Phonetics is not a mandatory course in acquiring an English teachers' or elementary school teachers' license in Japan. Teachers without knowledge of or confidence in using phonetics are likely to use Katakana in teaching pronunciation, which leads to unintelligible pronunciation. Based on the consideration that IPA is the solution, an experimental lesson was given to junior high school students using newly devised teaching materials. The experimental group which was taught IPA by a teacher without knowledge of phonetics, proved to be significantly superior to the control group in the pronunciation test.

This study is a complete survey of the quantity and the variety of the literary materials and their accompanying exercises included in the authorized high school textbooks for Communication English I, II, and III. The major findings of this study are as follows: (1) although the number of literary materials in the regular lessons is small, they account for more than half of the supplementary lessons; (2) non-English language literary materials are not rich in variety except for Japanese ones; (3) literary materials by famous authors are limited, and most of the materials are by contemporary and less-known authors; (4) the number of exercises for literary materials is small, and most of them are for checking the literal meaning of the text, summarizing the storyline, inferring the dispositions and feelings of the characters and narrators, students expressing themselves in English, and oral interpretation.

本研究の目的は、学習者の語彙学習に対する動機づけ向上のための指導方略開発に向けた示唆を得ることである。97名の英語学習者を対象に質問紙調査を行い、1) 豊富な語彙知識を獲得した将来の自分のヴィジョン (Vision-V) を明確化する指導は、語彙学習に対する外発的動機づけを高める指導よりも効果的な可能性が高いといえるか、2) Vision-Vは英語力全般に関するヴィジョンよりも語彙学習行動 (motivated vocabulary learning behavior: MLB-V) を強く予想するか、3) Vision-Vはスピーキング、リーディングに関するヴィジョンとどの程度相関があるか、4) Vision-Vの明確さと、語彙学習に対する内発的動機づけ (intrinsic motivation for vocabulary learning: IM-V) の2つの変数がMLB-Vをどの程度予測するか、について調査した。分析の結果、Vision-VとIM-VがMLB-Vの約34%を説明することが示されるなど、Vision-V を明確化し、IM-V を高める指導が、学習者の語彙学習に対する動機づけ向上に役立つ可能性があることがわかった。

To use machine translation effectively, a process called “pre-editing” is required to be done to edit the original text in a form that is easy to translate. In this paper, the author tried to apply the model used for Japanese-English translation to pre-editing for machine translation, and to verify the effect of pre-editing on English composition by asking participants of the experiment to write in Japanese and English. The participants are divided into three groups. The first and second group wrote two compositions in Japanese and one in English, and the third group wrote one in Japanese and one in English. As a result, it was found that to do proper pre-editing, just paying attention to writing sentences which are easy to translate into English is enough to use machine translation effectively and that some participants using the Japanese-English translation model tended to produce complex English sentences.

This study developed an elicited imitation test to assess Japanese EFL learners' knowledge of pragmatic routines, which was named the Pragmatic Routine Elicited Imitation Test (PREI Test). The advantage of acquiring pragmatic routines is claimed as “they provide low-level learners with a quick repertoire of target language resources, allowing them to outperform their competence” (Roever, Wang, & Brophy, 2014, p. 382). The procedure for developing the PREI Test is divided into six stages: (1) constructing a written discourse completion task, (2) collecting data from native speakers of English, (3) selecting targeted pragmatic routines, (4) comparing the targeted routines with speech act corpora, (5) writing head acts of four different speech acts using the targeted routines, (6) finalizing the PREI Test with the head acts. This paper will discuss possibilities and challenges for the PREI Test to be used to assess and teach the knowledge of pragmatic routines in EFL classrooms.

This 20-month study examined effectiveness of two teaching methods on English speaking-ability development. Two groups of 8th and 9th grade students, one from the attached elementary school, where special English education is used, and one from regular elementary schools. Both groups were divided into two so that half of the students from each group were exposed to the “Round System” (RS) method, characterized by large amounts of meaningful English input and output, and the other half received normal English instruction. The purpose was to assess the effect of the RS in combination with previous English education. Data analysis of post-instruction tests showed that there was no difference between the two teaching methods. However, the RS students took the test about three months before the standard-method students. The “extra” months of English education may have off-set any advantage offered by the RS.

英語スピーキング活動時に理解可能な発音で発話することを学習者に促す必要があるが、明示的な発音指導を行うか、行うならばどのように行うかについて、現在のところ明確な指針がない。そこで本研究では、出身地や教育歴などの背景が異なる3名の教員による発音エラーに対する指摘の傾向を比較した。さらに発音指導の補助ツールとして自動音声認識 (ASR) の導入を念頭におき、教員による指摘がASRによる誤認識とどれほど共通しているかを調べた。その結果、教員間および教員とASR間で示される発音エラーの量と傾向が大きく異なることが明らかとなった。本研究の後半では上記の量的分析を受け、担当教員それぞれがこの結果を質的に考察し、人間の教員による指導の利点、及び、サポートツールとしてのASRの有効性を探る。