This study investigates the effects of short-term study abroad on affective changes for Second-Language English (SLE) research students participating in a five-week intensive TESOL certificate program in Australia. Changes in individual differences among the participants, including anxiety in using a second language, willingness to communicate…

This study aims to examine whether differences exist in the factors influencing the difficulty of scoring English summaries and determining scores based on the raters' attributes, and to collect candid opinions, considerations, and tentative suggestions for future improvements to the analytic rubric of summary writing for English learners. In this…

This study examines L2 speakers' accent attitudes in relation to their linguistic profile and current practices, recruiting 107 multilingual postgraduate students of 34 different nationalities enrolled in leading research universities in Japan. The participants completed a survey regarding their perceptions of different English varieties in…

Recent research has shown that reading and listening together can be helpful in developing EFL reading fluency, but learner-autonomous bimodal reading research remains scarce. The present study, in an intensive academic English program in Japan, was intended to explore whether reading rates and related reading skills might improve while…

The pursuit of global competence (GC) is heavily promoted as part of university education in Japan, where the government exhorts universities to equip graduates with skills that will enable them to function as global citizens. Foreign language (FL) educators are often expected to cultivate these globally competent individuals. However, there is…

This study investigates how implicit and explicit learning and knowledge are associated, by focusing on the salience of target form--meaning connections. The participants were engaged in incidental learning of artificial determiner systems that included grammatical rules of [± plural] (a taught rule), [± actor] (a more salient hidden rule), and [±…

In this qualitative study, we analyzed the processes of a collaborative online international learning (COIL) collaboration between two higher education institutions in Japan and the United States from the perspective of the technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) framework. The research question this study aimed to address was:…

This paper examines email requests sent by Indonesian students to Japanese university professors using English as their lingua franca. It particularly analyzes how students modify their email requests using internal and external modifications as a way to soften the force of the imposed requests. Data were gathered from a total of 56 authentic…

The adoption of English-medium instruction degree and non-degree programs in non-Anglophone universities has grown dramatically over the past 15 years. Japan is not an exception. In the Japanese context, a growing number of research works have addressed the implementation of English-medium degree programs at the undergraduate level; however,…

This study is an extension of Nahatame's (2018) research that demonstrated the effects of causal and semantic relations between sentences on second language (L2) text processing. Employing eye tracking, this study aimed to examine whether these effects appear during more natural, uninterrupted reading processes and to identify the time course of…

Low-proficient L2 readers, especially, struggle for literal understanding of the text and for appropriately using reading strategy (RS). We examined whether and how the development of L2- English reading comprehension skills is associated with the frequency and kinds of L2 RS use. Fifty Japanese learners of English completed a reading…

Emotion plays important roles in learning, memory, and other cognitive processes; it does so not only in the form of "macro-level emotion" (e.g., salient affective states and self-reportable motivational currents) but also in the form of "micro-level emotion" (e.g., subtle feelings and linguistic attributes that are usually…

This case study examines the goals of 13 Japanese graduate students who studied abroad, and situates those goals in the larger context of Japanese society. The study abroad objectives of the Japanese government and some Japanese universities are compared and problematised. The authors conducted three interviews of each study abroad participant…

This case study explores the challenges that Master's students encounter when learning to write in academic English as part of a UK postgraduate course, after having achieved the required IELTS entry score. Interviews with six Chinese and Japanese learners at different stages of the Master's study revealed more sophisticated writing difficulties…

The lack of exchange between international students and host nationals in Japan has long been a pressing issue, yet very little progress has been made to rectify this situation. In this study, we examined this issue by focusing on how international students in Japan perceive cultural contact with their host and home culture members during their…