Japan has a longstanding history of shadow education, which has evolved, transformed, and extended beyond its borders. Japanese shadow education institutions, known as "juku," have expanded worldwide, including in Asia, the US, and Europe, offering offline and online tutoring services mainly for Japanese expatriates. This study examines…

Computer-assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) tools have become increasingly dependent on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology to provide automated corrective pronunciation feedback to learners. The extent to which ASR-based tools measurably improve second language (L2) pronunciation is of great interest to language educators globally,…

Driven by the digital revolution in second language (L2) classrooms and broadened views on literacy, digital multimodal composing (DMC) has gained a robust growth of interests in the past decade. To illuminate the empirical landscape of this budding field, this paper provides a substantive and methodological review of 60 empirical L2 studies on…

When we translate Japanese sentence into English, sometimes several English words become the candidates. However, the usage situation of these candidate words is not the same. In order to choose appropriate words from them, we need to understand the usage situation for each candidate words. Usage situation of the words can be inferred by…

Much of what is known about autism and literacy instruction is derived from studies including monolingual English-speaking children. Yet, less than one-fifth of the world's population are English speakers. This review examines the research on literacy instruction for children with autism learning to read and write in languages other than English.…

This study investigated the effects of using an online High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) program for university students whose first language is Japanese and who studied English as a foreign language. The target sounds were English fricatives, which many of the participants felt were challenging to distinguish and articulate. The training…

While research on language learner autonomy and Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is abundant, few studies have sought to systematically explore the relationship between the two. By adopting a rigorous approach that identifies transparent inclusion and exclusion criteria, this paper presents a systematic review that seeks to identify: (1)…

This study investigated the relationship between a metaphor-based approach to teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) and involvement of the brain's right hemisphere. Specifically, it examined learners' understanding of three levels of sureness associated with different expressions in English -- those that are "certain,"…

We report on the design and evaluation of a flashcard application, enhanced with emotional binaural narration to support second language (L2) vocabulary learning. Typically, the voice narration used in English vocabulary learning is recorded by native speakers with a standard accent to ensure accurate pronunciation and clarity. However, a clear…

Memorization is essential when new knowledge is based on association with existing knowledge. It is key in acquiring logographic languages, such as Chinese and Japanese. Such languages present challenges to students possessed of alphabet-based mother tongues. To meet these challenges, we discuss a technology-enhanced learning method to address the…

The present quasi-experimental study investigated the comparative effects of metalinguistic clue (MC) and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on the accurate use of Japanese transaction expressions. The study recruited 25 learners in a second-semester Japanese course (i.e. non-introduced group) and 17 students in a fourth-semester course (i.e.…

Natural language is highly complex and can be challenging for some learners, yet the contribution of complexity to individual differences in language learning remains poorly understood. This poor understanding appears due to both a lack of consensus among researchers regarding what complexity is, and to on-line language research often employing…

This study discusses the automatic coding methods of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework for multilingual contexts, in particular. In universities, foreign students cannot be overlooked, and learning systems are also required to work in multilingual situations. However, none of the existing work has addressed the lack of language-agnostic and…

Because a large number of Chinese characters are commonly used in both Japanese and Chinese, Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it more challenging to learn Japanese functional expressions than to learn other Japanese vocabulary. To address this challenge, we have developed "Jastudy," a…

Various explanations have been put forth for the asymmetrical acquisition of tense and aspect morphology across categories of lexical aspect. This experiment tested the adequacy of a subset of such accounts by examining English native speakers' (n = 40) use of progressive and past tense morphology within activity and accomplishment verb frames…