Due to the current status of English as a lingua franca in numerous domains, increasing attention has been directed toward the economic potential of English. However, research on languages other than English from an economic perspective remains limited. This study aims to address this gap by examining the labor market demand for Japanese language…

Purpose: This article examines the use of English medium instruction (EMI) for teaching Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) by non-native speakers with a focus on multilingual classrooms. It also explores teachers' positive and negative beliefs about using EMI in classroom settings for JFL instruction. Methods and procedure: 274 non-native…

Despite an increasing number of studies that explore language learning beyond the classroom (LBC), research examining LBC activities in relation to in-class learning is very limited. This paper investigates what kinds of LBC activities university students of Chinese and Japanese in Australia engage in and how they connect these activities to…

The purpose of the study is to understand how Japanese women become social entrepreneurs. The challenges in fostering women's entrepreneurship include socio-cultural traditional views on women's roles and expectations and insufficient support systems. Despite such challenges, the rise of Japanese women as social entrepreneurs has been observed in…

The aim of this study is to reveal the effect of foreign language learning on mother tongue use. Case study design, one of the qualitative research designs, was used in the study. In order to keep the sample large, 70 pre-service teachers were selected using simple random sampling method among the 4th year undergraduate students studying in three…

Background: In opaque orthographies, such as English, children with low reading skills tend to rely more on semantic information due to their inadequate acquisition of sub-lexical knowledge. This tendency has also been reported for kanji, a non-alphabetic and opaque Japanese orthography. However, previous studies on this phenomenon have had…

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…

The Plan to Accept 300,000 International Students achieved its numerical target in 2019 in Japan. Although the Japanese government announced its successful attainment, there has been criticism that it increased bogus international students. This chapter aims to elucidate its outcomes and issues by examining its policy structure, key indicators,…

This research investigated how children build up the language-specific system of the color lexicon, examining factors that play important roles for the construction of an adult-like color lexicon. We had 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old Japanese-speaking children and adults (n = 20, 18, 19, and 19, respectively) produce names for 93 color swatches. The…

This study examined number marking comprehension among Japanese learners of second language (L2) English, whose first language (L1) does not have an obligatory number marking system. The study conducted an online sentence comprehension experiment with 96 L1-Japanese learners and 32 native speakers of English, wherein participants engaged in a…

This paper presents a research project, funded by Durham University, investigating the potential of Generative AI (GenAI) for Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) learning, teaching and assessment within the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (MLaC) at Durham University. The study explores how Generative AI can support writing skills and feedback…

In order to conceptualize materials used in pair-work activities from a sociomaterialist perspective, this study examined the moment-by-moment unfolding of 67 pair-work interactions in beginner-level Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classrooms. The types of pair-work materials used in the focal classrooms--either textbook or teacher-designed…

A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant-directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult-directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learning: "hyperarticulation," which makes the categories more "separable," and…

As globalisation advances, an influx of loanwords has been seen in many languages in recent years. Japanese and Korean have similar grammatical features and many English-based loanwords. This study aims to clarify the difference in loanwords in Japanese and Korean adaptation, focusing on substituting alternative native lexicons through COVID-19.…

Modifying and hedging one's claims appropriately is an important characteristic of academic writing. This study focuses on the three main English modal verbs used to express "epistemic possibility" to avoid making strong statements, viz., "may", "might", and "could". The purpose of this corpus-based study is…