evaluation in attitude and manner of speaking and in accuracy and concision, and that the JTE's ratings correlate to students' evaluation in fluency.

View full abstract

The aims of this study were to explore what kinds of repetition strategies learners tended to use during English shadowing and to find out whether shadowing would raise learners' attention of phonological input. Two hundred and two Japanese learners of English who had just begun shadowing were asked to answer a 39-item questionnaire while reflecting on their cognitive processes during shadowing. As a result of an exploratory factor analysis, four factors were extracted including (1) meaning-centered, (2) sound-centered, (3) phonological perception and production difficulties and (4) obstacles by high-affective filter. Participants' responses to the questionnaire also showed that shadowing helped them attend to the phonological (especially prosodic) aspect rather than to the semantic aspect of the input. Moreover, overall results indicated that shadowing would improve the function of learners' phonological loop, so that their acquisition of new linguistic items would be accelerated.

View full abstract

This study is an attempt to establish a model of teacher motivation by clarifying how each element of teacher motivation influences the others. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with fourteen English teachers in Osaka in order to explore their motivational and demotivational experiences. The interview data were analyzed qualitatively, and as the theoretical framework for this study, the structural-construction qualitative research method (SCQRM), developed by Saijo (2005), was applied. The results suggested that English teaching, student guidance, and the relationships with colleagues and guardians of students seem to influence teacher motivation as well as teacher demotivation. In addition, it was revealed that the teachers' views of their own self-efficacy on those motivating and demotivating factors seem to play an important role in teacher motivation. Therefore, increasing the factors they think they have an impact on and decreasing the factors they don't feel that they have control over can be very important.

View full abstract

The aim of this study is to explore whether situational continuity influences EFL learners' reading processes. Continuity is regarded as one of the most important factors in reading because it determines readers' construction processes of mental representation, especially integration processes. For successful reading, learners have to appropriately integrate information obtained from reading into the preceding mental representation. A total of 39 Japanese university students took part in this study. They were divided into two groups based on the results of a reading proficiency test. They read narratives clause by clause, and their reading times were recorded. The analysis showed that information with high situational continuity was read more quickly than information with low situational continuity, which indicated that the former was integrated into mental representations more easily than the latter.

View full abstract

This paper analyzed the thematic structure of Japanese intermediate EFL college student writing to identify the textual features of higher rated and lower rated essays. As an analytical tool, the Theme-Rheme structure of Halliday's functional grammar was used. The thematic progression patterns, which contribute to making coherence and an overall impression of a text, were examined by focusing on what ideas were chosen for the sentence element that came first in each clause. The type of essays examined was expository writing discussing a social problem. The results showed that both higher and lower rated groups used similar types of thematic patterns overall, but differences in the use of constant and linear thematic patterns were observed between the two groups. Moreover, a similar difference in the use of thematic patterns was observed within the higher rated group. Such differences in the use of thematic patterns were found to be related to the level of writing ability of the writer and the type of topic discussed.

View full abstract

The present study explored the effects of the degree of success in lexical inferencing on vocabulary acquisition with Japanese EFL learners. The participants attempted to infer the meaning of 12 target words and then took a word association task. A comparison between successful and partially successful attempts showed that (a) partially successful inferences sufficiently led to vocabulary acquisition and; (b) the types of vocabulary knowledge acquired through lexical inferencing depended on the degree of success. These findings suggest that second language (L2) learners can acquire the relationship between known and unknown words even by making somewhat incorrect inferences from surrounding context.

View full abstract

There is general agreement that predictive inferences, inferences about future events and outcome, elaborate a reader's mental representation (Fincher-Kiefer, 1996). However, the characteristics and the timing of the inferences are not altogether clear. Hence, this study investigates how the nature of contextual information influences predictive inferences by EFL learners. Experiment 1 investigated using off-line tests that the effects of contextual support on readers' predictive inferences and mental representation. The result showed that EFL learners generated more-specific predictive inferences when there was strong contextual support. It also showed that text information concerning the inference tended to more firmly integrate into readers' mental representations. Experiment 2 investigated the effects of contextual support on the timing of predictive inferences with on-line methodology. The result showed that EFL learners did not activate predictive inferences during reading. The two experiments showed that the level of contextual support affects readers' mental representation after reading, but it does not enhance predictive inferences during reading.

View full abstract

The present study was conducted in order to examine the efficacy of a teaching method aimed at reducing the over-use of the verb "to be," which is one of the characteristics of the sentences produced by Japanese novice learners of English. The over-use of the verb "to be" is due to typological differences between their mother tongue, Japanese, and English. According to Rutherford (1983b), English is termed as a subject-predicate language and Japanese as a topic-comment language, and he argues that novice learners encounter difficulties in overcoming the grammatical points caused by the typological differences. Of these points, we focused on the anomalous use of the verb "to be" by Japanese novice learners. We created some worksheets that would facilitate the understanding of sentence construction in natural sounding English. We conducted step-wise lessons so that the students would not heavily depend on using the verb "to be." As a result of our instruction, they learned to use other regular verbs, and they produced more natural sounding English sentences.

View full abstract