Shadowing, a practice of repeating what one hears as simultaneously and accurately as possible, has been researched in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) field for years. The research findings have shown that shadowing contributes to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' bottom-up listening skills, which leads to…

This study investigated how well second language (L2) readers of English use context to identify proper names as such. It represents a first step in exploring a widely held assumption that L2 readers of English can easily identify proper names by their form and function. The study isolates the issue of function to investigate whether context alone…

The substantive component of construct validity requires a confrontation between empirical test results and content relevance. The Vocabulary Size Test (VST) has been extensively validated in terms of empirical results. Less is known, however, about expert judgments of content relevance. The VST was constructed and validated according to the…

This article reports on a study that combined two strands of research: studies of incidental vocabulary learning and studies of the classroom lexical environment (in which vocabulary exposure is measured and the potential for learning estimated). The study looked at the orthographic lexical environment in a language classroom over a semester and…

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…

Listening has been widely characterised as a multifaceted process encompassing a range of linguistic and psycholinguistic components (see Rubin, 1994). However, for learners at different levels of L2 proficiency, there is uncertainty over the relative importance of the various sub-skills. To address this issue, a number of linguistic and…

Serial ordering mechanisms have been investigated extensively in psychology and psycholinguistics. It has also been demonstrated repeatedly that long-term phonological knowledge contributes to serial ordering. However, the mechanisms that contribute to serial ordering have yet to be fully understood. To understand these mechanisms, we demonstrate…

This book focuses on appropriate English for Academic Purposes instructional concepts and methods in the Japanese context. It investigates a variety of pedagogical techniques, addressing the fundamental academic English skills -- listening, speaking, reading and writing -- as well as assessment and materials development. All the research included…

Three experiments examined whether the process of lexical inferences differs according to the direction of contextual elaboration using a semantic relatedness judgment task. In Experiment 1, Japanese university students read English sentences where target unknown words were semantically elaborated by prior contextual information (forward lexical…

The present study addressed the role of speed as a factor in tests of second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge, presupposing that speed of performance is important in actual language use. Research questions were: (a) Do learners with a larger vocabulary size answer faster on an L2 vocabulary breadth test than smaller vocabulary sized learners?;…

The purpose of the present study is twofold. The first goal is to examine the effects of phonological input on students' vocabulary learning. The second is to discuss how different pre­-listening activities affect students' second language listening comprehension. The participants were first-­year students at a Japanese university. There were two…

The present study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of automatic word recognition and the development of L2 orthographic representation in the mental lexicon. Participants in the study were Japanese university students enrolled in a compulsory course involving a weekly 30-minute sustained silent reading (SSR) activity with…

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,…

This study investigates a novel method of captioning, partial and synchronized, as a listening tool for second language (L2) learners. In this method, the term partial and synchronized caption (PSC) pertains to the presence of a selected set of words in a caption where words are synced to their corresponding speech signal, using a state-of-the-art…

This paper provides a discussion of the results of a cross-sectional examination of linguistic variables that are predicted to influence L2 reading fluency. This study is part of a larger, longitudinal mixed-methods study into reading fluency development using online Timed Reading (TR) with participants from a mid-to-high level private university…