National cultural distance is considered to be a strong predictor of language learners' pragmatic competence. To test the actual effect of national cultural distance on pragmatic competence holistically and comprehension and production aspects of pragmatic competence discretely, the current study was conducted on two groups of undergraduate…

This paper examines people's attitudes toward public spending on education in Japan. It is well known that Japan has the smallest public education expenditure relative to GDP among the OECD countries, and this may yield unequal opportunities in education. The tax burden in Japan is small compared to those in OECD countries, and there may be no…

This study assesses the Japanese translation of the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE). Researchers are often interested in comparing the conceptual ideas of students with different cultural backgrounds. The FMCE has been useful in identifying the concepts of English-speaking students from different backgrounds. To identify effectively…

As the life expectancy of people with intellectual disability (ID) increases, it is becoming necessary to understand factors affecting survival. However, predictors that are typically assessed among healthy people have not been examined. Predictors of all-cause mortality, including blood, urine, anthropometry, and nutritional indices, were…

The purpose of this research is to investigate the image of salespeople and of the selling function as perceived by business students across cultures. Of the several empirical investigations that exist in the sales literature, most are based on a single-country sample. This study extends previous knowledge on single-country perception of…

The constructs of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) have been used extensively to investigate learner performance on second language tasks. However, a serious concern is that the variables used to measure these constructs are sometimes used conventionally without any empirical justification. It is crucial for researchers to understand how…

This study is a quantitative, quasi-experimental investigation focusing on the effects of word recognition training on word recognition fluency, reading speed, and reading comprehension for 151 Japanese university students at a lower-intermediate reading proficiency level. Four treatment groups were given training in orthographic, phonological,…

In recent years, teachers' increased workloads have become an issue for policy, and have been multiply pointed out, deriving as they do from peripheral duties such as paperwork, in academic research as well. However, these mentions have not been based on sufficiently solid proof. Here, this paper compares teacher working hours surveys extant from…

The objective is to examine the changes in the effectiveness of motivational strategy use by teachers during one semester in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms. More specifically, we investigate differences in effectiveness changes for each motivational strategy used according to students' English proficiency levels and their…

The degree of equality in the delivery of education is an important dimension of variation. Some nations believe that the provision of a highly stratified system enhances quality, at least for the minority who are able to gain entry to the elite academic stream. In contrast, other nations prefer a more egalitarian approach to education where all…

Much of the research on assessing and comparing teacher education has focused on schools of education in westernized contexts. While teacher training programs in East Asia have received comparatively less attention than those in North America, Europe, and Australia, they may also offer practical insight through their similarities and differences.…

Predictive inference is the anticipation of the likely consequences of events described in a text. This study investigated predictive inference generation during second language (L2) reading, with a focus on the effects of strategy instructions. In this experiment, Japanese university students read several short narrative passages designed to…

The current study investigated the relation and comparison of reading comprehension and reading rate in Japanese high school EFL learners. One hundred and forty-eight tenth-graders in a Japanese high school participated in this study. Results showed that the relation between reading comprehension and reading rate was weak, but significant (r =…

This first Japanese twin study of early literacy development investigated the extent to which genetic and environmental factors influence individual differences in prereading skills in 238 pairs of twins at 42 months of age. Twin pairs were individually tested on measures of phonological awareness, "kana" letter name/sound knowledge,…

How to compute and report subscores for a test that was originally designed for reporting scores on a unidimensional scale has been a topic of interest in recent years. In the research reported here, we describe an application of multidimensional item response theory to identify a subscore structure in a test designed for reporting results using a…