Captions and subtitles as a form of scaffolding for audiovisual materials has gained much attention in second or foreign language (L2) learning in recent years and various studies report their positive effects on learners' listening comprehension. However, few attempts have been made to investigate how textual information specifically affects the…

The purpose of this study is twofold: to assess the acceptance and usefulness of Nagoya University Small Private Online Courses, which is an online end-of-life care educational program through popular social media designed to supplement traditional end-of-life care education among healthcare professionals and to get constructive feedback with the…

This study, which targeted students in Japanese universities, used a written questionnaire to examine student response behavior when their smartphones received a call or message during university lectures. Phone and message transmissions were taken as the transmission media and six types of caller/sender were set. Survey results showed differences…

This study explored how 14 foreign-language writers at a university in Japan changed their genre awareness of discussion genre texts (particularly argumentative essays) during a 15-week systemic functional linguistics course consisting of text-based writing lessons assigned as part of a teaching and learning cycle. To obtain in-depth quantitative…

The notion of the flipped classroom has been received much attention in the literature as it may increase learning outcomes and learning effectiveness elementary and secondary education as well as university learning. In the author's class on international finance (economics) features a blended flipped classroom and lecture; questionnaires were…

Aim/Purpose: When learning to program, both text-based and visual-based input methods are common. However, it is unclear which method is more appropriate for first-time learners (first learners). Background: The differences in the learning effect between text-based and visual-based input methods for first learners are compared the using a…

As online automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines become more accurate and more widely implemented with call software, it becomes important to evaluate the effectiveness and the accuracy of these recognition engines using authentic speech samples. This study investigates two of the most prominent cloud-based speech recognition engines--Apple's…

The present study investigated the effects of two types of core-image-based basic verb learning approaches: the learner-centered and the teacher-centered approaches. The learner-centered approach was an activity in which participants found semantic relationships among several definitions of each basic target verb through a picture-elucidated card…

How can Japanese teachers of English go about introducing more communicative activities suitable for their contexts? This article discusses an attempt by a high school teacher to implement communicative language teaching (CLT) in her classes while responding to institutional pressure to use "yakudoku" (a traditional grammar translation…

Literature from education, educational psychology and second language acquisition has consistently found that self-efficacy is a key factor leading to increased language learning success. Students with more self-efficacy are claimed to have higher motivation and to expend more effort in the learning process. On the other hand, those with less…

Lexical bundles are essential for fluency, but their incompleteness is a stumbling block for learners. In this study, two presentation methods to increase awareness of lexical bundles through explicit noticing are explored and compared with incidental exposure. The three conditions in this study were as follows: noticing with schematic linguistic…

Despite the rising interest in the practice of formative assessment (FA) in language classrooms, research has rarely examined the factors that contribute to differential use of FA. The present study adopts an explanatory sequential mixed-method design to examine differences in FA use among Japanese junior and senior high school EFL (English as a…

Note contents taken by students during a blended learning course were evaluated, to improve the quality of university instruction. To conduct a quantitative comparison of the contents of all notes for effective instruction from lecturer to students to occur, the contents were mathematically compared and evaluated using two ways of summarizing the…

We compared three methods for increasing reading amount and reading self-efficacy among L2 learners. (1) We required a word-target group to read at least 2,500 words a week outside class. (2) We required a sustained silent reading (SSR) group to do (a) in class SSR for 15 minutes every week, and (b) to read one book per week. (3) We required a…

The Multimedia Principle (Fletcher & Tobias, 2005) states that people learn better and comprehend more when words and pictures are presented together. The potential for English language learners to increase their comprehension of video through the use of captions, which graphically display the same language as the spoken dialogue, has been…