The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a study of 15-year-old students' performance in reading, mathematics, and science literacy conducted every 3 years. The PISA 2018 results provide a global view of U.S. students' performance compared to their peers in nearly 80 countries and education systems. By design, PISA aims to…

Aka (2019) conducted an year-long large-scale study demonstrating that Japanese high school students who undertook extensive reading performed better than a control group who undertook grammatical instruction. Those showing the greatest gains were those of lower and intermediate proficiency. The students' achievement was measured in terms of…

Nobuko Sakurai (2015) presents insightful research results that help educators better understand the impact of translation as it limits reading quantity, reading comprehension, and reading rate in an extensive reading (ER) program. Overall, the results of the study encourage educators to restrict translation as a means of obtaining better results…

This study was an investigation of how particular processing tasks influence L2 reading in relation to text type effects and L2 reading proficiency. Two groups of Japanese university EFL students (N = 103), varying in English reading proficiency, read a narrative passage and an expository passage in one of three task conditions: outlining,…

Concern has been expressed about teaching English to the fifth- and the sixth graders in the public schools of Japan. There appears to be an insufficiency of materials as well as anxiety among teachers who must instruct these grades. Story telling may be an important step for developing English competence. The current study replicated the work of…

Four hundred and ninety-five Japanese primary-school children aged from 8 (Grade-2) to 12 (Grade-6) were tested for their abilities to read/write in Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji, for their size of vocabulary and for other cognitive abilities including arithmetic, visuo-spatial and phonological processing. Percentages of the children whose…

In textbooks, foreign (second) language reading proficiency is often evaluated through comprehension questions. In case, authentic texts are used as reading material, such questions should be prepared by teachers. However, preparing appropriate questions may be a very demanding task for teachers. This paper introduces a method for automatically…

Having taught ESL/EFL for seven years has led me to believe that non-native instructors can teach English effectively since we are ESL/EFL learners ourselves. We can relate to our students through our shared difficulties and insecurities. However, a number of us face the insecurity of not being "fluent enough" to teach a language other…

Notes that "manga"--Japanese comics--constitute the most popular kind of reading material in Japan. Discusses the skills needed to read manga. Surveys 297 Japanese college students. Suggests that many manga readers can be considered engaged readers as they are highly motivated and have developed a range of strategies to help them…

To more thoroughly analyze and compare the types of dictionaries being used by Japanese college students in three college engineering classes, two kinds of surveys were designed. The first was a general survey about purchase, use and preferences regarding electronic dictionaries. The second survey asked questions about how various computerised…

The articulatory awareness task, which was found by Griffiths and Frith (2002) to discriminate ex-dyslexic from non-dyslexic adults, was given to three groups of Japanese college students with different English reading abilities. Two unexpected results emerged: (1) Articulatory awareness performance was generally poor across the groups, thereby…