The present study reports beliefs held by junior high school teachers and pre-service teachers (students in teaching credential courses) with relation to teaching world varieties of English at junior high schools. The participants were 48 teachers and 67 students, who responded to a 30-item questionnaire asking about the feasibility of incorporating English varieties into junior high school English education as well as beliefs about goals and methods of teaching English in this globalized age. While a majority of respondents believed that learners should become familiar with English varieties, their beliefs appeared to be influenced by their own background. Pre-service teachers with experiences of studying abroad tended to express concern that young learners are exposed to English varieties. Considering the fact that many of these prospective teachers encountered a variety of Englishes outside Japan, this outcome was rather paradoxical. Those students who had no study abroad experiences, on the other hand, were more idealistic, showing favorable views toward teaching global Englishes. Regardless of their age and study abroad experiences, in-service teachers tended to show similar views: e.g., It would be possible to teach Englishes if they were asked to do so in MEXT-screened textbooks.

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Since 2000s, affirmative views on using students’ first languages (L1s), including translation, in foreign language (L2) classrooms have been openly discussed. Researchers and educators investigate L1 functions and L2 teachers’ and students’ perceptions about their L1 use. Since there is little research on the role of translation during planning for speech performances, this study aims to investigate its needs and purposes in various pre-tasks for a speaking task from Japanese junior high school students’ perceptions. Based on the analysis and categorization of their comments, it is found that almost all students used translation, especially in reading-related pre-tasks to process new and cognitively demanding information, such as L2 vocabulary, L2 grammatical rules and structures, and L2 texts. The research suggests the importance of accepting students’ use of translation and leveraging it as a learning strategy in class because translation can promote students’ understanding and in-depth learning about the L2.

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The current study investigated the relationships between declarative and procedural memory (DM/PM) and procedural knowledge of intermediate-level second language (L2) learners under an instructed setting. Previous studies have reported the associations between DM and PM and L2 learning. However, as most previous studies on the topic have used grammaticality judgment tests as L2 measures, the relationships between their DM and PM and L2 procedural knowledge may not have been clearly established. This study measured participants’ procedural knowledge using an elicited imitation test, which required its use. Correlation analysis indicated that participants’ PM measured using a serial reaction time task was significantly and moderately correlated with their L2 procedural knowledge. However, their DM measured using LLAMA B was not significantly correlated with their L2 procedural knowledge. Thus, the results suggest that PM is more associated with L2 procedural knowledge than DM for intermediate-level learners.

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This research clarifies how novice English teachers relieve anxiety and improve their own English lessons and their teaching abilities within a group of English teachers of the same school, that is connected by mutual trust and have mutual connections. The high school to be surveyed was selected by appropriately using the sampling method of qualitative research. Because of the preliminary survey conducted in May 2020, it was confirmed that all eight teachers trust each other and they are connected by mutual trust and connections. After the high school was nominated as the research target, in July 2020, the main survey was conducted to investigate what support novice English teachers receive from senior teachers. As a result, it was found that novice teachers are trying to improve their English lessons and their teaching ability while receiving three types of support from senior teachers: business support, introspection support, and emotional support. Specifically, to promote the growth of novice teachers, instead of top-down guidance from senior teachers, a relationship that promotes their spontaneous and independent growth of them, while supporting them emotionally and providing assurance.

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The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has announced the university admission reforms and most of the applicants will take the new Common Test and/or private-sector English tests. The present study investigated the characteristics of each of the tests and compared them with the Center Test, the current test for university admissions. The findings showed that there was a significant difference of the proportion of question types between the tests; some tests include more paraphrase questions, while other tests include more higher-level questions, which were inference questions, theme questions, and text organization questions. Moreover, the average number of the words in choices differed significantly between the tests. The average number of the words included both in choices and texts also differed significantly, which suggests that the item difficulty in multiple-choice reading tests is different between the tests. These results suggest that the reading ability which applicants are required to achieve certain score is different between the tests, and therefore, different test-taking strategies may be useful for different tests, such as a word-matching strategy.

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Japanese English learners have difficulties with English spelling and pronunciation because the writing and phoneme systems differ between Japanese and English, and Japanese students do not have enough opportunity to learn these systems. It is necessary to understand the types of errors Japanese English learners make to improve their spelling and pronunciation skills. The purpose of this study is to see the characteristics of spelling and pronunciation of individual learners through error analysis of spelling and pronunciation tests. There are two Research Questions (RQs); RQ1: Do the spelling and pronunciation characteristics of Japanese English learners differ depending on the learners? RQ2: Are there any differences in participants’ spelling and pronunciation skills depending on their proficiency level? A total of 22 university students took three types of tests; (a) spelling test, (b) pronunciation test, and (c) a Japanese meaning check test. Focusing on each learners’ accuracy and error types, the learners could be divided into four groups; (a) Good Spellers Good Decoders, (b) Good Spellers Poor Decoders, (c) Poor Spellers Good Decoders, and (d) Poor Spellers Poor Decoders. Through this study, it was obvious that each learner has a different type of error. Therefore, Japanese English teachers need to teach their students individually about the types of errors that their students make. As for spelling teaching, it is necessary for the teachers to find the errors that are likely to occur individually and provide feedback to the learners so that they understand the errors they are likely to make. In terms of teaching pronunciation, it is important to take time for the teachers to check pronunciation individually, not just to practice pronunciation in the whole classroom.

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Readers run validation processes to understand texts coherently. One of the factors affecting the validation process is outdated information. However, little is known about its impact in secondlanguage (L2) readers’ comprehension. Thus, the present study aimed to explore the impact of outdated information on English as a foreign language (EFL) readers’ validation process by changing the order in which outdated information was presented in a text. This study included 18 Japanese graduate and undergraduate students who read narrative texts. We prepared 16 experimental texts, each of which had four context sections: Consistent, Inconsistent, Qualified-First, or Qualified-Second. The Consistent context described the protagonist’s traits that were consistent with the target sentence. The Inconsistent context contained traits that conflicted with the action of the target sentence. In the Qualified-First context, the protagonist’s profile was presented first and the outdated information was introduced second. In the Qualified-Second context, the order of introducing the protagonist’s characteristics and outdated information was reversed. Reading times for target sentences revealed that outdated information did not affect validation process, and the order of presentation also did not cause any comprehension difficulties. These findings suggest that EFL readers process outdated information in different ways from first-language (L1) readers.

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Intelligibility is currently considered to be the most realistic goal in L2 learners’ pronunciation acquisition. Although previous research revealed that both segmental and suprasegmental features might influence intelligibility, it still remains unclear what pronunciation features are especially crucial. The current study investigated factors affecting intelligibility, with a particular focus on seven types of consonant substitution typical of Japanese learners of English and the number of syllables (i.e., word length). Thirty-seven native speakers of English were asked to transcribe 40 words mispronounced intentionally by a Japanese-English bilingual speaker. The results indicate that /θ/→/s/ and /f/→/ɸ/ are the most detrimental to intelligibility, and that consonant substitutions in one-syllable words influence intelligibility more negatively than those in two- and three- syllable words. These findings might be helpful for teachers to set teaching priorities in pronunciation teaching.

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This study aims to explore how different research approaches, quantitative and qualitative, and the number of authors affect first-person pronoun usage in research articles (RAs) by using a corpus of 28 quantitative and 28 qualitative RAs in applied linguistics. First, the study examined the total frequencies of singular pronouns, I, my, me and exclusive and inclusive plural pronouns, we, our, us and their distribution across different sections of the article. The study further identified verbs that collocated frequently with I and exclusive/inclusive we and analyzed their discourse functions in each section of the article. Results indicated that the single authors of qualitative articles used first-person pronouns more frequently than the single authors of quantitative articles but no significant differences in frequencies were found between the two different types of RAs by multiple authors. The study also observed the highest frequency in the Method section of both types of articles. Analysis of discourse functions found that the authors of RAs with different approaches used exclusive pronouns I and we differently, while they used inclusive we in a similar manner.

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It has been observed, by phoneticians and practitioners alike, that Japanese EFL learners often fail to de-accent function words, despite their principally stress-less nature. This characteristic of learner speech becomes particularly apparent when they produce two or more adjacent function words, such as in the and and I was, to name a few. Oral production with such speech rhythm is considered detrimental to various aspects of L2 pronunciation. This practical report aims to help Japanese high school learners in an EFL setting overcome the difficulty in question by providing them an explicit instruction on the phonetic weakness of function words, especially when they occur in sequence. 96 high-school students took part in oral presentation activities. The participants were taught to (a) distinguish between content and function words, (b) produce reduced vowels, and (c) use rhythm patterns that successive function words make. Following an oral presentation, a questionnaire survey was administered to investigate learner perception of the effectiveness of the instruction, and the areas of pronunciation the participants came to believe weakening function word sequences contributed to. Results showed that the L2 learners felt that the instruction was effective for improving their speech rhythm. Those successfully produced the rhythmic patterns also reported significant growth in fluency.

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