Akira Hamada

Kobe City University of Foreign Studies · Department of English

This paper reports an approximate replication of Matsuda & Gobel (2004) for the psychometric validation of the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS). Their study examined the structural aspects of the FLRAS developed by Saito, Horwitz & Garza (1999). The results showed that the FLRAS measured three different subcomponents of foreign langua...

This study aimed to depict the assessment process of treatment effects of extensive reading in a second language (L2) toward the establishment of an evidence-based practice. Although standardized mean differences between treatment and control groups have been applied to interpret the magnitude of treatment effects in observational studies on L2 tea...

This study developed a vocabulary size test for Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) using the New JACET List of 8,000 Basic Words (VST-NJ8). Data from the vocabulary size tests were interpreted to assess, diagnose, and predict learners’ lexical proficiency. Yet, existing tests for Japanese EFL learners involve two critical issu...

A fine-grained understanding of individual differences in reading in English as a foreign language (EFL) is critical because a significant amount of EFL reading is essential for successful EFL learning. This study examined the effects of multidimensional EFL reading anxiety on learners' achievement in EFL classrooms. In a preliminary study, an item...

Assessing learners’ individual differences helps identify students who need teacher support in classrooms. Previous studies have examined second language (L2) achievement based on reading anxiety because reading is an input-based activity essential for successful L2 learning. This study applied a latent rank model to identify L2 learners who are li...

This paper reports an action-research study on the implementation of a classroom-based paired oral test for Japanese high school students. Following the steps of action research, we investigated whether teachers could properly discriminate students' interactional performance during the test period. The paired oral test was administered to 15 studen...

This action research reports the collaborative approach adopted to improve classroom teaching techniques by a research community. Past studies on English education have focused on professional researchers as subjects for the action research. However, there is little research on teachers collaborating with researchers in planning teaching methods, c...

The present study reviewed the quality of quantitative research in Annual Review of English Language Education in Japan (ARELE) volumes 13 to 28 from two perspectives: research designs and test traits. In articles on foreign language pedagogy including ARELE, quantitative data have been used as scientific evidence to determine if a teaching method...

This article reports an action research on the effects of process-writing instructions with data-driven learning and the order of meanings approaches. A specific theme of this action research was how to verify the degree of success in teaching because the score gains from pretests to posttests are usually found in practical research. Low-proficient...

This study discusses the processes of reading in a second language that determine success in maintaining the coherence of narrative comprehension. In an experiment, Japanese university students thought aloud their cognitive processes when reading narratives, which included discrepancies between characters' traits and actions. Participants, first, r...

Acquisition of second language vocabulary requires such a large amount of input that determining how frequently new words should be introduced is important for teachers. Results from an experimental approach could not identify the frequency of input required for learners to efficiently acquire target words because of uncontrollable linguistic and i...

本稿では，外国語活動のふり返りとして「文字と音を対応させる ICT ポートフォリオ」を児童がど のように使い，文字への意識や，文字と音のつながりに対する感覚がどの程度育ったかを報告する。 実践 1 では 5 年生 4 名，6 年生 7 名がどのように ICT ポートフォリオを活用するのか調べた。児童は タスクの遂行に必要な表現を授業中に探して発表の準備をし，準備内容を授業者が ICT ポートフォリ オに記録した。児童はポートフォリオを持ち帰って発表のリハーサルをし，次の授業でタスクの成果 を発表した。このサイクルを 4 単元くり返した結果，児童は ICT ポートフォリオを使って活動の成果 を文字と音で確認し，学んだ表現や活動内容を発表や他の活動に応用できるようになった。一方，文 字を読むこと...

This study involved two eye-tracking experiments that investigated whether and how Japanese EFL learners maintain coherent text comprehension (i.e., a situation model). The participants' eye movements were recorded while reading narratives each of which included an inconsistency between a description of a character (e.g., a vegetarian) and a subseq...

This study examined what linguistic variables affecting the cognitive process in reading comprehension determine the difficulty of Eiken reading passages. Using Coh-Metrix, a corpus analysis of Eiken first-grade to third-grade passages was run to compute lexical (word frequency and lexical diversity), syntactic (syntactic similarity), and meaning c...

The present study describes the first step in the development and validation of a task-based reading performance test. We designed 6 information transfer task test items in which test-takers were required to transfer what they comprehended from passages (e.g., reading a travel schedule and communicating it to circle members via email). To validate...

Three experiments examined whether the process of lexical inferences differs according to the direction of contextual elaboration using a semantic relatedness judgment task. In Experiment 1, Japanese university students read English sentences where target unknown words were semantically elaborated by prior contextual information (forward lexical in...

This study examined whether word-context semantic similarity computed by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) predicts the performance of incidental L2 vocabulary learning. LSA is relevant to the usage-based model of language learning, which premises that learners obtain lexical knowledge from the information about how words are used in context. In the e...

This study examined whether (a) EFL learners can build a mental representation of an expository text that represents causal relations among text ideas and (b) building a causally coherent representation leads to learning from the text. In the experiment, three groups of Japanese university students at different English reading proficiency levels (i...

Although paired-associate learning, the traditional method of learning new words, has been replaced by contextualized vocabulary learning, evidence from empirical studies runs counter to theoretical accounts of the superiority of context. Recently, more attention has been directed toward the quality of contextual information that leads to providing...

The summary writing task has been widely used in order to examine how well readers comprehend texts (Alderson, 2000). As a scoring criterion of summary protocols, previous studies have considered whether or not a reader can effectively use macrorules, which reflect the process of readers' construction of their mental representation (e.g., Johns & M...

When L2 learners encounter unknown words in a text, they must narrow down the possible inferable meaning of those words based on contextual information. However, it remains uncertain how specific meaning is strongly inferred according to a context during reading. This study examined how the strength of contextual constraint affected the specificity...

The present study examined how Japanese EFL learners infer the meaning of unknown words from discourse information, focusing on their depth of vocabulary knowledge (DVK) and availability of contextual cues for lexical inferencing. A total of 70 Japanese undergraduates performed a lexical inferencing task in a single sentence and a text (i.e., sente...

This study examined how Japanese EFL learners process unknown words in a text while reading, with a focus on two factors: (a) contextual constraints, and (b) recall instructions of a contextual sentence. Thirty-eight undergraduates read 16 contextual sentences with target words in four conditions: strongly contextual constraints with or without a f...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors in lexical inferencing (learner strategies and learning conditions) that affect the acquisition of vocabulary knowledge depth for Japanese EFL learners. Sixty participants attempted to infer the meaning of 12 target words in the three learning conditions: the target word only, one sentence, an...