This article provides an overview of the bottom-up process of EFL listening comprehension for native speakers of Japanese and traces some of its implications for application to listening education. First, I introduce two of my research studies of EFL segment perception, which identify consonants that are difficult to perceive at the initial and final positions of syllables, comparing learners’ differences in perception skills. Second, I briefly describe the general idea of a phonological loop and language-oriented components of working memory, describing previous research into perceptual units of spoken language, which are closely related to the span of the phonological loop. Third, I introduce our research into how the time domain factors of listening materials, such as articulation rate, speech rate, and pause duration, affect listening comprehension, outlining the positive effect of pause on listening comprehension. In conclusion, I discuss the application of these basic study results to English education.

This research aims at developing a virtual reality training system of English public speaking for Japanese EFL learners. Occasions for delivering speeches in English are increasing in this globalizing society. However, public speaking is known as one of major examples of social phobia, and there has not been sufficient evidence-based material for teaching and learning English public speaking. This study approaches the issue by developing a virtual reality training system for English public speaking. The system is designed with results from multimodal corpus-based data analysis of effective public speaking performances in terms of eye contact, speech rate, and speaker's nervousness. It offers 360-degree immersive virtual venue and virtual audience for learners in order to feel as if they are in authentic public speaking environment. A monitor test was performed with 36 Japanese EFL learners to investigate usability and potential effect of the system. From the result, it was found that the virtual reality material received positive evaluations for causing sense of realism and mitigating nervousness from participants.

Numerous studies have proven that extensive reading helps learners gain overall comprehensive skills. However, it is still unknown which particular reading sub-skills can be improved through extensive reading. In order to investigate the effects of extensive reading in detail, a longitudinal study was conducted on 19 Japanese learners of English. Two English proficiency tests were administered before and after nine-month learning activities of extensive reading. The participants performed better on the two researched items on the post-test: that is “understanding sentences with long objects” and “understanding sentences with relative pronouns or relative adverbs”. In cognitive linguistics, these two items are considered to reflect a prototypical construal of English language, which is difficult to explicitly teach in the classroom environment. Based on the results, this paper concludes that extensive reading helps Japanese learners of English acquire those construals.

This study aims to clarify a part of students’ listening processes to develop self-regulated learners of English by implementing the new teaching guidelines issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) in 2019. Students’ learning journals in this report were used to observe the students learning processes. The learning journal is a diary in which students write about their study. M-GTA (Modified Grounded Theory Approach) is used to analyze students’ journal entries qualitatively. This study specially focuses on words related to metacognition and self-efficacy, subsequently linking to self-regulated learning. As a result, it was found that students were able to improve their listening strategies by implementing metacognition and self-efficacy that help them become self- regulated learners.