Participation in overseas programs has recently increased as an international strategy worldwide. However, Japan has been the exception, because the number of Japanese students studying abroad has decreased over the last decade. The Japanese government and universities began efforts to motivate Japanese students to gain international experience.…

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…

English-speaking learners of L2 Spanish who were taking part in a four-week study abroad program in Spain and Japanese-speaking learners of L2 English who were individually studying in year-long abroad experiences participated in the present study. Quantitative and qualitative data from language questionnaires and contact profiles along with…

As online automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines become more accurate and more widely implemented with call software, it becomes important to evaluate the effectiveness and the accuracy of these recognition engines using authentic speech samples. This study investigates two of the most prominent cloud-based speech recognition engines--Apple's…

The present study discusses the findings from a survey of BA students in their 3rd year or higher, as well as MA degree program students, regarding their perception of Western corporate culture and internationalisation in relation to their foreign language major. The students surveyed (n = 445) belong to one of 24 different foreign language…

We compared three methods for increasing reading amount and reading self-efficacy among L2 learners. (1) We required a word-target group to read at least 2,500 words a week outside class. (2) We required a sustained silent reading (SSR) group to do (a) in class SSR for 15 minutes every week, and (b) to read one book per week. (3) We required a…

The Multimedia Principle (Fletcher & Tobias, 2005) states that people learn better and comprehend more when words and pictures are presented together. The potential for English language learners to increase their comprehension of video through the use of captions, which graphically display the same language as the spoken dialogue, has been…

Since the Communities of Practice (CoP) concept has been adopted in various learning environments, visualizing its development in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms is complicated. Thus, based on the CoP concept, this study investigates the changes in learners' degrees of participation and CoP elements in EFL writing/reading classes…

This study investigates the benefits of designing second language (L2) learning tasks to operate on learner-generated content (related to actual content in their lives and experiences) as opposed to teacher-generated content typical of current approaches to L2 task design (fictitious ideas and events created to provide an opportunity for…

Development of target language pragmatic competence in language learners requires not only provision of cultural features of target language community in language classes but also language learner's willingness to learn and use those cultural features. To investigate the relationship between language learners' attitudes toward cultural instruction…

Sociolinguistic and sociocultural features of the source language can be ideally transferred to the target language when the translator's cultural background knowledge has a high overlap with the source language culture. This signifies the crucial role of national cultural distance from the source language society in the quality of translation of…

We investigated how the updating function supports the integration process in solving arithmetic word problems. In Experiment 1, we measured reading time, that is, translation and integration times, when undergraduate and graduate students (n = 78) were asked to solve 2 types of problems: those containing only necessary information and those…

The aim of this study is to construct a model of a simple lexical network showing the strength and asymmetry of the connections between vocabulary items in the L2 mental lexicon of Japanese learners. The study focuses on eight nouns and investigates how they are networked, and whether the existing network structure formed by these nouns would be…

Task repetition facilitates learners' performance, at least temporarily: Since learners are already familiar with the content of the task at the initial enactment, they are capable of focusing their attention on linguistic form during the following enactment. However, the analysis in previous studies treated various aspects of "form" as…

Feedback, or information given to learners regarding their performance, is found to facilitate second language (L2) learning. Research also suggests that the timing of feedback (whether it is provided immediately or after a delay) may affect learning. The purpose of the present study was to identify the optimal feedback timing for L2 vocabulary…