One of the current approaches to teaching second languages is the communicative approach. To improve the use of this approach in Shimane, Japan, it is necessary to discover the extent to which it is being used and what is hindering its use. This study examined the situation by asking native and non-native English postsecondary instructors to…

In the context of generating research on student-generated goals, this paper asks: (1) whether Japanese students studying in Japan can articulate their own learning goals for a university level, general conversation course; and (2) what procedures are helpful in student goal setting. Subjects were 50 second year Japanese English conversation…

A course designed to teach survival Japanese language and culture to businessmen and professionals with little time for language study is described. The goals were to teach survival vocabulary and a few basic sentence structures and to develop the learners' pragmatic competence in using them. Portions of a commercial textbook were used for…

An exploratory, longitudinal study was undertaken to investigate how student self-assessment, course evaluation, and student evaluation of teaching can be incorporated into university second language instruction. Three issues were addressed: whether students evaluate themselves differently in first, second, and third year classes in the same…

Articles in this first special focus issue in Cross Currents' 18-year history include the following: "Courses or Resources" (Alan Maley); "Linguistic Pragmatics and English Language Learning" (S. Kathleen Kitao); "Arriving at the Himalayan Range: Language Learning and Teacher Training" (Subhash Jain); "The Fear…

A study investigated Japanese college students' perceptions and assessments of their college English classes, and to what factors they attribute difficulty in acquiring oral English. Subjects were 189 students from a junior college and a university, in first- through third-year English conversation classes. Most were English majors required to…