The sociocultural perspective of second language teacher education (L2TE) (e.g., Johnson, 2009), unlike the traditional one, values the importance of teacher development through actual teaching practice. Student teachers' (STs) initial beliefs should be challenged and reconstructed by taking into account particular teaching contexts. This…

This mixed-method study explored the impact of "Food Force (FF)", a UN-sponsored off-the-shelf videogame, on learner affect and vocabulary learning and retention in a Japanese as a second/foreign language classroom. The videogame was integrated into an existing curriculum and two studies were performed. In Study 1 (n = 9), new vocabulary…

Although distance language education has been widely adopted in university learning, very few researchers to date have looked at off-screen behaviors of second/foreign language learners in their physical environments while they engage in synchronous (real-time) online courses. This study examined one focal student's off-screen behaviors while…

This paper details the use of a free and access-controlled wiki as the learning management system for a four-week teaching module designed to improve the oral communication skills of Japanese university EFL students. Students engaged in repeated experiential learning cycles of planning, doing, observing, and evaluating their performance of a role…

This paper discusses several design issues in the development of a new online Japanese textbook, called "Robo-Sensei: Japanese Curriculum with Automated Feedback". When it is completed, the new online textbook will present a full Japanese curriculum. It extends a previously published online software program, "Robo-Sensei: Personal Japanese Tutor"…

In this paper we present a system for automatic correction of errors made by learners of English. The system has two novel aspects. First, machine-learned classifiers trained on large amounts of native data and a very large language model are combined to optimize the precision of suggested corrections. Second, the user can access real-life web…

This paper presents a new version of Robo-Sensei's NLP (Natural Language Processing) system which updates the version currently available as the software package "ROBO-SENSEI: Personal Japanese Tutor" (Nagata, 2004). Robo-Sensei's NLP system includes a lexicon, a morphological generator, a word segmentor, a morphological parser, a syntactic…

This study investigated the effects of synchronous and asynchronous CMC (computer-mediated communication)on the development of linguistic features of learners' speech in Japanese. Using learners from fourth-semester Japanese classes, the following research questions were examined: (a) Does CMC have positive effects on the development of oral…

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a handwritten correction support system with audio and playback strokes used to teach Japanese writing. The study examined whether audio and playback strokes have a positive effect on students using honorific expressions in Japanese writing. The results showed that error feedback with audio…

This study investigated the effects of using Romanized spellings on beginner-level Japanese vocabulary learning. Sixty-one first-semester students at two universities in Arizona were both taught and tested on 40 Japanese content words in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) program. The primary goal of the study was to examine whether the…

Based on recent studies, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been considered a tool to aid in language learning on account of its distinctive interactional features. However, most studies have referred to "synchronous" CMC and neglected to investigate how "asynchronous" CMC contributes to language learning. Asynchronous CMC possesses…

This paper discusses issues surrounding the development and implementation of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) at the curriculum- and program-levels. The Japanese program at the University of Alberta has introduced CALL courseware in language courses including those with multiple sections. An evaluation was conducted at the initial…

In this study, retrospective interviews were used to investigate reliability (and thus validity) threats to a computerized ESL listening comprehension test administered at a university in the US. The participants in the investigation, six international graduate students, were asked to respond to semi- and open-ended questions during individual…

This study examines the effectiveness of imagery and electronic visual feedback in facilitating students' acquisition of Japanese pronunciation skills. The independent variables, animated graphic annotation (AGA) and immediate visual feedback (IVF) were integrated into a Japanese computer-assisted language learning (JCALL) program focused on the…

Discusses a new template-automaton-based knowledge database system for an interactive intelligent language tutoring system (ILTS) for Japanese-English translation, whereby model translations as well as a taxonomy of bugs extracted from ill-formed translations typical of nonnative learners are collected. (Author/VWL)