Purpose: Although the relationship between leadership behaviors and team reflexivity has been investigated in prior research, little is known about the dimensions of reflective leadership or leadership behaviors that facilitate reflection in a group or organization. This paper aims to examine the interrelated characteristics of reflective…

This article examines the relative effects of two treatments--goal setting and visualization--on enhancing Willingness to Communicate (WTC) among a group of 373 Japanese university EFL learners. Although longitudinal studies in both EFL and ESL settings have been conducted to examine the developmental aspect of WTC, no solid results of enhancing…

The language learning strategy question has been debated on a number of levels, including definition, the strategy/success relationship and strategy coordination. In addition, awareness has been steadily growing of the importance of taking an holistic view of the strategy phenomenon and examining strategies not just in isolation but as part of an…

This study examined the effect of reading goal, topic-familiarity, and language proficiency on text comprehension and learning. English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students with high and low topic-familiarity read and recalled a text. Some were told in advance to expect a recall task in a particular language--the first language (L1) or second…

Study abroad is an under-researched domain of language learning. Moreover, most investigations of this phenomenon adopt traditional structuralist approaches, wherein outcomes of study abroad are assessed solely in terms of proficiency gains as measured through conventional exams. The present study builds upon an emerging body of poststructuralist…

This study explores the effectiveness of guided reflective journals to improve intelligibility in a Japanese higher educational context. Based on qualitative and quantitative methods, the paper evaluates changes in speech over the duration of one semester. In particular, this study focuses on changes in prosodic features such as stress, intonation…

This study explores the nature of co-constructed interaction in group oral tests by examining whether a test-taker's own and his or her group members' extraversion levels and oral proficiency levels have different influences on conversational styles between two group sizes: groups of three and groups of four. Data were collected from 269 Japanese…

Researchers, especially in the field of educational psychology, have argued that self-efficacy plays an important role in self-regulated learning. As such, teaching of self-regulated learning often focuses on enhancing self-efficacy. However, few studies have examined how the process of self-regulated learning might lead to the enhancement of…

Japan's government has mandated a shift from traditional to communicative methodologies in secondary English classrooms (Tanabe, 2004), but it is unclear whether this has affected student beliefs about language learning. This study investigates the beliefs of 315 incoming university students at a large private university in Japan from 2006 through…