The purpose of this study is to investigate the kinds of refusal strategies used by native speakers of English and to see whether some system of refusals patterns can be found. Solutions will thus be sought to reduce misunderstanding in interlanguage communication. Role-playing was used to collect data. Results revealed that the frequency of refusers' turns was related to status differences and stimulus types; that the number of refusers who used direct refusals was related to status differences and stimulus types; and that Leech's (1983) 'Tact Principle', 'Generosity Principle', 'Manner Principle' and 'Agreement Principle' were operative in some situations.

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This study attempts to establish the distinctive features of fluent/nonfluent oral narratives by low intermediate EFL learners. Six fluent speakers and six nonfluent speakers were selected out of 20 EFL Japanese college students on the basis of 12 native teachers' evaluations and examined in terms of the speech rate, hesitation factors (pauses and fillers), and facilitation factors (connectives, prefabricated patterns, and language switch). The results showed that the speech rate in the fluent group had a strong relationship with native speakers' evaluations, but that of the nonfluent group did not. The most distinctive features for discriminating fluent from nonfluent speakers were positioning and frequency of pauses, the use of connectives ("and", "so", "but") and a prefabricated pattern of "when I" clause. Fillers and language switch were less distinctive and rather idiosyncratic phenomena. The findings implied that fluent EFL learners tended to employ fewer hesitation pauses and longer sequences of utterance with connectives and "when I" clause. Pedagogical implications were made to promote EFL oral fluency by introducing the repetition of speech and explicit teaching of strategies and conversational fillers.

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Of in a noun phrase plays a very important role in English usage. However, in English textbooks used in Japanese schools, it is not introduced systematically as a learning content. In many cases, it is translated into Japanese as 'no' and treated as its equivalent. Certainly in some cases, the usage of of corresponds to that of 'no' although actually the usages of of and 'no' are quite different from each other. This misconception leads to the mistaken use of of, especially when Japanese ESL learners use it in speaking and writing. This paper attempts to develop a curriculum for systematic learning of of-phrases in NPs and also to demonstrate multimedia learning materials accompanying the curriculum to acquire the correct usage of of-phrases, which I have developed so far.

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Although many pronunciation instructions in Japan focus on segmental aspects, most of the pronunciation difficulties arise from the difference of perceptual prosodic systems. This paper analyses the pronunciation problems observed in typical Japanese learners of English, and examines what underlies such problematic performance. It gives two kinds of prosodic discrepancy as the major causes. The first cause is the difference in basic rhythm-counting units: mora in Japanese and syllable in English. It leads to various surface problems such as inability to link words, insertion of a vocalic segment after every non-moraic consonant, abrupt pitch change in the production of long vowels, and other prosodic troubles as well as segmental difficulties. Our second argument draws on the difference of how prominence is realised on words. Japanese is a pitch-accent language and it differs from stress-accent English in that the former only employs pitch to show prominent elements whereas the latter combines pitch, loudness, and duration. Another difference in terms of this is that English has an alternating stress pattern, while Japanese prominent elements appear in clusters. These cause the learners' monotonous performance, confusion of long and short vowels, inability to distinguish strong and weak syllables, and other problems concerning sentence rhythm. We also try to link the causes and the problems by giving explanations from phonetic and phonological theory and practice.

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The present study examines Japanese EFL learners' use of 'let's-imperatives' in their English invitations. The focus of the research is placed on the following three areas: 1) the characteristics of the linguistic forms used in the head act of making invitations; 2) the multiple functions of 'let's-imperatives' used by Japanese EFL learners; and 3) the influence of L1 rhetorical patterns on L2 writing. Analysis found that 'let's-imperatives' used by Japanese students in English invitations indicate not only invitations, but also announcements of the events and suggestions for parties. They also express the host's expectations, hopes, and requests for the guests' participation in parties. The inappropriate use of 'let's-imperatives' is considered to be attributed to linguistic as well as pragmatic transfer of Japanese expressions and sociocultural concepts into English.

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Reading rate data produced by 207 Japanese EFL college students taking one of two versions of a computer-administered sentence reading test was examined for reliability and validity as a reading proficiency measure. The test had 40 items, each consisting of one sentence followed by a multiple-choice question. The two versions presented sentences in different manners: in one version, they appeared under the moving-window condition and in the other, under the stationary condition. In either version, presentation was subject-paced and reading time was recorded, based on which reading rate was computed for each item in three different units: words per minute, syllables per minute, and characters per minute. Main findings included: (1) the moving-window condition produced faster reading rates than the whole-sentence condition; (2) the moving-window condition did not allow anomalous subject behavior, from which the stationary condition suffered severely; (3) the moving-window condition produced more reliable data than the stationary condition; (4) the mean reading rates recorded under the moving-window condition were more valid indicators of the readers' proficiency than those elicited under the stationary condition; (5) no clear differences were observed between the mean reading rates based on all the data points and those derived from the correctly responded items only; and (6) no one unit had a clear advantage over another.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of English and Japanese captions on the listening comprehension of Japanese EFL students. The subjects were instructed to watch four films with different caption conditions - English captions, Japanese captions, without captions, and audio only. They were asked what they could remember after watching each film. The results showed that English captions facilitated the understanding of both university and junior college subjects. The effects of Japanese captions, however, differed for the university and junior college students, which suggested that the effects of Japanese captions were influenced by the subjects' proficiency in English including translation ability and by the difficulty level of the listening materials.

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The purpose of the present study was to develop a set of computer programs for retrieving English idioms from a database and to evaluate their functions. A total of nine programs which vary in the methods of retrieving idioms were experimentally developed. A sample set of forty idioms and a corpus of 392,170 sentences collected from English magazines and TV news broadcasts were created in order to examine the performance of the programs. The program which demonstrated the best performance in idiom retrieval was the one in which the constituent words fell within a seven-word sequence in a sentence. Within this seven-word sequence, the program accepted all changes in word order and grammatical forms of the constituent words. The results also indicated that by the use of the program 99.6% of time and labor can be saved in retrieving idioms from the original corpus and the accuracy of human observation can be improved by 30% in the subsequent reconfirming process.

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This paper points out problems in previous studies concerning the statistical procedure of analysis and of the way results are presented based on the most popular questionnaire format in Language Learning Strategy researches, namely SILL (Strategy Inventory for Language Learning ver. 7.0 for ESL/EFL). A more appropriate statistical procedure to analyse the data, is proposed called "Structural Equation Modelling" based on the results of both "Exploratory Factor Analysis" and "Confirmatory Factor Analysis" with Oblique Rotation and Maximum Likelihood Method. Presentation with more detailed statistics is also promoted, which allows readers to reanalyse or meta-analyse. In order to validate the proposed method above of analysing and presenting the necessary statistics, a case study was conducted on strategy use of Japanese High School students using data obtained from the SILL. This case study explored which language learning strategy contributes most to the achievement of language learning.

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This survey was conducted in order to investigate the use of instructional equipment in junior high school English programs. It was administrated by the Special Project Section of the LLA (Language Laboratory Association ) Kanto Chapter in 1998, and is the fifth nationwide survey, following Ouchi (1968), LLA Kanto Chapter (1976), Arai, Sato and Usami (1985), and Yamauchi(1994). 960 schools with language laboratories were selected. A survey form with 26 questions was mailed to each JHS in September 1998 and 28.2% replied. Substantive findings are: 1) About two-thirds of the respondents with language laboratories use them on a regular basis, while only 20.6% of schools with computer classrooms use them regularly to teach English. 2) Teacher-made audio and video tape materials are the most effective in LL education. 3) Console switches promoting teacher-student and student-student interaction bring higher positive effects in LL education. 4) Pattern Practice Drills, which were once the primary exercise type in LLs are now most commonly used in Computer Instruction of English. 5) As computers become more sophisticated and are able to listen and respond to student input, they will eventually assume more of the functions of the language laboratory.

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