The entrance exams to Japanese universities have long been criticised for creating negative “washback” on English education in high schools in Japan, as teachers have often focused their teaching efforts on teaching grammar to prepare students for these exams rather than helping students to develop competency in spoken English. Many government initiatives have attempted to reform English language education by encouraging a greater focus on speaking competency. This paper outlines the nature of the Japanese university entrance exam system, considers the phenomenon of washback, and critically reviews the body of empirical research related to washback in the Japanese context. A systematic review was conducted on articles published between 1993 and June, 2022. These articles were subjected to thematic analysis in which four broad categories were identified: learner behaviour; washback to teacher behaviour; affective factors; and washback specifically from the introduction of the listening test. Findings suggest that more empirical studies are required to understand the complex nature of washback from university entrance exams, and that future research is required to examine potential washback from four-skills testing and, in particular, from the inclusion of a speaking test.

Despite attention by educators and researchers to the advancement of robotics research in education, little experimental research has been conducted on the use of robots in language education for young children. This paper reports on a study aimed at providing an improved English language development assessment questionnaire specifically for use in a project to bring autonomous social robots into English as a foreign language (EFL) classes for native-Korean-speaking children aged 3-5 years old. In order to examine the validity of questionnaire items, a focus group of 10 professors with expertise in child EFL learning was sent the questionnaire, which includes 127 items to be rated on a 5-point Likert scale and two open-ended questions. They were asked to judge whether each item was appropriate for children of the target age group, and whether any items were not appropriate to assess child L2 learners' English language development. The findings inform the selection of appropriate items for evaluating language development stages based on children's speaking performance in a robot-assisted language learning condition. The study's results provide a baseline for an English language assessment questionnaire for EFL teachers to evaluate 3-5-year-old children's language development in English speaking in the robot-assisted language learning (RALL) condition.

The present study examines the linguistic features of Korean college students' English writings in terms of their writing quality and genre. Forty-eight Korean college students took part in the study, and their writing samples, comprised of narrative and exposition compositions, were collected to analyze on the basis of fluency and syntactic complexity. A total of 95 writings were entered into the computer program L2 syntactic complexity analyzer (L2SCA), and then statistical analyses such as ANOVA and t-test were performed to investigate how the linguistic features of the participants' English writings are different depending on their writing quality and genre. The results showed that participants' writing quality had a statistically significant impact on the text length of their writings, while it did not have a statistically significant effect on 13 measures out of 14 syntactic complexity measures. However, the results of genre differences indicated that the genre of writing had a substantial impact on 15 measures including fluency and syntactic complexity in the participants' writing. Based on the results, some implications on how English writing instruction can better help Korean learners develop their English writing skills are discussed in the end.

Research on communication strategies (CSs) has been drawing much attention in the area of psycholinguistics and applied linguistics. This study examined if triggering instruction can accelerate the cognitive aspects of CSs transference from L1 to L2. In the first part of the experiment, all participants, twenty-one Japanese university students, looked at pictures and were asked to say anything that came to their mind in English. In the second part, half of them (an experimental group) were instructed to begin the task by saying likes and dislikes of the picture. The other half (a control group) did not receive such an instruction. Participants also answered a questionnaire asking about self-evaluation of the task performance in order to examine their affective and cognitive state. Their utterances were classified as either objective descriptions of what was shown in the picture or subjective expressions of what they imagined or felt. The results of the experimental group clearly demonstrated the effect of instructional intervention; subjective expression increased and objective description decreased, and also their anxiety decreased from the first part of the experiment to the second. These findings suggest that more attention should be paid to the cognitive aspects of CSs such as change of viewpoint from objective to subjective, which we may call 'self-expression switching,' and its transference from L1.

This study investigated the effects of explicit and implicit discourse marker (DM) instruction on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' speech. Two different teaching methods were used over seven weeks of online English classes at a university in Japan. Participants were split into two groups, and in the first week, a pre-test comprising two speech tasks was administered to both groups. The groups were then given explicit or implicit feedback about the usage of target DMs using video clips and emails. The results of the post-test in Week 5 revealed that, although the frequency of the marker for example was significantly higher after explicit instruction, there was no significant difference in the frequency of the other target markers in both groups. However, some students' repertoires of DMs increased after explicit feedback. In Week 7, a speaking test including tasks similar to those in the pre- and post-tests was administered as a substitute for the delayed test. Although some easily accessible markers such as and and because were used in speech, both groups' repertoire was limited. Hence, explicit instruction on DMs may have a limited effect on EFL learners' speech.

This article reports on a mixed method study that investigated the differences in Japanese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' satisfaction toward two different online teaching formats incorporated in universities during the COVID-19 situation: synchronous online courses (n = 324) and asynchronous on-demand courses (n = 323). Applying the items of the previously developed online satisfaction scale in the literature of online learning to EFL learning contexts, this study examined learner satisfaction from three main factors, engaged learning, agency, and assessment, as a quantitative inquiry. According to the Mann-Whitney U test, there were significantly higher results of engaged learning and assessment in synchronous online courses than in asynchronous ondemand courses, indicating a higher level of learner satisfaction in synchronous online courses. In addition, based on the qualitative textmining analysis of learner comments on their perceptions of the online courses they had taken, findings suggest that synchronous online courses accounted for higher percentages of positive comments compared to those in the asynchronous on-demand courses. This study shows that synchronous online teaching ensured higher satisfaction among Japanese EFL learners than asynchronous on-demand courses.