Many scholars and teachers in EFL education should agree that compared with reading and writing, listening has received much less attention. This brief article discusses important gaps existing in EFL listening and overall proficiency development. It presents the case for a greater focus on sounds and actual listening in the classroom and spoken…

Following growing interest in vocabulary acquisition, a number of researchers have proposed how learners' vocabulary knowledge can be measured both in terms of how many words they know (vocabulary size) and how well they know those words (depth of knowledge). However, most of the depth measures have addressed only a single depth aspect (often for…

This article is based on a study which investigated the beliefs about English language learning of 661 first-year university students and their 34 English teachers at a Japanese university. The focus of the article is the shifts in reported student beliefs over a nine-month period of English study between two administrations of the Sakui and Gaies…

This paper describes Japan's most recent attempts to improve English teaching and learning at all levels of the education system both for students and teachers as well as for the public in general. Based on policy recommendations by several advisory committees, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has…