[in Japanese]

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The present research examined the effects of global expectation for self-enhancement (i.e., global expectation that one would have in the future about their desirable abilities and positive self-evaluation) on self-assessment behaviors. The subjects were 77 Japanese undergraduate students. They were asked to evaluate 30 items for their abilities and probabilities of acquiring them in the future. According to the perceived probability of acquiring the most important, desired abilities, the subjects were divided into three groups: high, moderate and low for global expectation for self-enhancement (GESE). Self-assessment behavior was measured for each 30 ability with their preference among four tasks that differed in terms of ability diagnosticity. The results showed that GESE-high persons preferred a high-diagnosticity task, regardless of their abilities. On the other hand, GESE-moderate or-low persons only preferred a high-diagnosticity task for abilities that the perceived probability of acquiring was high. These results indicated that global expectation for self-enhancement significantly affected self-assessment. This suggested that self-assessment could be considered as a preparatory phase for achieving self-enhancement, and also suggested empirically that self-assessment should be defined in terms of process of self-enhancement.

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After the one-month study abroad programme, the improvements in the learners' spoken performance were observed in the following areas: 1. Time: There is a tendency that the learners now understand and respond to questions more readily. 2. The Amount of Production: The leaners can produce more language in terms of the number of words and T-units. 3. The Amount of Message & Information: The learners can explain situations that they are in and describe picture story in more detail. 4. Discourse: The learners now use more cohesive devices to organize their language production. On the other hand, the gains in the learners' success rates were, though positive, not statistically significant throughout the three parts of the test. Therefore, it seems that after the short-term study abroad programme the learners improved fluency in their spoken performance, but not so much accuracy. This is in line with the general impressions reported by many English teachers about changes in the language abilities of the students who participated in such programmes (e.g., Numoto and Joto, 1990; Geis and Fukushima, 1997). Yashima and Viswat (1994), although dealing with a different type of programme, also reported similar improvements in their eight high school students' spoken performance. Further research is needed to improve the reliability and validity of the present study by involving a larger number of learners and at least two groups of samples, one with the treatment and another without it, and also by extending the research to include different types of study abroad programmes.

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