The purpose of this study was to compare the perceptions of Japanese learners' oral proficiency by rater groups with different backgrounds. Three rater groups participated in the study: 12 native teachers of English (NT), 14 non-native teachers of English (NNT), and 42 non-native learners of English (NNL). They all listened to one-minute oral narratives of 20 Japanese university students and made a subjective judgment based on four linguistic categories (fluency, grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary). Statistical analyses of the data indicate that the three rater groups do not differ significantly from one another in their perceptions. The study implies that with no special training provided or marking protocols at hand, peer evaluation has potential as a measure of the spoken language.

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Dictation is widely used as a teaching technique in listening comprehension classes as well as a testing device in many experiments. Although the positive effect of this technique has been reported, specific explanation about its effect is yet seen: How should it be used? ; For what level is it effective? In order to have a clearer idea about the effect of this long used teaching technique, the author of this article carried out an experiment using Japanese university students: The subjects were divided into two groups; dictation and control groups. They listened to two types of texts; elementary and intermediate levels. Each text was played three times; without any pause for the first and the third playings, and with 10 second pause after each sentence for the second. After the third playing, they were asked to write down what they thought they had understood from the text in their first language. The results were that the control group performed significantly better than the dictation group for the elementary text (t=2.67, p<0.01), but for the intermediate text, no significant differences were found between the groups (t=0.72, n.s.). Regarding the relation between the dictation and recall test scores, a statistically significant correlation was found only for the difficult text (r=0.7433, p<0.01), but not for the easy text in the dictation group although all the test scores correlated with each other in the control group. This article will discuss why such results were obtained and will reconsider whether dictation is a proper teaching technique to promote learner's listening comprehension.

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This paper attempts to establish the country-by-country SILL (Strategy Inventory for Language Learning) norms advocated by Oxford and Burry-Stock (1995). First, a brief description of the SILL, a self-report questionnaire, is provided, and empirical studies indicating its drawbacks are summarized. Then we report an analysis that shows the underlying factor structure of the SILL when administered to 200 college students studying English as a Foreign Language in Japan. In this analysis, the universality of the SILL is challenged, and also, a suggestion is made that not only country-by-country SILL norms but also proficiency level-by-level norms should be established. After the factor analysis, relationships are sought, using a multiple regression procedure, between the factors found and EFL proficiency measured by the TOEFL. The results provide theoretical implications for further improvement of the SILL (especially concerning the validity issue) as well as for the development of sound strategy training programs in the EFL environment.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the importance of schemata in listening comprehension, stated in Long (1990) in comparison with the effectiveness of the use of the multi-presentation in foreign language learning claimed by Paivio (1986) under two different mode of presentations; narration (soundtrack) only and narration with picture on the video. To test the effectiveness of schemata-teaching, four groups were formed: Group 1) narration only; Group 2, narration with schema added; Group 3, narration with visual information added; Group 4, narration with both schema and visual information added. Two hundred university subjects listened to an American English TV news broadcast twice and were then asked to answer both the recall test and the comprehension test. Significant differences in scores on the two tests, on the listening passage across the four different treatment groups, were observed for both the comprehension test and the recall test. The results indicate that the provision of the schemata contributed to improve both total comprehension and recall of the content of the text more effectively than the addition of video picture to the narration. The most successful treatment combination turned out to be Group 4; narration with both schema and visual information.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of a multimedia type CALL (computer assisted language learning) material on the learning of English, and the methodology of measuring such effectiveness using multiple regression analysis and Hayashi's First method of quantification. In this study, 135 Japanese university students majoring in applied international studies who were taking English I, and III (mainly for listening practice in CALL laboratory), served as subjects. They took two tests and completed two questionnaires. And also they made achievement records of learning the CALL material, such as the length of time of learning, the frequency of speaking and dictation activities that were accumulated in a server computer. The pre-test/post-test to measure the students' listening comprehension revealed that they experienced significant proficiency in listening to English within a given period of time. In addition, the correlational analyses and Hayashi's First method of quantification revealed that a multimedia type CALL material was fairly effective in learning English especially for lower level students. The results suggest that statistical analyses in the present study can be reliable methodology in measuring the effectiveness of CALL on the learning of English.

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The purpose of the present study was to develop vocabulary teaching courseware (VC), and test its validity for teaching a large number of lexical items. The developed courseware was also expected to foster high vocabulary retention rates. Three experiments were undertaken in this study, and the validity of VC was tested in this study by using TOEFL and TOEIC to measure overall English proficiency of the learners in addition to using locally developed vocabulary tests. In the first experiment, junior high school students used VC and they improved their average listening scores by 40 percentage points. In the second and the third experiments, college students used VC in combination with the listening and reading courseware (LRC). Students' TOEFL and TOEIC scores obtained after using VC indicated that VC was approximately as effective as an additional LRC. Furthermore, the learning with LRC supplemented by VC was found to play a significant role in improving English proficiency of the students whose proficiency levels had been relatively high.

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It is well assumed in the field of cognitive psychology that information processing system of language is highly related to listening ability. There are two completely opposite directions of cognition; bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up cognition is, in other words, data-driven, and top-down, concept-driven. The aim of our research is to give an empirical explanation to the relationship of different types (bottom-up or top-down) of treatments (shadowing and note-taking) and different types (bottom-up or top-down) of tasks (dictation and comprehension) in English listening activities. Our main hypotheses are (1) a data-driven treatment (shadowing) is effective for a data-driven task (dictation), and (2) a concept-driven treatment (note-taking) is effective for a concept-driven task (comprehension). Of the two hypotheses only the latter has successfully proven by our 11- week experiment. Although the former has not enough been proven, our study well suggests the significance of the combination of treatments (class activities) and tasks (evaluation tests) in teaching listening ability.

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In order to write a logically organized composition, it is necessary to acquire the developmental patterns of logic peculiar to English. In conventional writing teaching, however, this point has not been adequately considered. This study attempts to propose a writing course, which focuses on acquisition of logical structures. The authors developed a course in which the structures and forms of representative English paragraphs can be easily recognized and acquired. To facilitate learning, the authors developed a paragraph writing assisting tool, SOUTO, which works on the computer, and made use of it in the class. With the aid of this tool, the learners were expected to visually grasp paragraph structures and to easily edit their compositions. Lastly, the authors attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of this tool in terms of both quantity and quality. That is, an analysis of free compositions before and after the course was performed. In addition, a questionnaire survey as to how the learners felt about the tool was conducted. The results empirically confirmed the effectiveness of this tool.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of students' experiences in a study abroad program. In particular, my discussion will include issues of intercultural understanding, transculturation, and ambiguity tolerance. Two types of questionnaires were administered to 230 university sophomores before and after the study abroad program. The first questionnaire was designed to measure variances in the students' intercultural understanding and transculturation. The data was analyzed by factor analysis. The analysis extracted five factors among 24 questionnaire items. The second questionnaire was designed to measure levels of students' ambiguity tolerance. The results of changes in ambiguity tolerance and TOEFL scores are also discussed.

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