Message from the Guest Editors
Welcome to the JALT CUE SIG 25th Anniversary Conference “25 years andstill right on CUE” Special Issue. The conference held September 15-16, 2018
at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, brought together a large number of researchersand conference participants. We are pleased to present a collection of six features
articles, three practice-oriented papers, two on poster presentations and threereflections.
The first of the six featured articles starts with, Tomoko Hashimoto, whoinvestigated student attitudes on informal and formal cooperative learning
through data mining of student responses to their experiences of cooperative
learning activities. This is followed by a paper from Tomoyuki Kawashima wholooked at the effects of awareness-raising activities regarding World Englishes.
Jamie Lesley investigated decision-making tasks in high-level discussion classes,
and Sakae Onoda wrote about enhancing L2 interactional skills through pairpresentations with small-group discussions. Kristen Sullivan discussed the poststudy abroad experiences of Japanese university students. Finally, Davey Youngdescribed student perceptions of textbook topics in a discussion course.
Following this, there are three practice-oriented papers. Wendy Gough andKazumi Kato proposed a project-based learning method in a content English
course designed for students specializing in marine sciences and technologies.
Then, Caroline J. Handley described statistical methods and interpretations
using JASP, an open-source software package. Mary Hillis shared selected
poetry to increase student engagement and motivation, and presented how toincorporate poetry in courses for academic English.
In the short reports section, Aaron C. Sponseller provided an initialattempt to validate a Japanese version of the Motivation to Study Abroad scaleusing exploratory factor analysis, CFA, and Rasch analysis. Then, Christopher
Pirotto and Robert Dykes described five common mistakes early researchers are5

From the Editors

prone to making when using quantitative research methods.
Finally, in the reflection section, Simon Park discussed Pirotto and Dykes’
poster presentation on common errors in quantitative analysis, and Handley’spresentation on quantitative analysis using JASP. Derek Herbert considered
the practical advice on getting published presented by Melodie Cook. Lastly,Anthony Torbert reflected on Kay Irie and Howard Brown’s presentations
related to English-medium instruction (EMI) and discussed whether EMI ispractical for Japanese universities.

Acknowledgements

It was a great pleasure to be guest editors for this Special Issue in which we had
the opportunity to have a deeper understanding of each paper and the editorial
process specific to the OnCUE Journal. We appreciate the timely efforts madeby each author during the editing process, and congratulate them for theircontributions to the CUE SIG community. The CUE SIG have gatheredprofessionals with knowledge in a wide range of topics and we wish the CUE
SIG committee and committee members the very best to maintain their vibrantcontributions to tertiary language education, especially in Japan.

Jean-Pierre J. Richard & Suwako Uehara
Guest Editors, Special Issue OnCUE Journal

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