Steven Macwhinnie

• MSEd TESOL
• Lecturer at Hirosaki Gakuin University

Japanese university students are often required to perform free writing activities in their EFL classes to encourage and build confidence in writing in English. Free writing activities in this research are writing freely about a given topic for a set time. The authors had students do free writing activities throughout the course of 1 semester of an...

Japanese university students are often required to perform free writing activities in their EFL classes to encourage and build confidence in writing in English. Free writing activities in this research are writing freely about a given topic for a set time. The authors have had their students do free writing activities throughout the course of 2 yea...

This is the first installment of articles about how death is dealt with in Japan. This article discusses the cremation process in Japan and how that process might influence the environment.

Research has shown that motivation is intimately connected to language proficiency (Dörnyei, 1994), yet little has been done to show how personality might be connected to both personality and proficiency in Japanese undergraduate students. This study examined the connection between the five-factor model of personality traits and the second langua...

As English education in Japan slowly shifts towards a communication based classroom, it is more important than ever to understand how students are motivated in this new style of classroom, and how that motivation is related to student personality traits. This pilot study tested tools for assessing both motivation and personality in Japanese univers...

The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Science and Technology (MEXT) are facing a plethora of pressures to become more global. This has led MEXT to draw up the 'English Education Reform Plan Corresponding to Globalization.' This education reform plan calls for a move away from grammar translation in favor of a communication based c...

Foreign language education became an official part of the national elementary school curriculum in Japan in 2011 (MEXT, 2010). One of the main goals of this new class was to encourage a positive attitude towards not only foreign cultures but also foreign languages in elementary school children. This study assesses pupils’ perceptions of English in...

In starved larvae of the tobacco hornworm moth Manduca sexta, larval and imaginal tissues stop growing, the former because they lack nutrient-dependent signals but the latter because of suppression by juvenile hormone. Without juvenile hormone, imaginal discs form and grow despite severe starvation. This hormone inhibits the intrinsic signaling nee...

With the exception of the wing imaginal discs, the imaginal discs of Manduca sexta are not formed until early in the final larval instar. An early step in the development of these late-forming imaginal discs from the imaginal primordia appears to be an irreversible commitment to form pupal cuticle at the next molt. Similar to pupal commitment in ot...