This study explored a way to help Japanese university students write longer essays while maintaining grammatical accuracy. Participants were three groups of students enrolled in a one-year EFL course in different academic years (N = 111), and the number of words they wrote in 30 minutes and the number of errors made per 100 words were compared. To…

This study seeks to clarify whether teachers are able to distinguish between essays written by English L2 students or generated by ChatGPT. 47 instructors who hold experience teaching English to native speakers of Japanese in universities or other higher education institutions were tested on whether they could identify between human written essays…

English teachers, especially those who teach summary writing to students with relatively lower proficiency in English face difficulty in teaching summary writing and while assessing their students' performances. In the classroom context, an analytic rubric is pedagogically more helpful than a holistic rubric because the teacher can confirm the…

In this study, neural representation of adult second language (L2) speakers' implicit grammatical knowledge was investigated. Advanced L2 speakers of Japanese living in Japan, as well as L1 Japanese speakers, performed a word-monitoring task (proposed as an implicit knowledge test) in the MRI scanner. Behavioral measures were obtained from…

A standard treatment of proper names in second language (L2) vocabulary analyses is to categorize them as known items. This treatment is often supported by the assumption that the form of the proper name (i.e., the initial capital letter) and the context will indicate to the L2 reader that the item is a proper name. The aim of this work-in-…

This study aimed to compare selection patterns of distractors (incorrect options) according to test taker proficiency regarding Japanese students' summarization skills of an English paragraph. Participants included 414 undergraduate students, and the test comprised three summarization process types--deletion, generalization, and integration.…

English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to 4 treatment groups. Two groups were…

The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle,…

Purpose: This study investigated the auditory comprehension of Japanese sentences including relative clauses (RCs) by 52 Japanese-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: A picture-pointing task measured RC and main clause (MC) comprehension for object and subject relatives in…

The present study evaluated the effects of a combined form of written corrective feedback (WCF) on English as a foreign language (EFL) students' writing accuracy. The combined WCF consisted of unfocused error-code WCF and focused metalinguistic explanation. Different forms of WCF were administered to two groups of Japanese EFL students in two…

An analysis of 44 commercially available English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks found that it is common for textbooks to present learners with exercises on phrasal verbs without first providing relevant input to help them. In these cases, learners are likely to resort to trial and error and are then expected to learn from feedback. The…

This study proposes a method to detect problematic speech segments automatically for second language (L2) listeners, considering both lexical and acoustic aspects. It introduces a tool, Partial and Synchronized Caption (PSC), which provides assistance for language learners and fosters L2 listening skills. PSC presents purposively selected words…

The constructs of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) have been used extensively to investigate learner performance on second language tasks. However, a serious concern is that the variables used to measure these constructs are sometimes used conventionally without any empirical justification. It is crucial for researchers to understand how…

Feedback, or information given to learners regarding their performance, is found to facilitate second language (L2) learning. Research also suggests that the timing of feedback (whether it is provided immediately or after a delay) may affect learning. The purpose of the present study was to identify the optimal feedback timing for L2 vocabulary…

Simultaneous with a call for standardized assessments to assess developing rather than preexisting or surface knowledge (Sawyer, 2006) has been a growth in awareness of the unavoidable interactive nature of any form of assessment and this awareness has created a social turn towards approaches to language assessment (McNamara & Roever, 2006).…