A quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of inductive and deductive types of instruction in the acquisition of a complex grammatical structure, the passive voice. The participants were two groups (n = 34) of second-year Japanese students from a vocational school who had three treatment lessons designed for each group embedded into…

Even young EFL learners who have not yet learned L2 grammar will notice language patterns if, when retrieving exemplars ("item-based patterns"), they succeed in making form-meaning connections (FMCs). Item-based patterns, termed formulaic sequences (FS), serve as a basis for creative constructions. Although learners are implicitly…

This study explored how 14 foreign-language writers at a university in Japan changed their genre awareness of discussion genre texts (particularly argumentative essays) during a 15-week systemic functional linguistics course consisting of text-based writing lessons assigned as part of a teaching and learning cycle. To obtain in-depth quantitative…

Poor English performance among Japanese college EFL students has often been explained by grammar-translation and lecture-memorization instruction. This study investigated the effectiveness of a recently designed teaching method, namely, "The read-aloud instruction package," which consists of four major activities: Slash/chunked reading…

This article outlines a junior high school physical education class which teaches basketball in English using the CLIL framework as a case study. The purpose of the article is to consider how and what students learned from the class through students' class results, basketball skills test, post lesson questionnaire and pre and post lesson teacher…

The purpose of this paper is to compare the efficiency of the core schema-based instruction (SBI) in learning English prepositions between two groups that were placed depending on learners' level of English proficiency. The SBI in the present study refers to a way of teaching in which the schematic core meaning of a given lexical item is provided.…

The purpose of this study is to determine which is more beneficial to improving learner writing: reviewing peer texts or one's own text. The study took place over one semester at a Japanese university with 51 students enrolled in two writing classes at two proficiency levels. The students at the lower proficiency level reviewed peer texts, while…