This preliminary classroom study explores students’ perceptions of their learning through the peer-review (PR) process. Specifically, the author, a lecturer of the Project-based English Program (PEP), investigates the influence of uniquely constructed PR model on students’ perceived learning about the fundamentals of an academic paper: the basic structure of English texts and logical development of arguments. The author conducted pre and post web-based questionnaires, and the e-learning postings of free description targeting participants’ perceived achievements during and after the PR process. Results of questionnaires show that the students perceived the process as having raised their level of thinking about certain aspects of the writing process. Qualitative data reveals students’ perceptions on the developed accomplishments. The author concludes that PR process can positively influence students’ learning on how English texts should be organized and developed.

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The main goal of the present study is to reveal to what extent prosodic cues, particularly pitch information, affect the auditory sentence processing of Japanese EFL learners. Two types of stimuli were prepared, one consisting of normal speech and the other edited to have the same fundamental frequency throughout (monotone). Therefore, one set of stimuli had normal prosodic cues, whereas in the other set, pitch information had been removed. In the experiment, parts of target sentences including either late closure or early closure were presented auditorily to the participants, and they were then asked to determine which type of sentence had been presented. The response data was analyzed using the generalized linear mixed effect model from which a model consisting of several linear predictors, including (a) sentence structure, (b) learner proficiency, and (c) stimuli type was selected that showed the best fit to the data. In addition, further analyses applying signal detection theory was also conducted in order to confirm the validity of the selected model. The results of a series of analyses showed that learners successfully utilized pitch information during auditory sentence processing irrespective of their proficiency levels. This indicates that pitch information contributes to sentence structure parsing for EFL learners at all levels. Some pedagogical implications are also discussed.

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The present study discusses the applicability of mixing multiple pedagogical treatments (e.g., face-to-face classroom instruction and e-learning), or blended learning, as a means of risk diversification on students’ learning outcome in foreign language teaching. Most of studies in foreign language teaching so far have solely focused on the effect of pedagogical treatments, but not the risk, which is represented by dispersion on a learning outcome measure, or volatility in the measurement. In everyday teaching practice, the risk of pedagogical treatments is yet another important viewpoint to concern as well as the effect of treatments. This paper introduces a mathematical foundation of risk diversification, which has been commonly applied in finance and risk management. Then, a Monte Carlo type of numerical example simulating a blended learning setting was shown to confirm how the risk diversification effect works.

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