The idea of 'multi-competence' is defined as 'the knowledge of more than one language in the same mind or the same community' (Cook, t.a.).Multi-competence thus presents a view of second language acquisition (SLA) based on the second language (L2) user as a whole person rather than on the monolingual native speaker. It involves the whole mind of the speaker, not simply their first language (L1) or their second. It assumes that someone who knows two or more languages is a different person from a monolingual and so needs to be looked at in their own right rather than as a deficient monolingual. Multi-competence changes the angle from which second language acquisition is viewed. If taken literally, it has important implications for language teaching goals and methodology.

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Evaluating students' progress is an important genre of ELT and has attracted the interest and concern of English teachers, though it is difficult to define the best method of evaluation. Among various ways of evaluation, paper-based testing is generally accepted as an efficient one to judge students' abilities at that time, based on which the total evaluation is often made. This paper attempts to shed light on the evaluation system during the latter period of Meiji era, focusing on the analysis of test papers of regular examinations at a middle school in Kagawa.

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Although Natsume Soseki is better known as a novelist, his career began as an English teacher at middle schools and high schools, and also as a teacher of English literature at the Imperial University. This paper investigates Natsume Soseki's teaching career and his ideas on ELT at middle school level, specially focusing on his days at Ehime Prefectural Lower Middle School, later renamed Matsuyama Middle School, and also known as the setting of his novel Botchan.

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The aim of this paper is to explore the case of an'0-Yatoi' who was employed by the government of the Kochi Han as a medical doctor and teacher at a new European-modeled hospital, Gyuko Hospital, and its attached school for English studies. To fully describe the history of English studies in Kochi, especially during the very early period of Meiji (early 1870s), it is indispensable to elucidate the profile and activities of this'0-Yatoi' at the hospital. This doctor was dismissed, within less than two years after his employment, because of his breach of contract.While his employment and dismissal have long been acknowledged among such researchers as Fukushima (1929), Hirao (1952), Ikeda (1968) and more recently Sarada (1991), no studies have ever succeeded in describing details of the case and even ascertaining the original spelling of his name. The'0-Yatoi' who is the subject of this paper was William Herny Hozier. He was born and educated in England and was afterwards registered as an American citizen.With newly-found historical evidence from the files of the doctor's lawsuit against the government of Kochi over his dismissal, this paper presents a profile and details of his academic activities as an'0-Yatoi' at the hospital in Kochi. It then suggests implications of the case for teaching English in a modem foreign language context.

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The present paper reports the findings of a research which analyzed common errors included in free English compositions written by upper secondary school EFL learners in Japan. For this research, in all 702 sentences were collected from 156 free compositions written by as many Japanese EFL learners. These 702 sentences were categorized into six major groups in terms of their contents. The sentences in each group were then subdivided into groups which share the same grammatical subject. Finally, the grammaticality of the sentences subdivided into each grammatical subject group was analyzed, focusing on the relationship between grammatical subjects and predicates.The results have revealed that the selection of grammatical subjects has exerted a substantial influence on the grammaticality of the produced sentences. On the basis of the obtained results and previous studies comparing English and Japanese, the study concludes that the common errors observed in the free compositions by the Japanese EFL learners have been mainly provoked by the fundamental difference between Japanese as a topic-prominent language and English as a subject-prominent language. More specifically, many errors made by the Japanese EFL learners were caused by their tendency to convert Japanese topics into English grammatical subjects. The guidelines for improving free compositions instruction for Japanese EFL learners have also been presented.

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This study examined conceptual preference modification in Japanese children learning English as a second language (L2). There has been a growing body of second language acquisition (SLA) research particularly in the multi-competence framework which suggests that exposure to an L2 has effects on adult L2 users' concepts as well as their first language (L1). However, there remains an issue of whether the concepts of child L2 users' with limited exposure to an L2 are even modified by the influence of the L2. The concept concerned in this study was categorization (or grouping) of objects. A picture categorizing (matching) task, which is non-linguistic, was given to two groups of Japanese elementary school children of different levels of L2 exposure to see how they categorize objects.It was found that even incipient bilingual children with limited exposure to the L2 modified their conceptual preference as a consequence of learning an L2 and the emerged concept was somehow different from that of monolinguals of either the L1 or the L2. These results provide further evidence for the multi-competence framework proposed by Cook (1991) for SLA and SLA research.

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The purpose of this study is to design the curriculum of English activities for the lower grades of elementary school considering the pupils' regional circumstances. English activities are asked to make good use of pupils 'interest, to raise their curiosity, and to value the relation with others.Besides, it is required for homeroom teachers to be involved in the practice.According to the new Course of study, English activities of the middle and lower grades are put in practice in Gakko-sairyo-no-jikan. It is significant to continue English activities for not only the upper grades but also the other grades considering accumulations of English activities up to the present for all grades. This is the practical report of one elementary school in Tokushima. It is especially conscious of link to the other subjects, discipline of the first grade.

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