Background: Contemporary models of student learning within higher education are often inclusive of processing and regulation strategies. Considerable research has examined their use over time and their (person-centred) convergence. The longitudinal stability/variability of learning strategy use, however, is poorly understood, but essential to…

The number of students expanding their academic programs to include learning experiences abroad has been steadily increasing over the past two decades. This study investigates the cultural identification of short-term study abroad participants and its influence on their acculturation process. By means of a widely used acculturation scale, it was…

This paper investigates the effect of using L1 translations versus L2 definitions on the learning and testing of L2 vocabulary recognition knowledge. For this study, 48 Japanese L2 learners of English studied 200 lexical items from the academic word list (AWL) over a 10-week period. To support their learning, the participants were provided with…

The purpose of this study is twofold: to assess the acceptance and usefulness of Nagoya University Small Private Online Courses, which is an online end-of-life care educational program through popular social media designed to supplement traditional end-of-life care education among healthcare professionals and to get constructive feedback with the…

English language learners seek strong speaking, reading, writing, and listening skills. When it comes to the last it is commonly assumed that if students have many opportunities to hear spoken English then that exposure will improve their ability to comprehend it. Unfortunately, this is often not the case since many second language learners do not…

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…

The purpose of the present study is to examine whether performance on the "TOEFL iBT"® Reading practice test is affected by 3 different levels of feedback provided to learners upon completion of reading exercises: (a) correctness of learner response (the knowledge of correct results [KCR] feedback), (b) KCR feedback and rationales for…

Lexical bundles are essential for fluency, but their incompleteness is a stumbling block for learners. In this study, two presentation methods to increase awareness of lexical bundles through explicit noticing are explored and compared with incidental exposure. The three conditions in this study were as follows: noticing with schematic linguistic…

Every day, almost one billion children around the world experience violent punishment. Eliminating all violence against children is a key target of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This is a monumental challenge due to the diversity of cultural, economic and social contexts in which children live. Violence-prevention…

The linguistic, social, and intercultural benefits of overseas experiences for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners continue to gain attention as the significance of English as a lingua franca proliferates. As the use of English for international communication increases, it is important to examine such interactions from multiple…

Since October 2010, the Chemistry-Biology Combined Major Program, an international course taught in English at Osaka University, has been teaching small classes (no more than 20 in size). We present data from the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) given to first-year classical mechanics students (N = 47 students over three years) pre and post score,…

Based on a one-year longitudinal experimental study with 3,782 kindergarten school children across 15 countries, this article examines the association between prayer and happiness. Results show that the post-test scores on the faces scale were higher for the participant group who had taken the prayer lessons vis-à-vis the comparison group.…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of two instruction methods for teaching polysemous English prepositions ("at, in, on") and to explore learners' perception on learning tools used in the instruction when learning polysemous words. The first study investigated the effectiveness of schema-based instruction…

This article provides the results of a small exploratory pilot study that tested for the influence of a positive self-review intervention of the successful production of English via a tablet computer on Japanese junior high school students' EFL motives. The Language Learning Orientations Scale-Intrinsic Motivation, Extrinsic Motivation, and…

The progression of silent reading rates and reading comprehension were examined among Japanese university students (N = 55) over one academic semester. Participants were divided into three quasi-experimental groups. The first group practiced a combination of timed reading and repeated oral reading with attention paid to chunking and prosody. The…