English Observation Paper

Participants

48 Japanese students of English as a foreign language (EFL) in an English-medium university in Japan were Participants. All courses are taught in English in their school, 50-60% of the instructors are foreign nationals, and 10-15% of the student population are international students. All first-year students live in a dormitory with international students. The participants were enrolled in the intensive English program in first semester. There were 16 males and 32 females within an age range of 18 to 21. Three students had the experience of living in U.S.A. for one month. Through class observations, interviews with instructors, and textbook analyses, it was proved that the participants did not receive intensive instruction on pragmatics.

Instrument

A computerized oral discourse completion test (oral DCT) was developed to examine this ability. Participants have to read situational descriptions and produced two types of speech acts: requests and opinions.

Adapting Gardner and Lambert’s (1972) motivation framework, half of the items measured the degree of integrative orientation toward learning English (i.e., learning English to develop friendship with English speakers), and the other half measured the degree of instrumental orientation (i.e., learning English for utility- based purposes). Students rated the degree to which each statement matched their reason to study English on a 7-point scale.

Lexical access test

Lexical access skill was operationalized as the ability to make speedy lexical judgments. It was assessed by a computerized word recognition test called lexical access test (LAT) on the basis of Segalowitz and Freed (2004). The LAT had 40 frequent English words (e.g., "tiger"), and participants made quick judgments on whether each word that appeared on a computer screen referred to a living or nonliving object.

Data collection