The present study examined motivation toward English learning among students at an international school in Japan. The motivation of 112 elementary school students, including those with English and Japanese as an L1, and those bilingual in English and Japanese, was analyzed based on self-determination theory. The results showed a distinction…

Study abroad destinations for Japanese students, particularly those aiming to improve their English language skills, tend to focus on the "Inner Circle" (Kachru, 1992) of English-speaking countries. However, over the last two decades, Korean and Japanese-owned English language schools in the Philippines started to appear, leading to over…

The aim of this study was to discover what potential benefits of Virtual Reality (VR) use students perceived in comparison to smartphone use in an English-speaking activity. Two surveys were conducted over three interventions in order to ascertain these student perceptions. Ten students enrolled in an elective English class at a Japanese…

Language teacher education is widely identified as one of the most important areas that needs addressing in order to improve early language instruction, yet research into teacher education for early language teachers remains relatively sparse. This volume responds to this gap by compiling studies with diverse methodological tenets from a wide…

There are a number of studies on teachers' corrective feedback and students' uptakes in immersion settings, but the majority is carried out in the North American context. Based on limited data, "the counter­-balance hypothesis" was proposed by Lyster and Mori (2006) to explain distributions of teacher feedback and students' uptakes in…

This longitudinal study asks 2 questions. The first one is: What patterns of pragmatic development can we observe among different pragmatic functions and attributes in a second language (L2)? The second question is: In what ways do individual differences and learning context affect the course of pragmatic development? Forty-eight Japanese college…

What is the role of the teacher in developing learner autonomy? The limited research in this area is seldom situated in theory and often based on self-reported data. This study is situated in sociocultural theory and draws on two constructs, the zone of proximal development and imitation, to explain the teacher's role in developing autonomy. The…

In this paper, both a cognitive and a sociocultural theoretical perspective are used to bring together findings from two studies that investigated the effects of instruction designed to enhance the potentially positive effect of peer interaction on L2 development. Despite differences between the studies' learning contexts, participants' age, and…

This study is an investigation of the development of vocabulary knowledge during study abroad (SA), intensive domestic immersion (IM) and academic-year formal classroom (AY) learning. Its focus was the growth of vocabulary knowledge in Japanese--a language where little SA research has been conducted to date. Unlike most studies addressing…

The Attitudes towards Japan and the West questionnaire was constructed to examine how English immersion students in an elementary school in Numazu City, Japan subjectively perceive themselves in relation to Japan and the West. Five subscales were identified.The questionnaire was also given to Japanese immersion students and to comparable…

Reports a study of Japanese students learning English in Japan. Supports the notion that the necessity to communicate forces learners to notice linguistic problems, and that noticing a problem can push learners to modify their original input. Through this cognitive process, learners acquire second languages, especially the ability to produce oral…

This paper reports on a questionnaire survey carried out in the first and last classes of a single semester English "conversation" class at a national university in Japan. While the time frame is obviously limited, the project focuses on changes in attitude to using the Learners' Mother Tongue displayed by students with regards to use by…

This study investigates linguistic, perceptual, and pedagogical change (LPPC) in a short-term, study abroad English immersion program. It proposes the LPPC Interactive Model of second language acquisition based on Gardner's 1985 socioeducational model and Woods' 1996 beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge (BAK) structure. The framework is applied in a…

A study investigated the use of content-based tasks as central and peripheral in second language instruction. Specifically, it examined the relative effects of such tasks that were either central to the syllabus, as sources of knowledge or skills in their own right, or peripheral, as occasional source of language practice. The study was conducted…

This is the tenth annual issue of the UCLA TESL (teaching English as a second language) workpapers. It includes the following papers: (1) "An Attempt to Model the Role of Cognitions in Language Learning," by R.L. Allwright; (2) "A Comparison of Language Proficiency Tests," by J. Donald Bowen; (3) "Language Study Through…