The purpose of this study was to develop a CAI system with which students can easily learn listening skills in English, and to test the reliability, validity, and the usability of the system as a teaching machine. The system consists of SONY's "The Repeater" and NEC's personal computer, "PC-9801". The tests confirmed that the system can be used easily, and give reliable and valid scores in evaluating the listening skills of college students if a cloze type or a dictation type answering method is used. Since it can evaluate students' communicative competence properly, and since it can feed the information back almost instantly to the students, it can facilitate the students' learning. The system was found also to motivate the desire of beginning students to study listening skills if a multiple choice type answering system was used.

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This observational experiment aims at discovering the degree of improvement in learning English as a foreign language by Japanese college students within a sphere of curriculum, applying a certain linguistic theory and devising pedagogical methods. A total of 300 first year students have been examined for the past six years. It was cofirmed that, in order of importance : (1) 45 hours are required in order to correct their ill-trained pronunciation and develop the skill of their aural comprehension, and approximately 120h. required to develop the skill of aural comprehension and oral production to reach the cited goal ; (2) the degree of correlation between oral production, aural comprehension and reading was very low regardless of prior learning reading for six years at middle school ; (3) at the beginning stage of learning some of the illtrained English phonemes, which they are lacking in L1, appear while they are speaking without conscious effort and in a relaxed state of mind after 120h. of practice ; (4) the degree of difficulty and exercise variations, in class and out, as well as preparation of self-learning tapes, will be dependent to a large degree on the students initial learning attitude and proficiency in English.

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We devised a CAI software to train Japanese college students, who have accustomed to reading English by translating word by word. They read English in the Japanese word order, not in the English. The software is composed of the following six methods to display English on screen, erasing the part once displayed, so that students can not reread the previous part. 1. Word-by-word display 2. Phrase-by-phrase display 3. Line-by-line display 4. Superimpose-like display 5. Line-by-line but adding letter by letter 6. Telecomputing-like display The application of the software to classes in our language laboratory, which have booths with a 10-inch screen, was accomplished by employing Sharp's X1turbo. The results of our last year's experiments showed the phrase-by-phrase method was more suitable to our purpose than the word-by-word one.

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