With rapid globalization, it is an urgent task for universities in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context to provide practical English education. Particularly, one that enables students to participate in the global society as well as the global business market. The challenge for these universities is to achieve this goal with limited class…

Self-directed learning (SDL) requires students to take initiative to learn and control their own learning process. Literature highlights the importance of SDL for lifelong learning. Yet, little understanding is known regarding how to support SDL at the school level, specifically for out-of-class learning context. To fill up this gap, this research…

Recommender systems in education aim to help students make good decisions about the direction of their learning. The design of such systems in conventional research has treated the decision making process of students as a black box and assumes the best recommendations to be those that accurately predict student choices. Such an approach overlooks…

The development of technology enables diverse learning experiences nowadays, which shows the importance of learners' self-regulated skills at the same time. Particularly, the ability to allocate time properly becomes an issue for learners since time is a resource owned by all of them. However, they tend to struggle to manage their time well due to…

Self-learning outside of class is an essential part of Japanese university education. With the drastic changes to university classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, self-learning became all the more important. In this study, we used surveys to investigate the changes in self-learning from 2019 to 2020, as reported by 5,861 third-year students at 15…

As emerging technologies rapidly evolve, language teachers in the 21st century face an increasing challenge in determining how to integrate them into their language classrooms. The existing literature emphasises that a crucial element for successful technology integration is for teachers to hold sufficient proficiency in technology and adopt…

Self-directed learning (SDL) ability, its usefulness in higher education and life-long learning have been highlighted in previous literature. However, there has been much less understanding of the effects of SDL ability in the school settings, specifically the effects on learners' SDL behaviors and processes. To address this limitation, this study…

Purpose: Drawing on the perspectives of cultural capital theory, this study investigated the impact of international internships on the performance of Japanese undergraduates on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) using a between-group pretest-posttest experimental design. Design/methodology/approach: Students participating…

Group-level self-regulation significantly impacts online collaborative learning performance (Panadero & Järvelä, 2015). Recently, online collaborative learning has been actively implemented in English language education in Japan, and group-level self-regulation, closely related to online collaborative learning, attracts the attention of…

Due to its accessibility and popularity, anime has been explored as a motivation for learning Japanese and as a pedagogical tool linking Japanese-as-a-foreign-language (JFL) literacy practices inside and outside of the classroom. However, JFL learners' actual practices in anime-mediated self-directed learning have not been fully investigated.…

Despite progress in recent years, Japanese classrooms continue to present challenges for educators seeking to promote language learner autonomy. Adopting an action research/case study design, the present study explored how, in a 5-week student-led project, an intact group of learners could contribute to the development of their own autonomy. Data…

This study developed a Self-Regulated Second Language Self-Study Questionnaire that addresses the self-regulated learning (SRL) skills of learners of English as a foreign language in a self-study setting. Much attention has been paid to SRL in second language acquisition; however, contexts outside school have hardly been explored. To address this…

Purpose: This study proposed a metacognition-inclusive self-regulated learning (SRL) approach to out-of-class listening practice and explored its impact on learners' listening performance and their reported use of self-regulatory listening strategies. Design/methodology/approach: Participants comprised 45 students learning English at a university…

This study examines whether ten weeks of direct instruction of affixes with online systems can improve learners' knowledge of affixes by using Affix Master 10 (AM10), a collection of online self-study materials developed by the current researchers. The aim of AM10 is to let students comprehensively learn 30 prefixes and 31 suffixes. The two…

It is no longer sufficient for higher education providers to solely focus on fostering academic research communication skills in their doctoral candidates, as a broader skillset is needed to communicate research effectively to diverse audiences. Such knowledge mobilisation facilitates research impact beyond academia and is linked to funding…