Despite students’ efforts in the classroom, in Japan there are still few opportunities to extend that learning to real-world situations. Unfortunately, many of the students do not have the experience to use English outside of class or interact with people from other countries, which is not a favorable environment for learning a foreign language. By actually interacting in English with students from other countries, we believe that students will be able to enrich their authentic learning and more deeply inquire into the reasons for learning English as a language. National surveys on academic achievement in Japan continue to show that students have problems with speaking in English. The present paper explains how ICT, such as tablet PCs, can be utilized in the GIGA school program to interact with schools overseas, and analyzes the effects of such interactions. By planning and implementing collaborative learning opportunities to use English with overseas schools, we aim to increase students’ motivation to learn English and improve their overall proficiency. Actual examples will be introduced along with a series of potential projects including tips on preparation, practice, evaluation and analysis.

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Since the introduction of the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter, 1978), the acquisition of unaccusativity has drawn the attention of many researchers in the field of first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. One extremely examined aspect of unaccusative acquisition is passivization errors, commonly referred to as overpassivization of unaccusative verbs. This article discusses two accounts of the ungrammatical passivization phenomenon—the passivization of non-target lexical causativization and the overt marking of NP-movement. The two analyses offer entirely opposite predictions: the former account predicts passive errors in the long passive structure and lexical causative errors; whereas the latter does not expect these errors. The present study investigates passive and causative errors by analyzing Japanese-speaking L2 English learners’ written production with unaccusative and unergative verbs observed in a large learner’s corpus. The study results demonstrated that learners are unlikely to produce unaccusatives in the long passive and the lexical causative constructions, strongly supporting the NP-movement account. Furthermore, passive errors were more found when the subject was inanimate than when it was animate. The finding suggests that subject animacy influences passivization errors.

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Building English skills in English as foreign language settings requires sustained learning. Thus, learners’ motivation for learning English is the important aspects that educators need to consider. This study conducted a survey to investigate the types and degrees of motivation among Japanese engineering-major students learning English. The questionnaire was identical to the one proposed by Agawa and Takeuchi (2016b), consisting of twenty items corresponding to four motivational factors: intrinsic, identified, external, and amotivation. Respondents provided their answers on a five-point Likert scale, and the data from 125 students enrolled in English classes were analyzed. The exploratory factor analysis identified four factors, suggesting that the number and structures matched with the results of the previous studies. The factor correlations were also consistent. Intrinsic and identified, external and amotivation were positively correlated, and the other combinations showed negative correlation. Descriptive statistics indicated that the amotivation received lowest ratings, followed by intrinsic, external, and identified. The estimated psychological network demonstrated that each item clustered into the intended factors. The results indicate that the respondents were motivated extrinsically more than intrinsically. Also, it is suggested that fostering the intrinsic and/or identified motivation leads to the lower amotivation state.

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