This article focuses on English language education in Finland, which has been attracting a lot of attention of educators worldwide, mainly due to her excellence in the PISA tests for the past decade. The reason we focus on Finland is because Finland has been showing her excellence not only in the PISA tests but also in English language education, which has well been testified by the recent TOEFL data. Its specific aim is to twofold. First, it tries to extract possible reasons for its success in English language education on the basis of the literature review, interviews with stakeholders of English language education, and the knowledge obtained by repeated observations of English lessons at primary and secondary education levels and also by careful observation of the Finnish society in terms of the importance of English. Secondly, the paper will confirm the degree of successfulness of English language education and examine the degree of importance of each extracted reason through interviews and questionnaires against stakeholders. The paper will be concluded with the summary of the obtained results and possible implications for English language education in Japan.

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This paper is a practical report on the effects of introducing e-learning into several university classes on (1) the enhancement of proficiency in English and (2) the autonomous learning of English. A questionnaire was administered in the pilot study classes and analyzed using statistics and student comments. The results indicate that the combination of e-learning with class teaching had positive effects on the autonomous learning as well as the enhancement of proficiency, and that there were reciprocal relationships between the two. Pedagogical suggestions about the use of e-learning based on its assets and liabilities are also delineated.

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This paper is aimed at presenting the effects and influences of the core schemas in teaching the meanings of auxiliary verbs. In Japanese traditional English classes, each meaning of auxiliary verbs tends to be taught separately. The teachers normally do not teach that every one of the auxiliary verbs has its own common image, or "core". The students have to memorize each meaning mechanically. This "core approach" has been catching a lot of attention, but this core approach has not been practiced in EFL classrooms. Under these circumstances, the author has attempted to investigate the influences given by the core approach. The influences of the core schemas in teaching auxiliary verbs were investigated in Fujii (in press). The results showed no statistic significance between the class using the core schemas and the class without them. But the students thought highly of the schemas in memorizing and understanding the image. Based on this experiment, I tried to conduct the similar experiment again to the technical college students except one thing; presenting some usage examples for each meaning of auxiliary verbs along with the core schemas in order to promote the image making. In this paper, I will report what effects were observed, and make some suggestions on English teaching with core schemas or image.

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This case study investigated the issue of how accented English pronunciation influences the listening comprehension of non-native listeners with different native language backgrounds.Two different spoken texts were recorded and prepared before the study: one read by a native speaker of Received Pronunciation (RP) and the other read by a native speaker of Japanese. These two spoken texts were then given to 7 native speakers of Chinese as a listening comprehension task. The influence of two different types of English pronunciation was then measured and evaluated based on the performance results of the listening comprehension task. The results showed that the Chinese participants demonstrated a significantly lower degree of listening comprehension performance when listening to the text read by the Japanese speaker of English (JSE) than the one read by the RP speaker of English. The results suggest that the accented English pronunciation produced by the JSE caused an intelligibility detriment effect on the listening comprehension performance of the Chinese participants. These results partially explain communication breakdowns which can occur in the context of international English language communication due to the mismatch of English pronunciation among non-native speakers of English with different types of accented English pronunciation.

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In 2011, foreign language activities were introduced into primary school curriculum as compulsory, and the 5th and 6th grade homeroom teachers are supposed to lead the activities. However, they do not have enough confidence to do so because of their lack of teaching experience of the activities and command of English. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the direction of in-service teacher training for primary school foreign language activities in order to improve this situation. First of all, the knowledge and abilities required to conduct the activities are specified and recent trends of in-service teacher training and teacher development research are reviewed. Then, the metaphorical meaning of learning is discussed to "form the foundation of pupils' communication abilities" stated in the new Course of Study (MEXT, 2008).Finally, based on the above discussions, this paper pursues for teachers' identity development as a new approach for instructors of foreign language activities, and suggests another direction of in-service teacher training for foreign language activities.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of sustained silent reading on learners' English proficiency. Sustained silent reading is a form of free voluntary reading where learners read silently in a designated time period regularly in class. Ninety undergraduate students, who belong to the same faculty, took part in the experiment. One experimental group and two control groups were set up to clarify how sustained silent reading contributed to the development of the participants'English proficiency.The experimental group consisted of 32 participants and the 2control groups consisted of 58 participants. The 3 groups shared the same syllabus and the textbook. Only in the experimental group, sustained silent reading was incorporated in class. All the participants of the 3 groups took TOEIC in April and December and they evaluated their class in July and February.The results are:(1) the experimental group outperforms the control groups in their TOEIC scores and (2) the participants of the experimental group give higher marks to their class than the participants of the control groups.

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This report is intended to provide students' and teachers' consciousness toward English debate. The survey on their consciousness about introducing debate in English had been conducted throughout Kochi Prefecture during May and June of 2009. The results of our survey allow us to summarize that a debate can have a significant effect on the development of the English proficiency of students. The interests and willingness toward learning English is also getting higher after they have experienced a debate. Also, many teachers and students have realized that English abilities improved. Another interesting finding is that both teachers and students have the counterparts in usefulness of debate and growing motivation. Debating provides a good opportunity to use their skills which they have learnt. It is not a passive learning activity, but a participation learning activity. Through this participation, students gain a working knowledge of English.

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