Although there seems to be no doubt that English as a lingua franca paradigm has affected the focus of English language teaching toward the issue of mutual intelligibility, studies involving only non-native English speakers (NNS-NNS interaction) are still in their infancy. Using a sequential analysis, this study examines how Japanese learners of…

Effective use of outside source texts is one of the key components of successful academic writing. This study aims at clarifying Japanese university EFL students' citation behaviors in producing argumentative writing. Twenty-six Japanese university EFL students wrote an argumentative essay. Their essays were analyzed quantitatively by six…

The present study mainly focuses on the topic development in student written production through the consistency between student self-assessment and teacher assessment. In the present study, topic development means "cohesion", "overall organization", and "coherence". It proposes the next hypotheses: (i) Students could…

There have been many studies on the acquisition of English unaccusative verbs which make use of learner corpora. Most of these studies have so far concluded that even advanced learners of English ungrammatically passivize unaccusative verbs and produce sentences such as "*The accident was happened" and "*The mobile phone was…

English rhythm is related to contrast between the stressed and the unstressed in duration structure. In native English speech, in general, an intra-speaker average duration of stressed syllable is longer than that of syllable as a whole. On the contrary, that of unstressed syllable is shorter than that of syllable as a whole. In the previous paper…

This study aimed to investigate the characteristics and developmental phenomena apparent in Japanese learners of English with their raters' perspectives in terms of fluency which has been recognized as a major factor in judging non-native speakers' proficiency. The following temporal indices demonstrated strong relationships with the raters'…

The objective of this research is to detect effective factors in English pronunciation teaching from the viewpoint of EIL (English as an International Language). This research is based on the data of the Successful Pronunciation Learners (SPL) selected by the raters, Japanese and native speakers of English (NSE), in Tominaga (2005). On the grounds…

To improve more effectively the learners' proficiency to control contrast of the stressed to the unstressed in English teaching, it is necessary to analyze how the acoustical characteristics of learners' speech are related to the perceptual evaluation by teachers. This paper analyzes A) learner characteristics of durations measured in speech units…

This study attempted to investigate the characteristics of interaction dynamics in a group oral interaction carried out by Japanese learners of English. The relationship between the participants' language development and interactional management functions (IMFs) was also explored. Oral performance tests in a paired or a small group have recently…

Examines Japanese English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners' requestive strategies. Data were obtained through the Situation Assessment Questionnaire and the Discourse Completion test and analyzed in terms of the relationship of the subjects' awareness of situation and frequency of the word "please," characteristics of subjects' strategies in English…

Presents a linguistic analysis of two nearly synonymous Japanese adverbs "betu" and "hoka." Provides a sharper characterization of these adverbs to make it easier for Japanese learners in their acquisition of these adverbs. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the listening process of less proficient Japanese English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners. Focuses on whether they tend to rely on bottom-up or on top-down processing, on which opinions are divided among researchers. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the interlanguage pragmatic strategies used by Japanese and Korean learners of English. Data was collected from a project carried out jointly by Korean and Japanese university students. Observation, analysis, and discussion of student data suggest that interspeaker understanding and sensitivity to pragmatic variables of the target…

Presents a linguistic analysis of three nearly synonymous adverbs: "totemo,""taihen," and "hizyoo(-ni). Provides a sharper characterization of these adverbs that will help Japanese learners in their acquisition of these adverbs. (Author/VWL)

Examines some distinctive differences observed between Koreans and Japanese when presenting their papers at an international conference. The differences discussed include linguistic features as well as pragmatic features. Suggests that the most important factors in writing and giving a good presentation are to have a clear idea and to organize it…