In realistic communication settings it is crucial to listen to and comprehend the message of the speaker and quickly respond to the interlocutor. This type of communication requires learners’ language processing to be accelerated and automatized in an ideal sense. Since vocabulary is a fundamental constituent element of language, how quickly the learner can process vocabulary reflects how fast he or she can process the language. To examine whether the learner can deal with rapid response communication, it is important to measure how fast the learner can recognize and comprehend vocabulary. However little research has been done in this area and almost no testing device has existed to date. In this study a new on-line test was developed which can assess recognition rate and automaticity of L2 vocabulary using the latest psycholinguistic concept: coefficient of variation (CV) and educational technology. An experiment was conducted to check the validity of the test. The results showed that this test was valid in measuring vocabulary size, recognition rate and processing automaticity. The observations of the questioners revealed that this test enabled L2 learners to check and recognize their own stage of vocabulary acquisition, thereby helping their motivation of learning vocabulary to increase.

This report is to establish a new formula for estimating Vocabulary Grade Level for students of English as a foreign language in Japan. Nowadays, in the internet web application such as "Word Level Checker", you can analyze English texts and get a graded word-level profile such as which 62% of the words belongs to 1,000-word level and 11% to 2,000, 6% to 3,000 and so on. You might think that "What is the use of a detail profile that can figure out the numbers of text's difficulties? How do I apply these results in deciding if it is useful or not for my specific groups?" So we challenged to develop word-level measures to produce a simple and understandable readings such as "This text is 11th grade word-level". Using textbooks of Junior and Senior High School and Eiken tests as criteria for grade level, we created a new Vocabulary Grade Level Formula. It is a very simple linear equation, that is VGL=30.371*H+8.7914, where VGL is an estimated Vocabulary Grade Level and H is a percentage of senior high school level words. And then, we made a test run of it to find points to be improved and got many important hints.

The purpose of this pilot study is to explore the use of computer conferencing to improve speaking skills of Japanese EFL learners, giving particular attention to learner-specific affective factors, such as anxiety, self-efficacy and motivation. Data were collected using a 68-item questionnaire which was developed based on Horwitz et al. (1986), Pintrich & DeGroot (1990), and Tanaka & Yamauchi (2000). The questionnaire was administered to 13 undergraduate students before and after three online group learning (OGL) sessions. The participants' speaking ability was tested twice (pre- and post-tests) using picture storytelling tests and assessed by an experienced English language teacher. Results show that all participants were scored significantly higher on the post-speaking test (t(10)=5.88, p<.01) and that their anxiety was significantly reduced after the OGL sessions (𝜒²(4)=55.89, p<.01). In addition, motivation and self-efficacy beliefs for EFL learning were slightly but insignificantly improved. The results suggest that OGL can improve not only EFL learners' speaking skills but also their affective variables, mainly EFL speaking anxiety.

In order to use online multi-media for language education, one of the most important things is to know their difficulty level. We started a research project on how to predict the difficulty level of TED Talks. TED Talks are videos from expert speakers on education, business, science, technology and creativity, with subtitles. Each subtitle file has texts and timing data of speech, so we can easily calculate its readability grade level and speed of speech. We downloaded 205 TED Talk subtitle files from the website and analyzed 48,271 subtitles. It was found that TED Talk videos have various readability grade levels from 9th to 17th, 90% of them are in from 11th to 14th grade level, and cover a wide range of speed from 56 words per minute (wpm) to 211 wpm, 83% of them are in from 120 wpm to 180 wpm. In these results, we can conclude that you can estimate the difficulty level of TED videos by readability grade level and speed of speech. But it was also found that their levels and speech speeds are rather high or fast in the use of English language learning for Japanese students.