It is well known that native Japanese speakers have difficulty in discriminating English /l/ and /r/ sounds. Most previous studies of this issue, including Aoyama et al. (2004), were targeted at native Japanese living in English-speaking countries, and little research has been conducted on Japanese who are learning English in Japan. This study examined how native Japanese living in Japan perceive English /l/ and /r/ sounds, to determine not only the differences from Japanese in other countries but also the relationship between learners’ abilities and their experiences, characteristics or motivations as determined by a questionnaire. In an experiment on perception, test subjects in Japan received as high a score on average as the subjects of Aoyama et al. (2004), who had lived in the US for an average of two years. The subjects who had special linguistic experience before the age of 10 got significantly higher scores on distinguishing /l/ and /r/ sounds. Moreover, a correlation between musical experience and the abilities of speech perception was observed. It is suggested that listening to the sounds other than those of native language at an earlier age plays a key role in improving the speech perception ability in foreign languages.

This paper proposes a new active learning approach using video-recordings of language learners as models to teach public speaking skills in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. First, we explain the definition of active learning with a brief history and its application and theoretical background, and also clarify how the concept can be implemented in higher education. Furthermore, an in-depth examination of previous research findings on video-recordings in the EFL classroom is explored. Results show that students were able to reflect on and analyze ways to improve their performance after viewing the video-recordings of other learners. Through our research, we highlight the importance of selecting video-recordings that consider a host of opportunities for advancement. In our study, we also considered learners’ English proficiency levels to motivate them to assert themselves more in the classroom.

Vocabulary is at the heart of second language learning (Gass,1999; Nation, 2001). However, it is far from easy for Japanese learners to learn English vocabulary. The questions we address in this paper are: Why is it that language learners find it difficult to use even simple words like put or look to the full range of their usage? How do we help learners acquire their lexical competence in English? As for the first question, we suggest two things. First, the difficulty presumably comes from the use of a learning strategy of searching for a translation equivalent to understand the meaning of a new expression. The translation equivalent does not fully represent the meaning of the expression in question. Secondly, it is also common that learners try to learn L2 words as they encounter in a text. They learn new words or expressions in an item-by-item manner. However, a word does not stand alone in isolation. As regards the second question, we suggest two things: (1) what we call “cognitive re-adjustment” can be a pedagogical tool to raise metalinguistic awareness which helps minimize the problem of the search-translation-equivalent strategy, and (2) a lexical network should be the unit of vocabulary learning in order to help learners overcome the problem of item-specific learning.