Intercultural English Language Programs

The use of computer-mediated communication has been shown to be effective in reducing teacher isolation and supportive of substantial collaboration between teachers.  In particular, online discussion forums may provide numerous opportunities for instructors within the same department to better coordinate their efforts and the flexibility in doing so at anytime and from anywhere with an Internet connection. This paper seeks to provide a rationale for the use of online discussion forums to foster departmental communication and collaboration and examines the output and perceived effectiveness of one such forum used by a faculty composed of limited-contract, English language instructors at a large, private university in Japan over the course of one academic year.

Although Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has stated that the enhancement of computer skills should be a major priority in elementary and secondary education, many Japanese students arrive at the post-secondary level with very limited English typing abilities. These limitations may be especially troublesome for such first-year students as university-level EFL programs across Japan are now more likely than not to include computer-based coursework that requires typing in English to some degree. This paper seeks to expand on the authors’ preliminary study (McDonald & Foss, 2007) by examining the effects of typing training and practice on the typing abilities and attitudes of first-year students at a large, private university in Japan over the course of an entire academic year. The results suggest that these first-year students made significant gains in both typing speed and accuracy throughout the academic year, presumably due to the increased demands for English typing; only slightly greater improvements were garnered from exposure to limited direct typing training and practice in class. Other findings suggest that the amount of attention spent on typing in class may have had more of an effect on improving students’ attitudes toward their own typing abilities and on typing in English in general. Ultimately, the authors cite the need for further studies to be conducted on Japanese students’ English typing abilities and call for an increased focus on English typing skills at the post-secondary level in Japan.

This article presents the idea of using logic puzzles as a task-based teaching technique in foreign language classrooms to foster second language vocabulary acquisition. The general advantages of using logic puzzles are that they can be both mentally challenging and fun for students while producing numerous pedagogical benefits. These benefits are believed to include an increased exposure to vocabulary presented in specific contexts with a distinct focus on comprehending meaning, a heightened mental engagement with the key vocabulary at a deep level of processing, and the fostering of inference skills and the ability to guess meaning from context, all in a relatively brief amount of class time. Furthermore, logic puzzles offer a great deal of adaptability in exactly how they are utilized in class. Ultimately, it can be concluded that logic puzzles should be explored more thoroughly for their potential benefits to classroom teaching and the learning of foreign languages through continued use and more substantial research studies.

Wikipedia, an online, collaboratively-authored encyclopedia, has quickly become one of the most popular destinations on the World Wide Web. While Wikipedia is now well known as an easily-accessible resource for basic information on any number of topics in any number of languages, it can also serve as the conduit for a number of language learning opportunities. Most readily, Wikipedia can serve as an ever-growing source of linguistic input, both at level intended for native speakers and, in the case of English, at a modified level for English language learners as well. Beyond its usefulness as a receptive source of information in the target language, Wikipedia also offers a range of opportunities for learners to engage in the self-directed production of language for an authentic audience. This paper seeks to provide both a rationale for and an overview of several ways that Wikipedia can be utilized to foster independent language learning.

Ensuring the most effective use of information technology (IT) in higher education requires that instructors understand not only the capabilities of the technologies themselves, but also how their use is perceived by students. This paper reports on the results of a questionnaire administered to 74 students at a small private women’s college in Japan. It seeks to compare Japanese undergraduate students’ perceptions of IT use in their courses with those of their peers in the United States and Canada via selected findings of The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2010. It further seeks to identify the Japanese students’ own self-efficacy for using technology and their opinions on its importance. The findings suggest that the Japanese students surveyed are using a surprisingly wide range of technologies in relation to their coursework and that their experiences, perceptions, and preferences differ somewhat from their North American counterparts.

As technology continues to develop at a rapid pace, libraries need to embrace a more engaged role in the active training of patrons to meet the diverse range of literacy requirements they are increasingly likely to face in their daily, academic, and professional lives. This paper contends that the promotion of educational opportunities should run throughout all aspects of libraries and embody the ethos of the librarians that work within them. If libraries are going to truly meet the needs of their patrons going forward, innovative information literacy training must be re-envisioned as a service priority in all library functions.

This study explores the potential impact of guessing on monolingual English and bilingual Japanese versions of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST; Nation & Beglar, 2007) in order to better understand the estimates that these tests provide. Eight first-year Japanese university students took 140-item versions of the VST modified to include an ‘I don’t know’ option and, immediately after completion, participated in brief semi-structured retrospective interviews about the reasoning behind the answers they selected on a sample of self-identified unknown items. Findings indicate these learners employed a large amount of both informed and uninformed guesses and that their guesses contributed to higher vocabulary size estimates, with estimates garnered from the Japanese version of the test showing a greater range of difference. The findings also suggest that informed guesses are guided by both partial knowledge and test strategy use, with potentially useful finer distinctions able to be identified.

Although academic libraries have made concerted efforts to adapt their reference services to the realities of how information is increasingly sought and accessed by their core users, the online component of these services, virtual reference services (VRS), has not yet lived up to their full potential. While ensuring that university students and faculty are aware of these services and understand how they can be used, other, more proactive approaches to identifying when these users need help must also be more thoroughly investigated in order to overcome the high levels of deep-seated apprehension that many of these users have been found to harbor. Only by actively pursuing all of these potential lines of research will more effective ways to address the many barriers that restrict academic library users from taking advantage on the benefits provided by VRS be ultimately identified.

This paper reviews the second/foreign language reading research articles published from 2000 to mid-2005 in more than 17 journals to illuminate what topics are being investigated and their possible implications for teaching practices. Our original intention was to report on all the studies we found. However, the breadth of articles exceeded what could be reported so we decided to identify the major trends of this research.  Articles were initially categorized into five overarching strands: Methods, Strategies, the Effect of Text Structure and Cognitive Processing, Learner Differences, and First Language Influences on Second Language Reading and then further subcategorized to better select the articles to include in this paper. For a complete bibliography of our findings, consult Aebersold, McDonald, and Morgan (2005).

This paper offers a response to Hutchinson's comments on our preliminary report of ''I don't know'' use and guessing on the bilingual Japanese Vocabulary Size Test (VST), which was published in Vocabulary Learning and Instruction. In particular, it provides greater clarification of the English proficiency levels used throughout that paper and a reiteration of what we see as its key findings regarding the range of vocabulary size estimates that were able to be calculated for the participants. Finally, it addresses the methodological limitations of the original study, which, we believe, reduce any determinations about the participants' personality types or general test-taking behaviors to mere speculation.

This study was designed to determine how well existing analytic rating scales functioned in the assessment of low- to mid-proficiency Japanese university students’ interactive English speaking ability when engaged in small group discussions. Many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) was employed to evaluate the quality of adapted rating scales for complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF), interaction, and communicative effectiveness. The video-recorded performances of 64 participants who completed 10-min group discussion tasks at the beginning and end of their first semester of university study were independently rated by four experienced raters using 9-point rating scales and the resulting scores were subjected to many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM). Although the scores demonstrated acceptable fit to the Rasch model, closer inspection of the data using Linacre’s (J Appl Meas 3:85–106, 2002a) guidelines for post hoc evaluation of rating scale category quality revealed multiple problems with the 9-point scales and suggested four major revisions were likely to improve the scales for use in this context. The resulting five 5-point rating scales developed through these revisions were then used by the same raters to reassess the same task performances. The 5-point rating scale data was then subjected to the same manner of MFRM analyses and found to demonstrate notably improved functioning and quality.