Recent publications
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.jp/citations?user=8Ji_z7IAAAAJ&hl=ja&authuser=1
Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nobuhiro_Kamiya2
Presentation at the first meeting of J-SLARF:
https://www.facebook.com/JSLARF/posts/729492543921639
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8R7nE87LXo
Presentation at the second meeting of J-SLARF:
This study investigated to what extent the scores of two English tests are correlated to each other, namely, the English test of the Common Test for University Admissions (Common Test, henceforth) in Japan and the TOEIC Bridge, a commercially available English test developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS) that measures four skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Moreover, this study examined to what extent the two tests’ constructs overlap from the viewpoint of L2 competence. In total, 128 university freshmen and high school seniors took the Common Test at the official venues and also the TOEIC Bridge at the researcher’s university (n = 92) or at home (n = 36) a few months later. Results indicated that the scores of the corresponding skills are moderately correlated to each other across the two tests (Reading = .548; Listening = .646; Total = .732). Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the degree of data fitting of the three models of test constructs (unitary, correlated skills, correlated tests) were statistically similar to each other. On the basis of substantive and statistical results, however, we claim that the correlated skills model should be chosen as the best fit model and consequently, that the productive skills should be measured in addition to the Common Test.
This study examined the effects of watching gestures and lip movement on second language (English) listening comprehension. The participants were 30 high and 22 low proficient learners of English. There were six listening tasks combining two variables: modality and difficulty. The modality consisted of three types of assessments: Body (the upper half of body was visible), Face (close up view), and Audio. The difficulty consisted of two levels: Easy and Hard. Learners watched Body, Face, or listened to Audio, and worked on six comprehension questions twice for each task. Moreover, the participants were asked about their modality of preference. The notable results were (1) the modality of listening had no influence on their listening performance, (2) for the high proficiency group, the score difference between the easy and the hard texts was larger at the second attempt than at the first attempt, (3) the participants generally preferred to watch the whole body, followed by watching the face, and then listening only, (4) the high proficiency group showed more variations of preference than the low proficiency group, and (5) the participants’ modality preference had no influence on their listening performance.
In this study, 118 native speakers of Japanese watched 48 separate video clips in which a teacher provided recasts on phonological or lexical errors to students in Portuguese, a language with which the participants were unfamiliar. In the video clips, six recast characteristics were manipulated: length, segmentation (segmented/whole), prosodic emphasis (stressed/non-stressed), intonation (declarative/interrogative), head movements (nodding/shaking), and gestures (beat/deictic/metaphoric). Participants judged whether or not the teacher had corrected errors and stated the reasons for their decisions. Multiple regressions extracted segmentation and gestures as being significant variables for both phonological and lexical errors. Precisely speaking, recasts were more likely to be accurately perceived as correction when they were provided in sentence-length discourse along with deictic gestures. Additionally, head-shaking and beat also contributed to improved accuracy of phonological errors. The analysis of their reasoning indicates that the participants actively compared errors with recasts when judging the presence of a recast. The overall results indicate that contrary to the common belief suggesting that shorter recasts are better than longer ones, when true beginners overhear recasts, they may find it easier to notice the corrections when they are provided in sentence-length discourse; as such recasts facilitate more accurate perceptions.
This case study examined a diary written by a Japanese senior high school student while he was studying abroad in the US for a year. His writings exhibited two types of texts throughout the year: code-mixed texts, in which a mixture of Japanese and English is used, and code-switched texts, in which only English is used, in a single sentence. The diary was examined to identify to what extent the emergence of content words under spontaneous written production (n1⁄41,716) could be predicted by their word frequency, degree of cognate similarity, and word length while comparing the two types of texts. According to the results of multiple regressions, word frequency was found to be a significant predictor for both texts, indicative of its robust effects. The effects of the degree of cognate similarity appeared only for code-mixed texts. The effects of word length were, if any, limited. Furthermore, code-mixed texts were found to yield longer words with lower word frequencies and higher degrees of cognate similarity than code-switched texts. Considering that the results here may be influenced by the duration of study abroad, this study re- confirms the significance of tracking the micro-development of vocabulary for second language learners.
This study examined how learners’ age, English proficiency, and years of learning English, affect the accuracy of the interpretation of nonverbal behaviors among English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The participants consisted of four groups of Japanese students: (a) 32 sixth graders attending public schools, (b) 18 sixth graders attending English immersion schools, (c) 30 university students with lower English proficiency, and (d) 32 university students with higher English proficiency. They watched 48 video clips taken from EFL classrooms in Japanese elementary schools without sound and judged whether the teachers had asked a question. The accuracy of their judgements was statistically analyzed and their comments were qualitatively analyzed. Multiple regression analyses pointed to students’ years of learning English as the sole predictor almost significantly affecting accurate judgements but only when teachers’ utterances were accompanied by gestures. This indicates that learners’ ability to correctly decode nonverbal behaviors developed only for teacher gesture. In addition to this qualitative aspect, a quantitative aspect was also found to be affected by the duration of study. Precisely speaking, those learners with over 6 years of learning English noticed a larger number of nonverbal behaviors, including gestures, for correct judgements, which boosted the minimum accuracy of their judgements. This implies that the effect of age and nativeness observed in past literature on the interpretation of nonverbal behaviors may have been in fact under the disguise of the amount of exposure to the target language and culture.
Second and foreign language teachers often say that they correct students’ oral errors naturally in their classes. In fact, the operationalization of incidental oral corrective feedback also states that it arises naturally in a communicative task. This notion was confirmed in a study that I conducted with four ESL teachers in the U.S, three of whom mentioned natural use of oral corrective feedback concerning their teaching practices. However, through analyzing their interviews and stimulated recall data further, it was found that their definition of the term natural was not uniform, but threefold: oral corrective feedback was natural to them because (a) it is what people do in daily conversations, (b) it is done automatically and unconsciously, and (c) it is a part of the job as a teacher. This implies that, when investigating beliefs among language teachers, scholars need to further examine how each teacher defines the word in their use of oral corrective feedback because using the umbrella term of natural may conceal the fact that the meaning of the word may differ for each teacher.
This study investigated how learners’ ages affect their interpretation of the nonverbal behaviors (NVBs) of teachers and other students in distinguishing between questions and statements in the second language (L2) classroom. After watching 48 short video clips without sound in which three L2 teachers asked a question or made a statement with or without gesture, 36 elementary school pupils and 30 university students judged whether they thought the teachers asked a question or made a statement along with their reasons. The findings show that, regardless of learners’ ages, L2 teacher’s gestures were found to help learners better identify questions. Furthermore, the six major types of NVBs used for judgments most frequently were identical across the two age groups regardless of the accuracy of their judgments. Nevertheless, incorrect judgments were made as often and sometimes even more often than correct judgments by applying the same assumptions. The effect of age was evidenced in that the university students were able to use a larger number of NVBs for correct judgments, and better distinguish questions and statements without linguistic information than the elementary school pupils. The data suggest that it is the learners’ (L2) classroom experience that seems to be playing the major role in yielding this difference. The study indicates that adult L2 learners are better able than children to incorporate and interpret NVBs of teachers as well as other students quantitatively and qualitatively.
For pedagogical reasons, the current entry defines proactive FonF as devising a task ahead of the class in which students are likely to focus on a form or forms. Reactive FonF is an attention to form that arises incidentally during the lesson. Despite their distinct natures, their primary purpose is commonly shared, which is to establish a connection between a form (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, phonology, discourse) and meaning, and possibly along with use (i.e., function) in students’ interlanguage in second and foreign language (L2) classrooms, whose primary focus is on meaning. Several categorizations exist for these types of FonF, such as preemptive versus (problem-oriented) reactive, planned versus unplanned or incidental, and teacher-initiated versus student (learner)- initiated. FonF is a common practice in most L2 classrooms and found to be beneficial for language development. Multiple pedagogical implications are proposed based on the findings from past research.
Beliefs of teachers and students are known to have a strong influence on their language teaching and learning behaviors, consciously and unconsciously, as well as positively and negatively. Their beliefs are mainly derived from their learning experience, espe- cially of language, in addition to their teaching experience in the case of teachers. Past studies indicate that neither a perfect match nor a mismatch should be expected between beliefs and behaviors. Some of the beliefs are changeable whereas others are not, but which belief would change in each teacher and student cannot be predicted. Teachers can use the Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI), a questionnaire to investi- gate beliefs regarding language teaching and learning, in order to understand their own beliefs and their students’ beliefs, and find agreement and disagreement between them. Some of the suggestions for dissolving the latter are presented with an example.
Background: The National Center Test is a test that high school graduates take in order to be matriculated into the majority of universities in Japan. Its English section (NCT), though, is scheduled to be replaced by commercially available private English tests of four skills (reading, listening, speaking, writing) due to the fact that NCT currently measures only the receptive skills of reading and listening. A concern has been raised, however, regarding the score comparability between NCT and those tests of four skills. Thus, this study was conducted in order to examine to what extent the score of NCT and TOEFL Junior Comprehensive (JC)—one of the commercially available private English tests of four skills—correlate with each other and to what extent their test constructs overlap from the viewpoint of L2 competence structure.
Methods: One hundred forty-four twelfth graders in Japan took NCT and JC. Pearson’s correlations and an exploratory factor analysis (maximum likelihood) were conducted. Moreover, confirmatory factor analyses and chi-square difference tests were performed in order to compare several models.
Results: The results show that the scores of the two tests are highly correlated with each other, indicating that JC can be a proper candidate to replace NCT. Moreover, an exploratory factor analysis revealed that all of the six scores can be subsumed under a single factor. According to the results of a series of confirmatory factor analyses and chi-square difference tests, the correlated skill model was shown to be the best fit model, but the unitary model was almost equally a good fit as well.
Conclusions: The results overall indicate that, regardless of tests and skills to measure, English proficiency as a general construct may determine the major portion of these scores. This poses the question of whether, in order to assess learners’ English proficiency, all four skills need to be measured separately.
This study focuses on four teachers teaching a speaking and listening class at an intensive English program in the US who read three academic articles on oral corrective feedback (CF). Their stated beliefs and classroom practices of CF as well as their responses to the readings were investigated through three classroom observations, two interviews, and two stimulated recalls over a semester. The results show that their classroom practices of CF remained largely intact. Although it is true that the MA TESOL student showed a gradual formation of her stated beliefs on CF after the reading, the readings seemed to have little influence on the other three full-time teachers because they had already established varying degrees of stated beliefs regarding CF. Still, the readings succeeded in raising the teachers’ consciousness of CF. All of the teachers identified with studies that reflected findings or claims that corresponded with their stated beliefs on CF prior to the readings. Finally, the participation in the study seemed to have prompted the teachers to reflect on their beliefs and classroom practices of CF. Thus, although indirectly in this case, academic articles can still have a role to play in teachers’ professional development.
This study investigated the relationship between stated beliefs of four ESL teachers about teaching and oral corrective feedback (OCF) and their actual classroom practices. The results show that their stated beliefs of teaching were found to be in accordance with their stated beliefs concerning OCF. While the most inexperienced teacher did not have any concrete ideas about OCF, the other three teachers had established varying degrees of stated beliefs. Nevertheless, they did not consider OCF as a primary tenet of their teaching; other elements were deemed as being more important. Their classroom practices were found to be largely in agreement with their stated beliefs about OCF in the sense that, following their common stated belief of teaching that creating a comfortable environment for students was crucial, they refrained from using explicit correction which could potentially humiliate learners, and instead opted for a more implicit type of OCF, recasts. Despite a general pattern of agreement between teaching statements and practice, one of the most experienced teachers demonstrated incongruent behavior between the two, indicating that teaching experience cannot be exclusively relied upon as an indicator of classroom practice.
This study was conducted to compare the effectiveness of intensive and extensive recasts on the acquisition of a planned target structure. The study consisted of a control group and two treatment groups, one of which received intensive recasts on errors only for English unreal conditionals; the other received extensive recasts on any kind of error during two-hour activity sessions. A total of 44 ESL learners participated in the experiment. Results showed that (a) the groups receiving recasts demonstrated higher accuracy on tests of both implicit and explicit knowledge when compared to the control group; (b) the intensive recast group showed a trend towards greater accuracy than the extensive recast group on the implicit knowledge tests; (c) both intensive and extensive recast groups demonstrated similar accuracy on the explicit knowledge test, and (d) the effectiveness of recasts was evident even for a structure that the learners were still unfamiliar with.
This article provides the answers to the four questions regarding English education that are commonly asked from the SLA perspective: (1) is it true that for English learning, the earlier, the better?, (2) what should learners do when they encounter some unknown words during extensive reading or listening?, (3) should English teachers use only English in the class?, and (4) how should English teachers correct students' oral errors in the classroom?
The current study investigated the relationship between one ESL teacher’s encounters with three academic articles on the topic of oral corrective feedback (CF) and the impact that they had on his stated beliefs regarding CF. The teacher had 14 years of English teaching expreince and a MA TESOL degree. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted, one before and one after reading the articles. Results suggest that the teacher’s stated beliefs about CF prior to reading influenced how he responded to the articles, in that he focused most on the findings and claims that coincided with his stated beliefs prior to reading. Namely, he agreed with statements and evidence that supported his belief in the effectiveness of CF, and he discounted negative claims about the use of CF. Reading the articles did not seem to facilitate a change in his beliefs regarding CF; nevertheless, the articles succeeded in raising his awareness of CF and caused him to reflect on a classroom practice that he had not considered for some time. The present study proposes the possibility of using academic articles for professional development even for experienced teachers.
This article proposes six pedagogical implications for learning English derived from theories of applied linguistics: (1) how can learners better remember vocabulary?, (2) is it true that vocabulary can best be remembered through writing a lot?, (3) is there any other way to remember vocabulary than rote memorization?, (4) should learners stop studying while doing something else?, (5) how can learners increase their test scores?, and (6) how can learners better cope with listening tasks?
The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between proactive and reactive Focus on Form (FonF) and gestures. Two English classes in a public high school in Japan taught by a native speaker of English were observed and videotaped for 96 min and analyzed. Overall, 64 proactive FonF and 43 reactive FonF were provided. Among them, 36% of the proactive FonF and 14% of the reactive FonF were accompanied by gestures. The target feature of proactive FonF was exclusively lexicon whereas those for reactive FonF varied. For reactive FonF, gestures were used the most for grammatical errors and the least for pronunciation errors. In addition, explicit correction was the most likely to be provided with gestures whereas elicitation was the least. Overall, deictic was the most common gesture for both proactive and reactive FonF. Furthermore, it was found that a deictic gesture was often essential in the sense that it was used to supplement the meaning of the demonstrative pronoun, this, in proactive FonF. In contrast, when reactive FonF or proactive FonF without the demonstrative pronoun was provided, gestures tended not to carry any crucial meaning related to FonF by which they were accompanied, rendering the gestures subsidiary.
Kamiya, N. (2012). How does the number of incidental recasts affect their effectiveness on addressees and auditors? HELES Journal, 11, 17-31.
Incidental recasts are a type of corrective feedback referring to recasts provided in response to errors that occur incidentally (e.g., Loewen, 2005). There are two variables that affect incidental recasts that have largely been ignored in previous studies: a) the number of recasts provided, and b) whether the learner is an addressee or an auditor of the recast. For the first variable, it is natural to assume that the greater the number of recasts provided for a target feature, the more effective the feedback. As for the second variable, we would anticipate that recasts are more effective for the addressee than for an auditor. The present study was conducted to examine these hypotheses. Twenty-six ESL learners participated in a treatment – immediate posttest – delayed posttest design of study.
Four grammatical features were chosen as target structures among all of the recasts provided during the implementation of a series of text-manipulation tasks that lasted two hours. These features were selected as target structures based on the total number of recasts provided on them. Two of the structures (major target structures) received a total of 39 recasts combined, whereas the other two (minor target structures) combined, received 11 recasts.
The results show that the effectiveness of incidental recasts for minor target structures was negligible regardless of whether the students were addressees or auditors. In contrast, the incidental recasts for major target structures were effective only for the addressees, but not for the auditors. This effectiveness, however, disappeared at the delayed posttest. This study suggests the necessity to take into account the number of recasts provided as well as to analyze data according to addresses and auditors when investigating the effectiveness of incidental recasts.
Kamiya, N. (2011). Exploring tests for L2 implicit and explicit knowledge: In the case of English unreal conditional. HELES Journal, 10, 37-54.
Whether or not explicit knowledge can be converted into implicit knowledge has been a controversial topic in the field of second language (L2) acquisition. The non-interface position denies such a possibility whereas the strong and weak interface positions support the opposite. In order to settle this debate, tests to measure L2 implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge separately are indispensable. Nevertheless, the majority of previous studies utilized only tests in which explicit knowledge is favorable. Responding to this drawback, recently, some researchers started to use tests for implicit knowledge; however, the validity of these measurements is usually ignored. To address this gap, Ellis and his colleagues used factor analyses to validate several measurements that they used in order to measure implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge of L2 learners separately. The present study investigated the four tests used in Ellis (2005, 2009b): elicited oral imitation test, timed grammaticality judgment test, untimed grammaticality judgment test, and metalinguistic knowledge test, using Pearson’s correlation coefficient and a principal component factor analysis. The target structure was English unreal conditional. Overall, 72 ESL learners participated. The results showed that the present study failed to replicate Ellis’ results; the factor analysis in the current study differentiated three factors according to test types, but not knowledge types. The main reason this study failed to replicate Ellis’ results was that the participants did not possess enough implicit or explicit knowledge of the target structure to allow for a difference to be found between the two types of knowledge. Furthermore, the grammatical items and the ungrammatical items in the untimed grammaticality judgment test functioned similarly. The correlation coefficient between the score of the metalinguistic knowledge test and that of the untimed grammaticality judgment test was the highest over all, but it did not reach the level of significance.
Kamiya, N. (2009). 中学校の定期試験における英語の得点に見られる男女差 (Gender difference in the scores of English term tests in junior high school). HELES Journal, 8, 83-102.
The present study was conducted in order to examine whether there is a gender difference in the scores of English term tests in junior high schools in Japan. The scores were compared in light of total scores as well as the three components for English assessment in junior high schools in Japan: production skills (writing), reception skills (listening and reading), and knowledge and understanding concerning English (mainly grammar, vocabulary, and idioms). The data were collected over a period of nine years. In addition, the scores of speaking tests were compared over a period of two years. It was also examined how these differences changed as students became older.
There were many cases where gender differences did not exist in the scores; however, in most cases when there was a significant difference, girls showed their preponderance in ability over boys. No components of term tests consistently favored boys nor girls except that girls regularly had higher scores than boys in knowledge and understanding concerning English although this occurred only when girls performed better than boys in the same grade. There were some cases wherein gender differences existed in speaking tests; however, which gender tends to have better scores is still inconclusive.
In order to inspect whether girls generally tend to have better scores than boys in term tests of other subjects as well, the scores of the term tests of five subjects (Native Language, Social Studies, Math, Science, and English) in junior high school in Japan over a period of two years were compared to examine whether there was a gender difference. The results showed that although girls performed significantly better than boys in English and Native Language in most cases, gender differences were not usually shown in the scores of other subjects.2
Thus, it was concluded that although gender differences do not exist in most cases, when there is a difference, girls tend to perform better than boys only in subjects related to languages.
