Listening to academic lectures in a second language (L2) can be a daunting task, as the listener faces various challenges related to processing the speech stream, prioritizing the importance of information, and deciding when, where and how to take notes. A host of factors can contribute to student comfort in and ability to take "good"…

This study investigated the effect of consistent freewriting practice on written fluency development. Thirty-nine first-year university students completed 70 10-minute freewriting activities over the course of an academic semester. Written fluency, measured as words produced per minute (wpm), increased from a mean of 19.5 wpm to 30.1 wpm over a…

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a popular teaching approach that is being enthusiastically adopted across Japan (Ikeda, M. 2019. "CLIL in Comparison with PPP: A Revolution in ELT by Competency-Based Language Education." In "Innovation in Language Teaching and Learning: The Case of Japan," edited by H.…

The elicited imitation task (EIT), in which language learners listen to a series of spoken sentences and repeat each one verbatim, is a commonly used measure of language proficiency in second language acquisition research. The "TOEFL® Essentials"™ test includes an EIT as a holistic measure of speaking proficiency, referred to as the…

Background: In our research project, we have developed a scoring rubric for a second language (L2) summary writing for English as a foreign language (EFL) students in Japanese universities. This study aimed to examine the applicability of our five-dimensional rubric, which features both analytic and holistic assessments, to classrooms in the EFL…

Background: While numerous articles on Criterion® have been published and its validity evidence has accumulated, test users need to obtain relevant validity evidence for their local context and develop their own validity argument. This paper aims to provide validity evidence for the interpretation and use of Criterion® for assessing second…

Bias is communicated via the "hidden curriculum"--the vehicle for the unspoken academic, social, and cultural messages that are communicated to students while they are in school. Revealing the hidden curriculum in English language textbooks (ELTs) entails an analytical and holistic approach to the content of the text and images appearing…

National cultural distance is considered to be a strong predictor of language learners' pragmatic competence. To test the actual effect of national cultural distance on pragmatic competence holistically and comprehension and production aspects of pragmatic competence discretely, the current study was conducted on two groups of undergraduate…

A study was conducted to examine the differences in narrative essays produced by skilled and unskilled EFL student writers. Twenty-six Japanese university students participated in the study. They were told to write a narrative story based on six-frame pictures. The students were classified into two groups, skilled and unskilled, according to the…

The language learning strategy question has been debated on a number of levels, including definition, the strategy/success relationship and strategy coordination. In addition, awareness has been steadily growing of the importance of taking an holistic view of the strategy phenomenon and examining strategies not just in isolation but as part of an…

Although the importance of summary writing is well documented in prior studies, few have investigated the evaluation of written summaries. Due to the complex nature of L2 summary writing, which requires one to read the original material and summarize its content in the L2, raters often emphasize different features when judging the quality of L2…

This report is part of a larger, 2-year ethnography of bi- and multilingual speakers in Japan. On the basis of audio and videotape recordings of discussions among international students in a Japanese university, this study examines participants' deployment of different conversational resources to understand and talk about marginalizing…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…