ISSN 2188-8612

ISSN 2188-8612

JACET International Convention
Selected Papers
Volume 1

JACET CONVENTION 2013
The 52nd International Convention
Theme: Collaboration and Relativization in English Language Education

August 30 - September 1, 2013
Kyoto University

JACET International Convention Selected Papers, Volume 1
Published by The Japan Association of College English Teachers (JACET)JACET Selected Papers Committee
Senior Director-in-Charge
YAMAUCHI, Hisako (University of Nagasaki)

Director-in-Charge
NOGUCHI, Judy Tsutae (Mukogawa Women’s University)

Editorial Board
Chair
Vice-Chair

TAJINO, Akira (Kyoto University)
TAKAHASHI, Sachi (Kyoto University)

HIGUCHI, Akihiko (Kagoshima University)

NAITO, Hisashi (Hokkai-Gakuen University)

KANAMARU, Toshiyuki (Kyoto University)

TOMITA, Kaoru (Yamagata University)

KANAZAWA, Yoko (Hoshi University)

TSUDA, Sanae (Professor Emeritus, Tokaigakuen University)

KOYAMA, Toshiko (Osaka Ohtani University)

YOKOYAMA, Yoshiki (Hokkaido University of Education)

MATSUOKA, Hironobu (Yasuda Women’s University)

Advisory Board
BASSNETT, Susan (The University of Warwick)

HYLAND, Ken (The University of Hong Kong)

HIRVELA, Alan (The Ohio State University)

IIYOSHI, Toru (Kyoto University)

JACET Prize & Academic Publication Selection Committee
Director-in-Charge
TERAUCHI, Hajime (Takachiho University)

Head

OZEKI, Naoko (Meiji University)

Vice-Head

KOJIMA, Hideo (Hirosaki University)

Reviewers
ANTHONY, Laurence (Waseda University)

OHMORI, Yujitsu (Aichi Prefectural University)

HASEGAWA, Mizuho (Toyo Gakuen University)

ONO, Naomi (Seikei University)

HINO, Nobuyuki (Osaka University)

SAKAI, Hideki (Shinshu University)

HIROMORI, Tomohito (Meiji University)

SHIZUKA, Tetsuhito (Daito Bunka University)

ISHIDA, Masachika (Seisen University)

SUZUKI, Chizuko (Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University)

ISHIKAWA, Shin’ichiro (Kobe University)

SUZUKI, Wataru (Miyagi University of Education)

KADOTA, Shuhei (Kwansei Gakuin University)

TAJIKA, Hiroko (Tsuda College)

KAMIMURA, Taeko (Senshu University)

TERAUCHI, Masanori (Hosei University)

KANZAKI, Takaaki (Kwansei Gakuin University)

TOMITA, Kaoru (Yamagata University)

KATAGIRI, Kazuhiko (Senshu University)

TONO, Yukio (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)

KAWANARI, Mika (Meikai University)

TSUZUKI, Masako (Chukyo University)

KIMURA, Matsuo (Aoyama Gakuin University)

YAMAZAKI K., Atsuko (Shibaura Institute of Technology)

MATSUZAWA, Shinji (Niigata University)

YOSHIDA, Kensaku (Sophia University)

MIYAHARA, Masuko (International Christian University)

YOSHIKAWA, Hiroshi (Chukyo University)

OGURI, Yuko (University of Shiga Prefecture)Cover Design
KASUNO, Shin-ichi
Editorial Office
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Address: 55 Yokotera-machi, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-0831 JAPAN
Phone: +81-3-3268-9686/

Fax: +81-3-3268-9695

E-mail: jacet@zb3.so-net.ne.jp

First published in December, 2014
ISSN 2188-8612
Copyright © 2014 by JACET
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or republished in any form without
permission in writing from JACET.
The articles published herein do not reflect the opinions of JACET.

Contents
Message from the Editorial Board Chair ······················································· V

Invited Papers

Translation as a Shaping Force in English ································ Susan Bassnett ···· 2

Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers ···· Ken Hyland ········ 19

Current Perspectives on Publishing in International Journals ·········· Alan Hirvela ······· 36

Selected Papers

Questionnaire Survey on Business Meetings: English Proficiency and Difficulty······················· Tamao Araki, Masako Terui, Reiko Fujita,
Masuyo Ando, Kosuke Miki, & Hisashi Naito ········ 56

Listening Comprehension Problems Among Two Different Groups and the Degree of
Effectiveness to Which a Listening Skill is Applicable to Their Problems······················· Yumiko Gunshima ········································· 78

Verification of the Effects of Remedial Education Aimed at Improving Students’ Basic
English Ability ·············· Shuji Hasegawa & Taichi Ochiai ······················ 105

Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions in Science and Engineering ResearchPresentations ················ Kazuko Tojo, Hiroko Hayashi, & Judy Noguchi ······ 131

Submission Guidelines ··········································································· 165

Message from the Editorial Board Chair

It is with great pleasure that we present this inaugural collection of selected papers fromthe Japan Association of College English Teachers [JACET] 52nd International Convention,
which was held at Kyoto University, Japan, from August 30 to September 1, 2013. For the
JACET organization, this was a very notable and successful convention not only because it
was the first to be hosted by Kyoto University, but also because it attracted a record numberof attendees and presenters from Japan and from other nations.
We begin this international collection of the selected papers from the convention by
featuring the invited papers written by plenary speakers and the Kansai Chapter’s Symposium
panelists. Professor Susan Bassnett provides us with invaluable insight into translation as animportant and shaping force in English. Professor Ken Hyland highlights the opportunities
and options available for college English teachers of writing. Professor Alan Hirvela writes onacademic publishing with especially helpful advice for those aspiring to get published in toptier international academic journals.
In addition to these invited papers, we received a great response in our call for papers
from convention presenters who submitted papers for this collective work on a wide-ranging
span of topics related to English language research and pedagogy. With utmost concern for
quality in selection, we have maintained a very stringent acceptance rate with the hope that
this volume of selected papers could capture the most interesting and inspiring work of theconvention for all to access online. This process resulted in the publication of four papers.
As the Chair of the Editorial Board, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to eachof the reviewers, the Editorial Board members, and all of those who helped to publish thisinaugural volume of the JACET International Convention Selected Papers.

Akira Tajino, Ph.D.
Chair, The Editorial Board of the JACET International Convention Selected Papers, Volume 1v

Invited Papers

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 2–18

Translation as a Shaping Force in English

Susan Bassnett
The University of Warwick

Anyone travelling round Britain cannot but be struck by the great variety of place
names. Some names recur frequently; for example, we find Stratfords all over England, notonly in Warwickshire where Stratford-on-Avon is the famous birthplace of William
Shakespeare, but in the north and in the south of England too, while there are dozens ofnames ending in ‘ton’ or ‘ham’ or ‘burgh’. The explanation for such recurrences is, of course,that the place names embody topographical elements—‘ham’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon
word for ‘homestead’, ‘tun’ signified an enclosure in a forest, ‘burg’ refers to a hill, while
Stratford is simply ‘the place where a Roman road (straet, or street) crossed a river’. Rivercrossings were obviously vital: Oxford referred to the place where oxen could cross, while
Cambridge was simply ‘bridge over the river Cam’. ‘Cam’ it should be noted, is an ancient
British (that is, Celtic) river name, as is Avon, and interestingly a substantial number of rivernames and names of hills and forests are British, hence close to contemporary Welsh. What
we see in the Domesday Book of 1086, the first attempt to list inhabited sites in England is apalimpsest of placenames incorporating a variety of linguistic and cultural elements: British,
Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian. The great Swedish professor Eilert Ekwall, whosemonumental book The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names was first publishedin 1936, notes the variety of Scandinavian place names, from the Old Norse elements in large
parts of the North of England, such as the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales, to theDanish elements most notable in the eastern part of the country and the Midlands.
On car journeys with my family, I taught my children basic place name spotting skills:
towns with ‘by’ such as Grimsby, Formby, Easby etc all reveal their Danish heritage, towns

2Bassnett, S.
Translation as a Shaping Force in English

with ‘cester’ or ‘chester’ (Leicester, Worcester, Manchester) all began as Roman camps, andthe difference between those towns and the ones that have the suffix ‘caster’ (Lancaster,
Doncaster) is explained by the influence of Scandinavian that turns the soft sound ch into thehard c. I tend to travel with a copy of Ekwall, because so many of the place names are so
extraordinary that expert help is needed, particularly in the north of England where thesettlement patterns were so diverse. Just down the road from me is Thwaite, deriving from an
old Norse word for ‘sloping meadow’, and Muker, which incorporates 2 Old Norse elements,‘mior’ meaning ‘narrow’ and ‘akr’ meaning field. Yet if you travel down the valley, along theriver, through the string of villages with names deriving from Viking settlers a thousand years
ago, you come to Richmond, a name deriving from French, for the great castle was built by
one of the powerful Norman barons serving William the Conqueror who became king ofEngland in 1066.
In his introduction, Ekwall argues for the value of place name study for cultural
historians and for linguists. The various elements in English place names ‘testify to changes
in the population of the British Isles, and place names often supplement the meagre data ofrecorded history’ (Ekwall, 1980: xix). In this, he is absolutely right: the Domesday book is avaluable source of information, showing changes in settlement patterns, as indicated in place
names, over hundreds of years. Recognising the great linguistic diversity in place names
shows how the population changed: a network of Roman roads and cities was superimposedon the Celtic world, then the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons changed the map again, to which
was added the spread of Christianity which also had a major impact on place names, thencame the Scandinavians, firstly the Danes whose territories encompassed large tracts ofEastern and Northern England, then, from the Viking kingdom of Dublin, came other
Scandinavians who left their mark on the North (to this day, in the north a stream is a ‘beck’,a hillside is a ‘fell’, a street is a ‘gate’) and then the Normans brought their variant of Old
French and built the string of fortresses whose ruins we so willingly visit today.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 2–18

Why should we concern ourselves today with place-names and their origins? The point
I am seeking to make from the outset is that place-names are a fine example of thesignificance of hybridity in English language, literature and cultural history. Even a cursory
glance at place names reveals layers of interconnectedness between very diverse peoples,
often hostile to one another, but whose traces are preserved through language and through thenaming of the sites they inhabited. As English has developed as a language, we can see that
tendency continuing: English is a highly flexible language, a language that absorbs elementsfrom all kinds of sources, a language in a continual process of change. Dr Johnson, creator of
the first English dictionary (more than 42,000 items) published in 1755 was all too aware of
the volatility of English and of the inadequacy of any single dictionary to capture that endless
linguistic movement. In his preface, he wrote:

It must be remembered, that while our language is yet living, and variable by the capriceof everyone that speaks it … words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more
be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately
delineated from its picture in the water. (Johnson in Hitchings, 2005: 190)

Let us take just one simple example: the phrase ‘silver surfers’ has been recently coined
to refer to older people, the silvery-haired, who use the internet. This is a metaphorical use of
the term ‘surfer’, one who rides a surfboard. However, the idea of surfing as a sport is also
very recent, first coined in the early twentieth century, and the origins of the word ‘surf’,
which refers to waves breaking on the shore is unknown. The word is first recorded in theseventeenth century, to refer to the breaking of waves in the Indian Ocean, and one theory isthat ‘surf’ is related to ‘sough’, that is, the rushing sound of leaves rustling in the wind, aword of Anglo-Saxon origin. The ship’s captain who first wrote the word ‘surf’ in his log
could therefore have been referring to the sound of the sea, not to the waves themselves,

4Bassnett, S.
Translation as a Shaping Force in English

though by the early nineteenth century the term ‘surf’ had acquired its modern meaninginstead. So we have moved from sound to physical description, then to sport finally tometaphor thereby confirming Dr Johnson’s statement about the impossibility of fixing theeternally changeable nature of language in any dictionary.
I began my academic career as a philologist and historian of literature. Today, I define
myself as a scholar of comparative and world literature, with a series of publications also inTranslation Studies. What this means is that my academic interest is in tracing patterns, thedictum of Matthew Arnold who, in his Oxford Inaugural Lecture of 1857 declared that:

Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, nosingle literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to otherliteratures.

What this paper is seeking to demonstrate is the undesirability of trying to isolate thestudy of one literature from another, and also to show the fundamental importance oftranslation in English literary history. Today, in the twenty first century we are finally startingto acknowledge the significance of translation as a major shaping force in literary history, as
we move on from the fashion for conceptualising literatures in nationalistic terms that is thelegacy of European Romanticism. Andre Lefevere argues, in his seminal book, Translation,
Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame that alongside this emphasis on the idea ofa ‘national’ literature, uncontaminated by outside influences which became so predominant in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there has also been a desire to assert the preeminence of the national language. Lefevere sees this as part of what he calls the‘monolingualization’ of literary history by Romantic historiographers, and he also suggeststhat the refusal to consider the importance of translation was also due to the association oftranslation with ‘language’ rather than with ‘literature’ (Lefevere, 1992: 39). In the case of5

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 2–18

English, we have to acknowledge that until after the First World War, the study of both
English literature and English language in English universities was considered on a much
lower level than the study of classical languages and literatures, and the study of English
could only be justified intellectually by claiming a direct line back to the ancients, read, ofcourse, in the original languages. The first professor of English at Cambridge, Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch, known as Q, wrote in 1918 that English literature had always obeyed‘however unconsciously, the precept Antiquam exquisite matrem’, seek back to the ancientmother; always it has recreated itself, kept itself pure and strong, by harking back to bathe inthose native—yes, native—Mediterranean springs (Quiller-Couch in Crowley, 1989: 40). It isinteresting to note that since Q was making this point in the year when the devastating FirstWorld War came to an end, with the loss of millions of lives he was at pains to try andobliterate any hint of English intellectual connection to German culture, which explains thestrong antipathy he held for Anglo-Saxon philology. Heaven forbid that linguists or literaryscholars could demonstrate a shared cultural heritage with the enemy! English literature wasto be seen as the descendant of the greatest classical works from the ancient world, with
Greece and Rome held up as ideal models, and the study of ancient languages consideredessential to proper intellectual development.
Ironically, though, the first ever established Chair of English was not in an English, but
in a German university. In 1762, just 7 years after the publication of Dr Johnson’smonumental dictionary, a certain John Thompson was appointed to the Chair of English at the
University of Gottingen. That university had been founded by King George I of England, theElector of Hannover who had been obliged to accept the English throne on account of being
the descendant of one of the daughters of King James I. George never learned English, andspent as much time as he could in Hannover, but the university he founded established astrong Faculty of Humanities and foreign languages and literatures were taught. Prof.
Thompson, about whom we know sadly little, edited an anthology of contemporary English

6Bassnett, S.
Translation as a Shaping Force in English

literature for teaching purposes, which went through several editions and was in use for
decades.
In 1941 George Sampson brought out the Concise Cambridge History of English
Literature, based on the 14 volumes of the earlier, extended Cambridge history, the final
volume of which appeared in 1916. Once again, it is important to consider the context and thedate of publication: in 1941 Britain was once again at war with Germany and the war was byno means going well. Sampson’s history is a patriotic cri de coeur, and at every stage hestresses the native aspects of English writings. The book opens with this statement:

The history of a national literature is part of the whole national story; but it is aseparable part, for man is older than his songs, and passed through many stages ofdevelopment before he found his way into the kind of self-expression we call literature.
(Sampson, 1941: 1)

Throughout the book, Sampson stresses the ‘Englishness’ of English literature: in his
chapter on ‘The Beginnings of English Prose’ he writes about ‘the triumph of English overFrench’ (Sampson, 1941: 68), Chaucer is ‘one of the greatest English poets of all times’(Sampson, 1941: 77), Sidney and Spenser, rather than Wyatt and Surrey are the fathers of the
English sonnet. Faced with the problem of the huge impact of German Romantic thought on
Carlyle, Sampson says that the influence of German literature and especially Goethe has been
exaggerated. Carlyle, he says was a man with a highly original mind.
He called Goethe his master; but actually there were very few points of contact. Carlyle
believed that Goethe had found serenity by solving for himself the eternal riddle of therelations between man and the universe. Really Goethe had solved nothing. He attained his
serenity by cutting out of his life anything likely to disturb him (Sampson, 1941: 96).

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 2–18

As for Wordsworth, Sampson urges his readers to ‘dismiss from their minds’ any ideasof Wordsworth as the liberal leader of a Romantic revolt and to think of him instead as ‘agreat English poet, tenacious, indomitable and unsubmissive, carving his own way slowly tounderstanding of himself, and winning, in the end, the love and admiration of the best readers,
not by any moral message or theory of art, but solely by the penetrating beauty of his poems’(Sampson, 1941: 572).
With this emphasis on the Englishness of English literature, there could be no room forforeign intervention. This model was still firmly in place until the 1970s, and it has only
recently started to change, challenged from many different sources, including feminist
questioning of what was essentially a male canon, the rise of postcolonial writing in variantsof English, which has led to the important shift in most universities from ‘English literature’
to ‘Literatures in English’, the development of cultural studies methodologies, the widespreadenthusiasm for literary and cultural theorists writing in other languages, principally French
and German, and the questions to the idea of a nationally hermetically closed literature posedby translation studies.
In his essay on Chaucer in the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. I
to 1550, Barry Windeatt refers to the earliest surviving response to Chaucer’s work, in aballad dated roughly 1385, by his contemporary, Eustache Deschamps, who refers to ‘Grant
translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucer’ (The great translator, Geoffrey Chaucer). This issignificant, because it shows the prestige Chaucer enjoyed as a translator in his own time. A
great deal has been written about Chaucer’s translations, which can be summarised asfollows: Chaucer moved easily between English, French and the Anglo-French that was partof courtly English life, he was sent on diplomatic missions to Italy and acquired good Italian,as an educated man he of course had Latin, and he translated from all these languages.
However, what we find with Chaucer is a wide variety of translation practice: he used both
French and Latin sources for his version of Boethius, for example, and alongside those8Bassnett, S.
Translation as a Shaping Force in English

translations where there is an identifiable source, he also used translation as a device,claiming sometimes to be translating (as he does in his Troilus and Criseyde) from an
authoritative source, when what he is doing is freely inventing and merely playing with theidea of authority conveyed by the suggestion that there is an ‘original’ somewhere else. As
Windeatt summarises:

Any characterisation of Chaucer as a translator must account for just how far many of
his works which are not translations of a single original may nevertheless includesections of relatively close verbal translation from particular sources, whether or not
acknowledged. These translated sections may function alongside passages that
represent translation more distantly. (Ellis, 2008: 145)

In other words, Chaucer sometimes translated closely, sometimes claimed to betranslating when he was freely inventing, sometimes translated without acknowledging that
this is what he was doing. Far from being a totally ‘English’ writer, Chaucer was able to makefull use of the multilingual environment in which he lived, shifting between what we now
refer to as Middle English, Anglo-French, French and Latin, with Italian as well. The picture
becomes ever more complex when we look at his themes and plot lines, where it can beclearly seen that he drew upon a wide range of sources for his writings.
Traditional histories of English literature follow Sampson in seeing Chaucer as the‘father’ of English poetry, followed by a fallow period when little of any significance wasproduced until the advent of Shakespeare. This is not only false, but also fallacious: just as
Chaucer was recognised as a pre-eminent translator by his contemporaries, so he was also
living in an age when translation was all around him. The Renaissance was a great age oftranslations; in Northern Europe religious debates hinged upon translation. The Frenchscholar Edmond Cary points out that:

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 2–18

The Reformation after all, was primarily a dispute between translators. Translation
became an affair of State and a matter of Religion. The Sorbonne and the King wereequally concerned with it. (Cary in Bassnett, 2014: 65)

Wherever we look in the history of English literature we find translations: let us take as
an example the sonnet, which comes into English via translations, with Sir Thomas Wyatt andthe Earl of Surrey as the two earliest well-known exponents of the form. But here we see anaspect of translation that is often not recognised: when any text crosses a linguistic andcultural boundary and is recreated in another context, it is inevitably changed. Languages aredifferent, so also are literary systems, and during the translation process changes may berelatively minor or they may be enormous. In the case of the sonnet, what happened is thatwhile the dominant form of 14 lines was retained, the organisation of those 14 lines in English
was very different from that of the original Italian. In Italian, the structure of the sonnet
followed the Petrarchan principle of a rhyme scheme that divided the first 8 lines from thefinal 6 lines. This could be used to great effect, with subtle shifts of direction, extended
metaphors, sophisticated patterns of rhyme. The first translations of sonnets in English follow
this pattern, but it quickly became clear that the 14 lines could be structured differently; mostnotably there could be 3 sets of 4 lines and final couplet. So if we look at the first sonnet of
Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, we can see just how the English sonnet created all
kinds of possibilities for irony and for humour that were not there in the Italian. Shakespeare,of course, developed the sonnet in particularly striking ways.
Sidney’s sonnet is about a lover seeking the approval of his lady, but it is also a poem
about writing. The lover hopes that he might win his lady if she enjoys what he has written,
but as he struggles to find the right words he encounters what today we would call a writer’s
block. He tries to find ‘fit words’, he reads what others have written ‘Oft turning other’s
leaves’ to see if anything will refresh his ‘sunburn’d brain’. The first 8 lines describe this10Bassnett, S.
Translation as a Shaping Force in English

condition, then lines 9–12 build to a climax, as the poet realises that all his effort is getting in
the way of genuine feeling:

But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows;And other’s feet still seemed but strangers in my way.

Sidney uses the image of pregnancy—‘great with child to speak and helpless in mythroes’. Then in the final couplet he turns on himself, rejects the failed solutions he has triedand urges himself to draw upon his own reserves of creative energy:

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite;‘Fool’, said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write’.

The final couplet is the English twist on the Petrarch sonnet form, and it can be argued
that the final ironic reversal is a very English stylistic trait more generally. The Metaphysicalpoets such as John Donne, employed the idea of circularity to great effect: the opening lines
of a poem may appear to lead the reader clearly along a particular path, but as the poem
develops, so we find ourselves being led to an opposing position. The best-known example ofthis is probably Donne’s poem ‘To the Sun Rising’, which opens with a reproof to the sun for
wakening the poet and his lover, but concludes through cleverly crafted argument withwelcoming the sun into the room. Today, we find this device also used frequently injournalism, which can present problems to readers not used to that convention. Basil Hatim
and Ian Mason, in their book The Translator as Communicator talk about what they call‘through-argumentation’ (stating something and then substantiating it) as opposed to ‘counterargumentation’ which they define as ‘citing an opponent’s thesis, rebutting this and

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 2–18

substantiating the point of the rebuttal’ (Hatim and Mason, 1997: 127). Both have worked
with translators in the Arab world, and point out that while counter-argumentation is strong in
English, through-argumentation is the dominant mode in Arabic. This presents problems
when for example, an English text starts out with a statement that appears to be a valid
assertion, but which, as we read on, turns out to be statement made deliberately in order for
the writer to argue against it and refute it by the end of the piece.
What they also point out is that although we appear to be talking here about stylistic
conventions, there is a strong ideological element present as well. The norms that dominate ina particular culture will determine how a story is presented. The meaning of a text does not
only concern its content, but also its construction, that is, the discourse that comprises that
text. In his book of short essays reflecting on the problems of translation, Is That a Fish inYour Ear? (subtitled: Translation and the Meaning of Everything) David Bellos, translator
and comparative literature scholar, points out that written and spoken expressions in any
language do not have a meaning on their own, but acquire a meaning in context. He also adds
that:

Translation represents the meaning that an utterance has, and in that sense translation isa pretty good way of finding out what the expression used in it may mean. (Bellos,
2012: 80)

The title of Bellos’ book provides a good example of the problem of linguistic andcontextual meaning, for it is a reference to the Babel fish, the invention of the writer Douglas
Adams in his award-winning book, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whereby
travellers in the future would be able to understand any language in the universe through thedevice of placing a creature called a Babel fish in one ear.

12Bassnett, S.
Translation as a Shaping Force in English

Bellos plays with this absurd idea, and his book is a witty, but at the same time very
serious investigation of some of the issues that surround translation. In one of his chapters, hetells us that when he ran a web search in 2010 for quotations of the old adage that poetry iswhat gets lost in translation, he came across 15,100 pages. Yet he also points out that thehistory of Western poetry is the history of poetry in translation. Literatures exchange forms,
ideas, genres, themes, and once we acknowledge that literatures interact with one another, it
becomes possible to see all kinds of patterns emerging that are not visible if we seek to follow
a narrowly defined nationalistic path. For just as English as a language has been very
receptive to other languages, incorporating new words, borrowing, coining neologisms all thetime, so the literatures written in English also absorb from other literatures. Salman Rushdie
may be considered as an exponent of magical realist writing, but magical realism wasdeveloped in the Spanish speaking countries of Latin America and found its way into English
in the 1970s and 80s, during what has been described as a boom of Latin American literarytranslation. The detective story is another example of a genre that has moved across frontiers
and undergone all kinds of transformation en route. Edgar Allen Poe’s Auguste Dupin is often
regarded as the first example of the detective hero, but Poe most likely had read Voltaire’s
Zadig, and then, of course, Poe’s works became hugely influential in the late nineteenth
entury in France. Writers criss-cross the globe, changing as they move, and out of thatinteraction come new ideas, new forms, new lines of development.
Sometimes, though, it can take a long time for writers who are canonical in their own
culture to enter into another literature. A good example of this is the great Italian medieval
poet, Dante Alighieri. Dante’s Divine Comedy was one of the most powerful works of theEuropean Middle Ages, a huge poem in 3 parts recounting the journey of the living poet,
Dante himself, into the lands of the dead, travelling with his guide, the shade of the Latin
poet, Virgil, through Hell, where all the souls are damned, then climbing up Mount Purgatory
where the souls of the saved purge themselves of sinfulness, then ever upwards into the13

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 2–18

perfection that is Heaven. In this great allegorical, encyclopaedic work, Dante sets out a mapof medieval cosmography, attacks contemporary politicians and religious leaders, and creates
an alternative universe, in the course of which he engages with philosophical, historical andtheological debates. In short, it is a work that has earned its place as one of the most important
European texts ever produced.
But while other medieval Italian writers, such as Petrarch and Boccaccio found an
enthusiastic response very early in English (Boccaccio being one of the authors whose
influence is felt in Shakespeare, for example) the combination of theology and politics in
Dante did not attract English translators, and it was not until the early nineteenth century thatthe first complete translation of the Divine Comedy appeared, after which Dante began to beappreciated in English. Throughout the nineteenth century, when enthusiasm for an idealised
Middle Ages led to the writing and art of the Pre Raphaelites, and to the widespread
popularity of poetry and prose based on the Arthurian cycle, there were dozens of translationsof Dante by English and American writers. There is even a plaque in Florence, in the Piazza
Santa Maria Novella dedicated to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) who alsotranslated Dante which reads:

Poeta americano nelle lingue neolatine maestro/ traduttore della Divina Commedia/ trale forestiere dimore ebbe questa/ nella Piazza che fu detta ‘la mecca degli stranieri’.
(American poet, master of the neo-Latin languages, translator of the Divine Comedy,
whose homes abroad included this house in this piazza, which was known as ‘theMecca of foreigners’.)

The impact of Dante on English literature, however, came later, and Dante can be said
to have entered into English through the work of two of the greatest English languages poetsof the twentieth century (one American, one Irish), both of whom incorporate Dante into their

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Bassnett, S.
Translation as a Shaping Force in English

own poetry. T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is full of echoes of Dante’s Hell, and in his essayon Dante in The Sacred Wood Eliot declares that:

Dante is the most comprehensive and the most ordered presentation of emotions thathas ever been made. (Eliot, 1964: 168)

After Eliot, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney drew upon Dante’s Purgatory, first in his
poem ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ and then, most significantly, in his ‘Station Island’, theimportant poem in which Heaney struggles to articulate his own position regarding theNorthern Ireland Troubles and to deal with the criticism he had received for being seen as‘apolitical’ in the 1970s. Heaney uses Dante’s encounter with souls in the other world as aframework for his own encounter with the dead, in particular in ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’for his cousin, murdered by Protestant paramilitaries. This poem is prefaced with 3 lines from
Dante’s Purgatorio, so that the Italian medieval poet and the contemporary Irish poet are
fused together in language. The world of thirteenth-century Italian politics may seem to be a
far cry from the world of twentieth-century Irish politics, but Heaney shows how the twoworlds actually coincide, through the personal grief of those damaged by the pointlessness offactional conflict.
In his important essay, ‘Englands of the Mind’, a reflective piece on the work of threegreat English poets, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, Heaney examines them interms of different lines of linguistic and poetic development, using a geological metaphor as
illustration. In his view, Hughes ‘relies on the northern deposits, the pagan Anglo-Saxon and
Norse elements’, while Hill’s language is ‘modified and amplified by the vocabularies andvalues of the Mediterranean’, and Larkin’s is ‘the English language Frenchified and turned
Humanist by the Norman conquest’. Here Heaney conceives of English poetry, like theEnglish language, built up of layers of linguistic and cultural sedimentation.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 2–18

This paper has sought to demonstrate that literatures are porous, that writers draw theirinspiration from many sources, and that in the case of English, the tendency is to absorb
elements from other literatures, originally written in other languages, just as the English
language itself tends to absorb elements from other linguistic systems. This has resulted in
English having a vast vocabulary, while as a literature we can see traces of other literatures
everywhere, once we start to look for them and move away from the old idea of ‘native’
tradition.
I shall end with a fascinating example of new writerly interaction, this time on theInternet. This work, entitled theroadnorth.com is described as a ‘blog’, but is actually a kindof travel journal of a journey around Scotland. In 2010, two Scottish poets, Alec Finlay and
Ken Cockburn set off from Edinburgh and travelled around their native Scotland, taking
photographs of people and places, writing short prose accounts of where they went andwriting a string of little poems. When you log on, you find a map of Scotland on the home
page, with 54 dots: you click on each in turn and can follow their journey, through images,
sounds and words. Next to the map is a brief explanation:

The Road North is a word-map of Scotland, composed by Alex Finlay and Ken
Cockburn as they travel through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho,
whose Oku-no-Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) is one of the masterpiecesof travel literature.

Ken and Alec left Edo (Edinburgh) on May 16, 2010,—the very same date that Bashoand his companion Sora departed in 1689.

The blog then invites readers to follow the poets’ progress week by week, and to ‘read
about some of the places Basho leads them to’.

16Bassnett, S.
Translation as a Shaping Force in English

It is tempting to make a connection between Basho, the poet whose guiding spirit leadson the two modern travellers and Virgil, who led Dante through the afterworld, and the ideaof a living being led on a journey by a spirit is a powerful recurring theme in many literatures.
What is significant here is that throughout the journey there are references to Basho’s work, adeliberate linking of the two distinct worlds through the poetic imagination. In their Epilogue,
Alec Finlay notes that he had written to another Scottish poet, Kathleen Jamie, whose also
writes about travel, and quotes her reply in which she says that she took a copy of Basho’s
poetry with her on a recent visit to St Kilda, the furthest island to the West of Scotland, theremotest place in the British Isles.
The Japanese master, Basho, read in translation, is the inspiration for a new work, in a
new form, half way across the world in Scotland in the twenty-first century. In the preface tothe Penguin translation of Basho’s writings by Nobuyuki Yuasa, the translator declares that
this version is primarily for lovers of poetry, not for scholars, adding that ‘the present
translation is not for purists’. One can only be thankful that contemporary poets are inspiredby this ‘unscholarly’ translation, and have found new ways of journeying themselves with
Basho.
This paper began with a journey around England, seeing traces of the past incontemporary place names, and is ending with a journey around Scotland, inspired by aseventeenth-century Japanese poet and utilizing twenty-first century technology.
Underpinning both journeys, and everything this paper has sought to emphasize, is the powerof translation in shaping language, literatures and cultures. Translation is key to discourses ofintertextuality, global influence flows, transnational literary movement, canon formation andchallenges to the canon. The English language and its literatures have been enriched overcenturies through translation, for although states may close borders, the movement of ideas
and linguistic change cannot be halted. Basho probably did not even know that Scotland
existed, but I like to think that four hundred years after his death, he would have rejoiced at

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 2–18

the thought that his spirit lives on, in another language, through other poets and via atechnology he could never have imagined.

References
Bassnett, Susan (2013) Translation. London: Routledge.
Bassnett, Susan (2014) Translation Studies (4th edition). London: Routledge.
Bellos, David (2012) Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.
London: Penguin.
Crowley, Tony (1989) The Politics of Discourse. London: Macmillan.
Ekwall, Eilert (1980) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Eliot, T. S. (1964) The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen.
Ellis, Roger ed. (2008) The Oxford History of Literary Translation into English. Vol. I: To
1550. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Finlay, Alec and Ken Cockburn (2013) theroadnorth.com
Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason (1997) The Translator as Communicator. London: Routledge.
Heaney, Seamus (1980) ‘Englands of the Mind’, in Preccupations. Sklected Prose 1968–
1978. London: Faber and Faber.
Hitchings, Henry (2005) Dr Johnson’s Dictionary. The Extraordinary Story of the Book that
Defined the World. London: John Murray.
Lefevere, Andre (1992) Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame.
London: Routledge.
Sampson, George (1941) The Concise History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Yuasa, Nobuyuki transl. (1966) Matsuo Basho. The Narrow Road to the Deep North andOther Travel Sketches. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 19–35

Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers

Ken Hyland
The University of Hong Kong

Abstract
This paper explores the main approaches to teaching and researching writing. Making a broad
distinction between theories concerned with texts, with writers, and with readers, I will showwhat each approach offers and neglects and what each means for teachers. The categorisation
implies no rigid divisions, and, in fact the approaches respond to, critique, and draw on eachother in a variety of ways. I believe, however, this offers a useful way of comparing andevaluating the research each approach has produced and the pedagogic practices they havegenerated.

Introduction
Writing which has been a central topic in applied linguistics for over half a century is acentral area of teaching and research in most languages. Its complex, multifaceted nature
seems to constantly evade adequate description and explanation, and many forms of inquiry
have been summoned to help clarify both how writing works and how it should best betaught. An important factor is, of course, the overarching significance of writing in all our
lives, its roles in social, professional, and academic contexts, and the importance it has indetermining our life chances. Writing is central to our personal experience and social
identities, and we are often evaluated by our control of it. The various purposes of writing,then, the increased complexity of its contexts of use, and the diverse backgrounds and needsof those wishing to learn it, all push the study of writing into wider frameworks of analysis
and understanding.

19Hyland, K.
Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers

In this paper I want to offer a brief survey of these frameworks and explore the main
approaches to teaching and researching writing, focusing on three main orientations (Hyland,2002). Each focus assumes a different idea about what writing is and implies different waysof teaching it:•

The first approach concentrates on the products of writing by examining texts.

•

The second focuses on the writer and the processes used to create texts.

•

The third approach emphasises the role that readers play in writing, showing how writers
think about an audience in creating texts.
These three approaches have become blurred as teachers and researchers have drawn

from each and combined them, to both learn more about writing and to provide better
teaching and learning methods. In any classroom, then, a teacher may draw on a combinationof these. But I think it is helpful to separate them to see clearly what we are doing when we
make teaching decisions. We need to know the theories, assumptions, and research which
support our teaching practices.

Text-oriented Research and TeachingFirst, text-oriented approaches consider writing as an outcome, a noun rather than averb, viewing writing as the words on a page or screen, and here we see texts either as objects
or as discourse.

Texts as Objects
First of all, seeing texts as objects means understanding writing as the application ofrules. Writing is a “thing” independent of particular contexts, writers, or readers—andlearning to become a good writer is largely a matter of knowing grammar. So this view sees
texts as arrangements of words, clauses, and sentences, and its exponents believe that students
can be taught to say exactly what they mean by learning how to put these together effectively.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 19–35

In the writing classroom teachers emphasise language structures, often in these four stages(Hyland, 2003):
1. Familiarisation: learners study a text to understand its grammar and vocabulary,
2. Controlled writing: then they manipulate fixed patterns, often from substitution tables,
3. Guided writing: then they imitate model texts—usually filling in gaps, completing texts,
creating topic sentences, or writing parallel texts.
4. Free writing: learners use the patterns they have developed to write an essay, letter, etc.
But while this has been a major classroom approach for many years, it draws on the
now discredited belief that meaning is contained in the message, and that we transfer ideas
from one mind to another through language. It assumes that a text says everything that needs
to be said with no conflicts of interpretations, no reader positions, no different understandings,
because we all see things in the same way. Accuracy is just one feature of good writing anddoes not on its own facilitate communication. Even the most explicitly written contracts andlegal documents can result in fierce disputes of interpretation. So our goal as writing teachers
can never be just training students in accuracy because all texts include what writer’s assume
their readers will know, and how they will use the text. The writer’s problem is not to makeeverything explicit, but to make it explicit for particular readers, balancing what needs to besaid against what can be assumed.

Texts as Discourse
A second perspective sees texts as discourse—the way we use language tocommunicate, to achieve purposes in particular situations. Here the writer is seen as having
certain goals and intentions and the ways we write are resources to accomplish these.
Teachers working with writing in this way seek to identify how the texts actually work as
communication, regarding forms of language as located in social action. A key idea here isthat of genre, which is a term for grouping texts together. We know immediately, for21

Hyland, K.
Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers

example, whether a text is a recipe, a joke, or a love letter and can respond to it and write asimilar one if we need to. We all have a repertoire of these responses we can call on tocommunicate in familiar situations, and we learn new ones as we need them.
Genre reminds us that when we write we follow conventions for organising messages
because we want our reader to recognise our purpose. Genre approaches describe the stages
which help writers to set out their thoughts in ways readers can easily follow, encouraging us
to look for organisational patterns and salient features. So, looking at texts as discourse cantell us a lot about how we create meanings: what writers are trying to achieve when writing
and how they do it.
Genres encourage us to look for organisational patterns, and we find them in even themost apparently personal and expressive kind of writing. In an analysis of theacknowledgments in 240 PhD and MA dissertations written by Hong Kong speakers ofEnglish, for example, I found students used the structure shown in Figure 1:Move
1 Reflecting Move

2 Thanking Move
2.1 Presenting participants

ExampleThe most rewarding achievement in my life, as I
approach middle age, is the completion of my doctoral
dissertation.

During the time of writing I received support and help
from many people.

2.2 Thanks for academic help

I am profoundly indebted to my supervisor, Dr. Robert
Chau who assisted me in each step to complete thethesis.

2.3 Thanks for resources

I am grateful to The Epsom Foundation whose research
travel grant made the field work possible and to thelibrary staff who tracked down elusive texts for me.

2.4 Thanks for Moral support

Finally, thanks goes to wife who has been an importantsource of emotional support.

3 Announcing Move

However, despite all this help, I am the only person
responsible for errors in the thesis.

Figure 1. The structure of dissertation acknowledgements.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 19–35

As we can see, the acknowledgement structure consists of a main Thanking Movesandwiched between optional Reflecting and Announcing Moves. So first the writer offers abrief introspection on his or her research experience. Then there is the Thanking Move where
credit is given to individuals and institutions for help with the dissertation, and this canconsist of up to 4 steps. First, a sentence introducing those to be thanked, followed by thanks
for academic help. This was the only step that occurred in every single text, supervisors werealways mentioned, and always before anyone else, but sometimes other academics appeared
here too. Next there are thanks for providing resources such as clerical, technical, andfinancial, and then thanks for moral support from family and friends for encouragement,
friendship, sympathy, etc., and this occurred in two thirds of all texts. The final Announcing
Move was uncommon, but here writers accept responsibility to show that the thesis is theirs
and not the work of all the people they’ve thanked.
In the classroom genre teaching means attending to grammar, but this is not the olddisembodied grammar of the writing-as-object approach but a resource for producing texts. A
knowledge of grammar shifts writing from the implicit and hidden to the conscious andexplicit to allow students to effectively manipulate language (Hyland, 2004). In writingclasses this means getting students to notice, reflect on, and then use the conventions to help
them produce well-formed and appropriate texts. One approach widely used in Australia is theteaching-learning cycle (Figure 2).

23Hyland, K.
Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers

Figure 2. The teaching-learning cycle.

The cycle helps us plan classroom activities by showing genre learning as a series oflinked stages which scaffold, or support, learners towards understanding texts. The key stagesare:
1. First understanding the purpose of the genre and the settings where it is used: So, how itfits into target academic situations. Who writes it, with whom, who for, why, etc? What is
the relationship between the writer and reader? What degree of formality is involved? Thismight involve presenting the context through films, guest speakers, simulations, roleplays, or case studies to bring the context to life.
2. The second stage involves modelling the genre and analysing it to reveal its stages andkey features (what are the main tenses, themes, vocabulary, and so on). Possible activities
here are getting students to sequence, re-arrange, and label text stages, asking them to reorganise scrambled paragraphs or re-write unfinished ones, etc.
3. The third stage involves the joint construction of the genre with students, either in groups
or individually, supporting students in their writing as they collect information through24

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 19–35

library or internet research and interviews, as they create a parallel text following a given
model or as they work in small groups to construct texts for presentation to the wholeclass.
4. Fourth is independent writing, with students working alone or in groups while monitoredby the teacher. Possible activities are outlining and drafting a text based on pre-writing
activities, rewriting a text for another purpose by changing the genre from an essay into a
news article or notes to a report, or revising a draft in response to others’ comments.
5. Finally the teacher relates what has been learnt to other genres and contexts. This can bedone by showing how a genre fits into a chain of genres to achieve a purpose such as theinterview which follows a job advert, application letter, etc., or comparing genres in thesame context.
Each stage therefore has a different purpose and so draws on different classroom
activities. The main features of the cycle are that students can enter it at any stage dependingon what they know about the genre, and genres can be recycled at more advanced levels of
expression. Perhaps more importantly, it provides scaffolded learning for students. As I show
in Figure 3, the kind of scaffolding provided by the cycle supports students through what
Vygotsky called the “the zone of proximal development,” or the gap between student’s
current and potential performance. As we move round the circle, direct teacher instruction is
reduced and students gradually get more confidence and learn to write the genre on their own.
Their autonomy increases as they gain greater control over the genre.

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Hyland, K.
Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers

Scaffolding

Learner Progress

Independent learner performance

Potential performance

Reduced teacher involvement
Increased learner independence
Zone of proximal development
Considerable teacher contribution

Existing competence

Learner’s entry level

Figure 3. Teacher-learner collaboration (Based on Feez, 1998, p. 27).

Genre teaching has been criticised for stifling creativity by imposing models on
students. Obviously teachers might teach genres as recipes so students get the idea that they
just need to pour content into ready made moulds. But there is no reason why providing
students with an understanding of discourse should be any more prescriptive than providingthem with a description of parts of a sentence. The key point is that genres do constrain us.
Once we accept that our goals are best achieved by, say, writing a postcard or an essay, thenwe will write within certain expected patterns. The genre doesn’t “dictate” that we write in acertain way nor determine what we write; it enables choices to be made to create meaning.
Genre theories suggest that a teacher who understands how texts are typically structured,understood, and used is in a better position to intervene successfully in the writing
development of his or her students.

Writer-oriented Research and Teaching
The second broad approach focuses on the writer, rather than the text. Interest here ison what good writers do when they write so that these methods can be taught to L2 students.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 19–35

Most teachers are familiar with process writing techniques and make use of brainstorming,
peer and teacher feedback, multiple drafts, delaying corrections until the end, and so on.
Writing is seen as a process through which writers discover and reformulate their ideas asthey attempt to create meaning. It is more of a problem solving activity than an act ofcommunication—how people approach a writing task as the solution to a series of problems.
Essentially, process theorists explain writing using the tools and models of cognitive
psychology and Artificial Intelligence. In the model there is a memory, Central Processing
Unit, problem-solving programs, and flow charts. The flow chart in Figure 4 is well known toteachers and shows that writers create texts by jumping between these stages:

Figure 4. A flow chart of the writing process.

Process approaches tell us that writing is about discovering and formulating ideas as wecreate personal meanings. The flow chart shows us that:•writers have goals and plan extensively.

•

writing is constantly revised, often even before any text has been produced.

•

planning, drafting, revising, and editing are recursive and potentially simultaneous.

•plans and text are constantly evaluated by the writer in a feedback loop.
For some teachers the model helps explain the difficulties their L2 students sometimes

have because of the writing task and their lack of topic knowledge and we cannot deny thatthe quantity and impact of the research into the writing process has been enormous. This

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Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers

advises teachers to:•set pre-writing activities to generate ideas about content and structure.

•encourage brainstorming and outlining.

•give students a variety of challenging writing tasks.

•

require multiple drafts.

•

give feedback on drafts and facilitate peer response.

•

delay surface corrections until the final editing.
Writer-oriented approaches are influenced by cognitive psychology rather than applied

linguistics, emphasizing what people think about when they write rather than the language
they need to do it. For me this creates some serious problems for teaching writing (Hyland,2003).
First of all, by over-emphasising psychological factors it neglects the importance of
how context influences writing. Process tends to represent writing as a decontextualised skill
as it focuses on the writer as an isolated individual struggling to express personal meanings.
There is little understanding of the ways language is used in particular domains or what itmeans to communicate in writing. In fact, we don’t just write, we write for a purpose in aparticular context, and this involves variation in the ways we use language, not universal
rules.
Second, this is a discovery-based approach which doesn’t make the language students
need explicit when they need it. Feedback is withheld until towards the end of the process andeven then teachers are often concerned about much intervention. Students are not taught thelanguage structures of the genre they are writing but are expected to discover them in theprocess of writing itself or through the teacher’s feedback on drafts. This might be sufficientfor L1 students, but L2 writers find themselves in an invisible curriculum as Delpit (1988, p.
287) points out:
Adherents to process approaches to writing create situations in which students

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ultimately find themselves held accountable for knowing a set of rules about which noone has ever directly informed them. Teachers do students no service to suggest, even
implicitly, that “product” is not important. They will be judged on their productregardless of the process they utilized to achieve it. And that product, based as it is on
the specific codes of a particular culture, is more readily produced when the directivesof how to produce it are made explicit.
Third, it assumes that making the processes of expert writers explicit will make novices
better writers. But not all writing is the same; it doesn’t always depend on an ability to use
universal, context-independent revision and editing practices. Exam writing doesn’t involve
multi-drafting and revision for instance, and academic and professional writing is often
collaborative and time constrained. Different kinds of writing involve different skills.
Finally, process models disempower teachers. This is a model of learning based on
personal freedom, self-expression, and learner responsibility, all of which might be stifled by
too much teacher intervention. This reduces us to well-meaning bystanders who just assign
tasks and give feedback. Because language and text organisation tend to be tacked on to theend of the process as “editing,” rather than the central resources for constructing meanings,
students are given no way of seeing how different texts are written for particular purposes andaudience. So while a process approach will help novice writers to become more effective at
generating texts, this cannot help them understand what their readers expect to find in those
texts.

Reader-oriented Research and Teaching
Writer-oriented research sees context as the site of writing, where the writer is, what heor she is thinking of, and so on, but a final approach expands the idea of context beyond the
local writing situation to the reader’s context and what writers do to address the reader. Whenwe write we choose our words to connect with others and present our ideas in ways that make29

Hyland, K.
Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers

most sense to them. We try and draw readers in, to influence, persuade, inform, or entertain
them by a text that sees the world in similar ways to them, and we do this by using the words,
structures and kinds of argument they will accept and understand.
So a reader-oriented view of writing emphases the interaction between writers andreaders: The process of writing involves creating a text that the writer assumes the reader willrecognise and expect. And the process of reading involves drawing on assumptions about
what the writer is trying to do. Mike Hoey (2001) says this is like dancers following eachother’s steps, each building sense from a text by anticipating what the other is likely to do.
This is one of the reasons why writing in English so difficult for speakers of other languages
because what is seen as logical, engaging, relevant, or well-organised in writing, and whatcounts as evidence, irony, conciseness, and coherence, are likely to differ across cultures.
It is the unfamiliarity of these expectations that often makes writing in a foreign
language so difficult. What is seen as logical, engaging, relevant, or well-organised in writing,
and what counts as evidence, irony, conciseness, and coherence, are likely to differ acrosscultures. Some cultures favour deductive forms of writing, setting out the main point thenadding support, while others prefer an inductive approach, getting to the point eventually;some are more formal than others, some more impersonal. Culture isn’t the only explanationof course—we can’t simply read off the ways students are likely to write on the basis of
assumed cultural preferences or vice versa—we can’t, for example, identify a Singaporean
writer by his or her linguistics choices in English. But it is clear there are different ways oforganising ideas and structuring arguments in different languages and this can have
implications for teachers.
Research suggests, for instance, that compared with many languages, texts in English
tend to be more explicit about structure and purposes with constant previewing and reviewingof material, to be less tolerant of digressions, and to use more sentence connectors (such as
therefore, in addition, and however). For Clyne (1987) this is because English makes the30

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 19–35

writer rather than the reader responsible for clarity and this is very different from German,
Korean, Chinese, and Japanese where the reader is expected to dig out the meaning. The
writer compliments the reader by not spelling everything out and the text is more complex
with less explicit signalling, but in English the onus is on the writer to set things out so they
can be easily understood. So by looking at large numbers of samples, we can see the ways thattexts are typically expressed by particular groups based on their usual ways of relating toreaders.
Considering readers means looking at the ways writing is used by social groups and theconcept of a discourse community is important here as a way of joining writers, texts, andreaders together. Discourse communities have been defined in different ways, so that Swales(1990), for instance, sees them as having collective goals, while Johns (1997) suggests they
have common interests, rather than goals.
Discourse community continues to be a problematic idea, often laying too much stresson what people share rather than the disputes and differences that occur in all communities.
People have different commitments, stakes, and statuses in a community and these are notaccounted for, nor is it clear how “local” such communities are. Are all writing teachers acommunity? All teachers? Members of a university department, a discipline, or just a
specialism? But discourse community has been very influential in researching and teachingwriting, particularly in EAP and ESP, showing us how writing works in different disciplines
and why, for example, the kinds of essays we need to teach physics students look very
different from those needed by students in history.
For teachers this means that different disciplines value different kinds of argument and
set different writing tasks.
•

In the social sciences, for instance, synthesising multiple sources is important, while inscience, describing procedures, defining objects, and planning solutions are required.

•

In post-graduate programmes, engineers give priority to describing charts, while business31Hyland, K.
Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers

studies faculty require students to compare ideas and take a position.
•

In undergraduate classes, lab reports are common in chemistry, program documentation incomputer science, article surveys in maths, and project reports in social sciences.
A reader-oriented approach, therefore suggests that instead of basing teaching on our

impressions of writing, we need to study texts carefully and look for what features are used toengage different readers, helping them to understand that there are different patterns fordifferent contexts and genres. I will mention just three ways which have potential forachieving these goals.

Genre Portfolios
It is important that students study a number of text examples to encourage reflection on
similarities and differences. Ann Johns (1997) advocates using “genre portfolios” which
require students to write a range of genres and then collect them together in a folder forassessment. Figure 5 shows a mixed-genre portfolio for secondary school students in
Singapore.

An argumentative essay.
Why did you organise the essay in this way? What phrases or parts of the essay do you
particularly like? Are you satisfied with this? Why or why not?
A research-based library project (All notes, drafts and materials leading to the final
paper).
What difficulties did you encounter writing this? What did you learn from writing it?
A summary.
Why did you select this particular summary? How is it organised? Why is it organised likethis? What are the basic elements of all the summaries you have written?
A writer’s choice.
What is this? When did you write it? Why did you choose it? What does it say about you?
An overall reflection of the portfolio (A letter to the teacher integrating the entries).

Figure 5. A genre portfolio with reflective questions.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 19–35

Essentially, the purpose of portfolios is to get a more accurate picture of students’
writing, what they can do and how they can vary their language for particular purposes andreaders. But they have a consciousness raising function by getting students to think aboutsimilarities and differences between genres as learners can be asked to write a reflection on
the texts and on what they learnt.

Comparative Tasks
A second approach is to give students comparative tasks. These are excellent devices
for raising students’ awareness of language features and how they change with readers. For
instance, comparisons can be made between:•

How a particular feature is used in writing a genre in English with how students use it intheir L1, encouraging them to notice and reflect on similarities and differences.

•

Compare the advice they find on a feature in language textbooks with actual target texts.
Perhaps looking at what they say about using personal pronouns or hedges and then seeing
how expert writers use them in the target genres.

•Compare how a feature like boosters or “you pronouns” varies across two genres.

Audience Analysis
Finally, students can be encouraged to think about who their readers are and what theyneed from a text. White and Arndt (1991) in Figure 6 suggest a simple checklist to sensitize
students to the importance of attending to shared knowledge with an example response to aletter of complaint.

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Writing: Options and Opportunities for College English Teachers

A

B

C

D

What do I know

What does my reader

What does my reader

What is my reader’sabout the topic?

already know about it?

not know?

attitude likely to be?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Customer bought

As for A

What the company will

Customer is probably

some biscuits.

do about it, eg., apologise,very annoyed. She

There wasrefund the price.

will expect

something hard incompensation.

one of them.

Figure 6. An audience awareness prompt for a letter of adjustment.

Conclusion
I have tried to introduce and critique the major frameworks that are used to look at
writing and at the same time to argue that writing isn’t just words on a page or the activity of
isolated individuals creating personal meanings. It is always a social practice, influenced bycultural and institutional contexts. What this means for writing teachers is that we need to
become researchers of the texts our students will need and the contexts in which are likely toneed them. And then, through our classroom activities, to make the features of these texts as
explicit as we possibly can.

References
Clyne, M. (1987). Cultural differences in the organization of academic texts. Journal of
Pragmatics, 11, 211–247.
Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’schildren. Harvard Educational Review, 58, 280–298.
Feez, S. (1998). Text-based syllabus design. Sydney: McQuarie University/AMES.
Hoey, M. (2001). Textual interaction: An introduction to written text analysis. London:
Routledge.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 19–35

Hyland, K. (2002). Teaching and researching writing. London: Longman.
Hyland, K. (2003). Second language writing. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hyland, K. (2004). Genre and second language writers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Johns, A. M. (1997). Text, role and context: Developing academic literacies. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
White, R., & Arndt, V. (1991). Process writing. Harlow, UK: Longman.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 36–54

Current Perspectives on Publishing in International Journals

Alan Hirvela
The Ohio State University

Introduction
This article is based in part on a presentation I gave at the 2013 JACET Convention
about publishing in the journal TESOL Quarterly, which I co-edited from 2009–2013. I’m
also drawing on the session which opened the JACET convention, where Ken Hyland (coeditor of the journal Applied Linguistics) and I discussed our perspectives on current trends in
TESOL research and publication. My purpose is to share information, insights, andsuggestions related to the journal publishing process in the hope of demystifying that process
and providing authors with input that will help prepare them for the publishing experience.
With constantly increasing pressure in many countries for academics to publish theirwork, especially in “top-tier” English language journals, for such purposes as being granted adoctoral degree, seeking a faculty position, and being promoted to higher academic rank,
there is a need to provide an updated look at what publishing in such journals entails. To
achieve this purpose, I’ll address several issues and questions that arise in discussions of thesematters during “how to publish” sessions at conferences (where journal editors share theirthoughts on such topics) and among journal editors in our conversations with each other.

Selecting a Publishing Site
Success in academic publishing begins with the crucial decision of where to send one’s
work, a decision that I fear is often not taken seriously or carefully enough. This is not a
simple decision and should never be taken lightly, as a poor decision will result in an unhappy
outcome. Here, I’d like to share a comment that I’ve perhaps made more than any other as36

Current Perspectives on Publishing in International Journals
Hirvela, A.

both a journal editor and a reviewer for various journals: “Good manuscript, but wrong
journal.” What I mean here is that authors often fail to see which journal would be the best fit
for the manuscript they’ve written. It’s essential to know the available journals before making
the submission decision. For example, be aware of whether they focus on research-based
work only, on pedagogically-oriented work, or are open to both. In the case of TESOL
Quarterly, for instance, it’s rare to see non-empirically based work published as full-length
articles. This is generally the case among the top-tier journals. It’s also important to know
about the kinds of topics journals prefer. Journals have their own target audiences and will
look to publish work that appeals to their particular audience. Hence, a very good empirical
study may be rejected simply because the topic is too narrow or too remote to be of interest tothat journal’s readership. Hence, try to determine who the primary target audience is. Thisshould be apparent from the articles being published, and the journal’s website may contain
information to this effect.
What you need to seek is the best “fit” for the work you’ve done, as opposed to simply
trying to publish in the most prestigious journal in the field, or the one with the highest impact
factor, only because of its status. Such journals are likely to have very low acceptance rates,
and your work might not fit what they’re looking for. Your chances of being successful will
increase when you have the right alignment between your work and the journal to which it issubmitted. In my experience, it’s best to decide on the journal you will submit to before evenwriting an article. In this way you can tailor what you write, and how you write it, relative tothat journal’s expectations and nuances.
The comments above lead to my second point, which is to know your work andunderstand the nature of its appeal. Don’t allow a mismatch to occur between the kind ofwork you’ve done and the journal to which it’s submitted, as this is a recipe for a rejection of
the manuscript. You may have to settle for a “lesser” journal in terms of reputation or impact
factor, but the right fit between what you’ve done and who’s reviewing increases your37

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 36–54

chances of meeting your fundamental goal of having your work published.
A third point I want to make here, and one that draws from the second point, is that you
should take some time to consider whether your manuscript works better as a journal article
or a book chapter. Chapters in edited volumes are read and cited, and they can make an
impact on their field. Thus, it’s wise to keep a close eye on calls for proposals that appear injournals and on listservs, as well as at conferences. You may find that what you’re working on
is in fact a better fit for an edited collection of papers. Speaking of calls for proposals, look
for those tied to special, guest-edited issues of journals as well. Some work may be a close fit
with the theme of a special issue, and as a result it may have a better chance of being acceptedfor publication in a special issue than in a regular one of the same journal. Most top-tierjournals publish special issues (e.g., TESOL Quarterly has one every year), and, in addition toperhaps having a better chance of seeing your manuscript accepted for a special issue, you’ll
find that articles in such issues tend to be cited a good deal because the special issue has
drawn close attention to an important topic.
A fourth point I want to address in this context is that of the various publishing options
some journals offer. It may not be necessary, or desirable, to submit a full-length article.
Some manuscripts are more effective in shorter, more condensed form. TESOL Quarterly, forexample, offers such options as “Brief Reports and Summaries” (shorter research-based
pieces) and “Forum” (short, discussion-oriented manuscripts intended to provoke newthoughts or discussion on a topic of interest and importance in the field). These articles areread with interest and can be cited frequently, and the competition for publication isconsiderably reduced, as far fewer authors submit such manuscripts.
To sum up, it’s essential to be strategic when attempting to publish your work, andbeing strategic begins with the crucial decision about where you wish to submit your work.
Don’t allow journal reputations and impact factors to cloud your judgment of the nature ofyour work and where it would best fit. My experience, as an author and a journal editor and38

Current Perspectives on Publishing in International Journals
Hirvela, A.

reviewer, is that those who publish more often are very good at knowing where to send their
work.

Read and Adhere to Submission Guidelines
Here I want to address an issue that is a sore point among journal editors and one that isremarkably easy to address. One of the most frequent complaints I’ve heard among journal
editors (and reviewers) is that authors ignored the journal’s specifications in terms of lengthof manuscripts, citation style to be used, guidelines for the handling of tables and figures, andso on. This is a regular source of amazement and confusion to editors. Journals provide
detailed guidelines for the submission of manuscripts; these can easily be found on theirwebsite or perhaps inside the journal itself. Before not only submitting a manuscript but alsodeciding where to submit, study the submission guidelines for the journal(s) you’re
considering. This information can be surprisingly helpful. For example, you may find that acertain journal of interest to you only accepts articles of shorter length, while the nature ofyour work requires that you write a longer manuscript. You need to know this before deciding
where to submit your work.
An important aspect of this issue is the fact that top-tier journals are now receiving far
more manuscripts than was the case in the past. It’s safe to assume that any top-tier journal in
the domain of TESOL/applied linguistics receives a few hundred to several hundred
manuscripts per year. Hence, the competition for acceptance is tougher than it’s ever been. In
this publishing climate, adhering to submission guidelines takes on added meaning. With somany manuscripts being submitted, they may be rejected without any peer review processsimply because they’re far too long, or too short, to cite a few possibilities related tosubmission guidelines. A careful reader of journals would be aware of the length expectations
before making a submission decision so as to ensure that the submissions guidelines are being
observed. Here it’s also worth remembering that top-tier journals usually have space

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restrictions (a certain number of pages per issue) and only publish a small number ofmanuscripts per year (for example, TESOL Quarterly typically publishes only 20-25 fulllength articles per year). Meanwhile, as noted earlier, more authors than ever before aresubmitting manuscripts. These factors can lead to very rapid rejection of manuscripts that failto adhere to submission guidelines, regardless of the quality of the work. The guidelines are
there for good reasons, and editors expect authors to read and follow them.

Understanding the Review Process
For a variety of reasons, the process by which manuscripts are reviewed has changed
significantly in recent years, and it’s important for authors to be aware of these changes.
Historically speaking, in the case of TESOL/applied linguistics, the journals generally
received manageable amounts of manuscripts. As a result, the review process could unfold
over a reasonable period of time. We face far different circumstances nowadays, and thechanges that have occurred have important ramifications for today’s authors.
One important change is that, to return to a point made earlier, the number of authors
has increased dramatically, especially as more individuals have earned (or are pursuing)
higher degrees and seek or hold positions which require publications. On a closely relatednote, the number of countries from which authors come has also increased greatly. On theother hand, while the total number of journals in our field has probably increased a good deal,
especially with the advent of online journals, the number of top-tier journals has not changed
much. The critical mass of such journals remains very small. The net result is that there are
now far more scholars competing for what remains a limited number of publishing
opportunities in these journals.
A significant ramification of the factors just noted is that the burden on manuscript
reviewers has become enormous. Top-tier journals will only want the top scholars to review
their manuscript submissions, and there’s a finite number of such scholars/reviewers. This40

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means that, compared to the past, these individuals receive far more review invitations thanused to be the case. Well-known scholars may well receive a handful of such invitations in a
typical month. These come from both the top-tier and other journals. There are two important
outcomes of this situation. First, this means that journals are now competing fiercely for theservices of the same reviewers, and these individuals can only accept a small number of theinvitations received. Second, and closely related to the previous point, there is now a very
common phenomenon which many journal editors call “reviewer overload.” Faced with theconstant arrival of review invitations, and completing as many reviews as is reasonably
possible amidst their demanding schedules, these reviewers eventually reach the point where
they simply cannot review for periods of time, or greatly reduce the number of invitations
they accept.
What this means for authors is that the review process is almost certain to run much
longer than was the case in the past. When there were fewer authors and manuscripts,
reviewers were more inclined to accept review invitations, and this meant that the review
process could play out over a few months. That is rarely the case today. A journal editor may
well have to issue several review invitations before finding the number of reviewers requiredby their journal’s review policy. Time must be allowed for invited reviewers to decide
whether to accept an invitation, and if they decline the invitation, other reviewers must be
identified and contacted. Each time this happens, the review process is lengthened. If several
potential reviewers decline, as is common these days, it may well take an editor at least a few
to several months just to locate reviewers. Then the reviewers need sufficient time tocomplete their reviews. Since these individuals may well have a number of invitations to act
upon, it can take much longer than in the past for reviews to be submitted. It also seems(anecdotally speaking) that major differences in opinion among reviewers are more common
than in the past. These split decision situations necessitate having another review(er) to
resolve the split, thereby further increasing the length of the review process.

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The net result is that authors must now expect the review process to last several months,
however inconvenient and frustrating that may be for them. At the same time, with moreauthors and more manuscripts in circulation, and limited publishing space available injournals, the competition for acceptance is much more demanding than in the past. All of thismeans that (a) authors must understand and respect the burdens faced by journal editors andreviewers, and (b) they must be exceptionally patient as the review process plays out. And
they must bear in mind the increasingly lower acceptance rates that are the norm these days.
The situation just described is one that no-one likes, especially journal editors, forwhom this is an ongoing and deeply frustrating occupational hazard. This is not to minimize
the negative effects on authors. However, an author is experiencing it once at a time, while forjournal editors the situation occurs over and over again (indeed, on a daily basis). They will
typically have numerous cases in which the review process is taking much longer than theywould like. What they (and authors) need to keep in mind is that reviewers, who are alreadyvery busy with their daily responsibilities, review for free. They generously and selflessly
donate their time for the sake of the profession, and under ever more demanding
circumstances. Meanwhile, journal editors must rely on the goodwill of these individuals whoare so much in demand. This often leaves them in a very tight and uncomfortable spot
between anxious (and sometimes angry) authors on one side and overburdened reviewers on
the other.
Given the circumstances just described, it’s even more important for authors to makethe right decision as to where they submit their work. In the past, authors would receive areview decision in a few months. As a result, they could revise a manuscript and submit itelsewhere a few or even several times per year. That is not true nowadays. With the review
process lasting many months, resubmissions will occur less frequently, thus making it more
important for the initial submission to be a successful one, which comes in part from selecting
the right journal for the initial submission.

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Nonnative English Speaker (NNES) Issues and Good Writing
One of the most common perceptions that journal editors encounter among authors isthat reviewers are biased against NNES writers and their writing. An underlying assumption
here is that the reviewers are all native speakers of English (NES) and will employ native
English speaker norms during the review process. It seems safe to say that there was a time
when some reviewers were indeed especially critical of the writing of NNES authors andreflected that view in the review comments they wrote and perhaps the recommendations they
made. However, in my experience, this is rarely the case nowadays. First, today’s reviewers
are aware of, and sensitive to, debates about the unfairness of imposing native speaker norms
on review criteria. As a result, they emphasize the kind of criteria that would be expected:
quality of research design, effectiveness of analysis/interpretation of results, and the potential
for the manuscript to make a contribution to its field, not the quality of the English. In short,what matters most is whether the research is good. Second, it is far more likely nowadays that
reviewers themselves are NNES. As a result, they, too, will be sensitive to fairness issues
when evaluating manuscripts. They, like NES reviewers, know that various writing-related
issues can be dealt with at a later stage. They will also be especially appreciative of the valueof having more NNES authors publishing.
A related point to be noted is that authors should consult a journal’s list of editorial
board members. This is usually available in the journal itself and perhaps on its webpage.
Upon reviewing this list, they’ll find that top-tier journals will have numerous NNES board
members and will seek a good balance of reviewers among “center” and “periphery” countries
or regions of the world. There is far greater diversity today in this regard than was the case in
the past, and this helps ensure that the review process will be a fair one for NNES authors.
An important point that emerges here is the need to understand the criteria journals
employ during the review process. Here it is valuable to seek out such information, which isusually readily available. For example, on its website, TESOL Quarterly provides detailed

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descriptions of its specifications and expectations for research within various researchparadigms. This is the kind of information reviewers will bear in mind when reviewing for a
specific journal. A key part of their job as a reviewer is to determine whether a manuscript isa good fit for the journal to which it was submitted, as opposed to employing some universal
and decontextualized set of standards. In other words, they review relative to that particularjournal. Thus, it is incumbent upon authors to familiarize themselves with those standards andto understand their importance in the review process.
The bottom line is that journals are interested in good research. Good writing isimportant, to be sure, but writing can be revised, whereas the research can’t be changed. If theresearch is strong and the manuscript makes a contribution to the field, journal editors willfind ways to make the writing work well, and reviewers will bear in mind that this is the case.

Understanding the Editor’s Job
It’s extremely important for authors to understand the situation editors find themselvesin when dealing with manuscripts. First, they are expected to uphold the standards andexpectations of the journal they represent. Second, they must be respectful of what reviewers
have said about a particular manuscript, even if their own judgment of a manuscript differs.
These points may seem obvious. There’s a third one that isn’t obvious but is just as important.
This is the confidential remarks intended only for the editor.
Those authors who review for top-tier journals will know that there are two dimensions
to the commentary process. One is the comments directed toward and made available to theauthor(s) of a manuscript. The other is comments only the editor sees. Because these areconfidential remarks, they may be much franker in tone and more critical than those theauthors see. Here it is not uncommonly the case that these remarks give the editor a different
sense of the manuscript than what is seen in the commentary available to authors. From an
editor’s perspective, this is extremely important feedback that offers a truer picture of what44

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the reviewer has in mind.
When making a manuscript decision, then, the editor may be privy to and guided byevaluations invisible to authors. This is an important point to bear in mind when an author
reads reviewer comments which cast the manuscript in a more favorable light than what theeditor sees. Authors will be understandably unhappy and confused when they receive adecision that seems to run counter to what the reviewers apparently felt about the manuscript.
In these circumstances, they must remember the additional input an editor may possess, inputthat cannot be shared with the author(s) due to its confidential nature. It’s also essential tounderstand that the decision as to whether a manuscript should be accepted is the editor’salone; recommendations from reviewers are just that: recommendations. Reviewers don’t
decide whether something will be published. The editor also reads manuscripts closely.
Furthermore, not all reviews are of sufficient quality. Indeed, an editor may decide that areview is not thorough or fair and thus place less value on it when making a publication
decision. This information will not be conveyed to authors, but it will be taken into
consideration by the editor, along with her/his own reading of the manuscript. Thus, when an
author sees a decision that doesn’t align with what the reviewers said and recommended, it
must be remembered that the editor is also deeply involved in the process and is the only
person who has the full picture regarding a manuscript.
It should also be noted that, in this age of reviewer overload and the staggering numbersof manuscripts being submitted, that a full peer review process is not a guarantee. During
their initial screening of a manuscript, editors are increasingly likely nowadays to make adecision about a manuscript instead of allowing the full review process to take place. This isan editor’s prerogative, and editors are extremely perceptive readers of manuscripts. This
makes it all the more important for authors to adhere to submission guidelines and to produce
work that is a good fit for the journal to which it’s been sent. Journal editors nowadays are, ofnecessity, increasingly cautious and prudent when it comes to deciding whether a manuscript

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merits a full review process.
Editors certainly strive to be fair to authors, but the decision making process runs in two
directions at the same time: toward the authors and toward the reviewers. In thesecircumstances, editors may find themselves caught in the midst of a complex dilemma thatcannot be explained to authors. The combination of the visible and invisible discourse of thereview process generates a complex dynamic authors need to be aware of and to respect.

Plagiarism and Multiple Submissions
Here I want to address two issues of importance to editors, and thus to authors as well.
First, nowadays, in discussions of academic publishing, the matter of plagiarism is certain to
emerge at some point. Concern about it is a recurring theme among authors, particularly those
breaking into the field, and it’s a frequent (and often intense) topic of conversation among
journal editors.
One important point to understand about plagiarism is that, at least among top-tierjournals, detection of it is remarkably easy these days. These journals usually have access tosophisticated new software that not only points out occurrences of what may be inappropriate
textual borrowing, but also of the original sources the questionable material comes from. This
information is contained in “originality reports” that editors consult. Newly submitted
manuscripts are routinely subjected to plagiarism checks before the review process begins,
and these checks generate the originality reports just mentioned. The software is hardly
infallible; material that is in fact acceptable is sometimes misidentified, but such mistakes areeasily detected. More importantly, if plagiarism has occurred, it will be identified. To ensure
fairness to authors, editors analyze the nature of items pinpointed by the software before
determining the appropriate course of action, but originality reports which indicate large
amounts of questionable textual borrowing are almost certain to result in rejection of themanuscript.

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As a number of scholars have pointed out, plagiarism is a cultural issue as much as it isa textual one, and this complicates matters considerably. What is acceptable in one culture
may be unacceptable in another. In the final analysis, there is no perfect definition ofplagiarism to work with, and editors understand this. Then, too, there are some “gray areas”
when it comes to determining whether something should be called plagiarism. For instance,
what about authors recycling portions of their own work? It’s not uncommon, in cases where
authors are preparing more than one manuscript based on the same study, for them to cut andpaste at least some of their description of the study’s methodology, so that much of the samelanguage is reused. From their point of view, authors may well feel that this is acceptable, andso will be surprised when editors express concerns about such a practice (which originality
reports will identify). Another common occurrence is for authors to provide the appropriate
citation information, but to copy the language of the original source without the use of
quotation marks. Here the presence of the citation information alone is insufficient; readersneed to know who actually wrote the words being read. However, authors may well feel thatthey were being responsible simply by indicating the original source of the words being used.
So, what does all of this mean? First, authors need to understand and account for thekinds of information now available to editors via the software mentioned earlier. Second,
while being aware of this information, authors should not become obsessed with a fear ofcommitting plagiarism. Concerned, yes; fixated, no. While different notions and practices
connected to textual borrowing (and thus plagiarism) will perhaps always exist, plagiarism as
defined by journals is usually avoidable as long as efforts are made to handle citation
situations carefully. Hence, there’s no need to panic or feel unnecessarily anxious. This leads
to the third point: look closely at how other authors have addressed citation situations in their
publications. These examples will be revealing and helpful. Fourth, bear in mind that it’s justas easy to plagiarize one’s own work as it is to do so with the work of others. The rules that
apply to the use of work produced by others apply equally to your own writing.

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A second important issue to be addressed has to do with simultaneous submissions ofmanuscripts. While editors recognize that there can be genuine misunderstandings as to what
constitutes plagiarism and will try to account for that possibility as much as they’re able to doso, they will be absolutely rigid and uncompromising when it comes to authors submitting thesame (or virtually the same) manuscript to more than one journal at the same time. This
simply will not be accepted. And here it needs to be remembered that the scholars who review
for top-tier journals are likely reviewing at least a few manuscripts at the same time. And
since it would be likely that their work was cited in a manuscript being reviewed, they may
receive more than one invitation to review the same manuscript. In these circumstances, they
will quickly notice the similarity and immediately notify the editors involved. This is not an
uncommon occurrence, and the outcome is never a happy one for the author(s) involved.
When submitting a manuscript, authors will usually be asked, via a checklist ofsubmission-related items, whether they have followed a journal’s policy of submitting themanuscript only to that journal. There must be honesty in responding to this item, and ofcourse the policy must be respected. Also, authors need to remember that the community ofavailable reviewers for manuscripts on various topics will be small, and so simultaneous
submissions will very likely be detected and reported. Thus, it is essential to be patient andsubmit a manuscript to just one journal at a time.

Responding to Reviewer and Editor Comments
Another of the commonly asked questions among authors is how they should respondto feedback received when they have been encouraged to revise and resubmit a manuscript.
This is not an easy matter to resolve, especially when there are conflicts between reviewers interms of changes they’ve asked for, or when it’s clear that a reviewer has, for whateverreason, not fully understood or carefully read the manuscript and thus asked for changes thatare in fact unnecessary. Then, too, authors may simply disagree with the reviewers on some48

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points. The long and short of the matter is that, between the reviewers’ comments and thosemade by the editor, an author is confronted with a lot of input, and some may not be easy to
decode or to respond to.
An important perspective to bear in mind in these circumstances is that the editor willusually highlight the most important recommendations for revision. The editor’s decision
letter provides important directions on how to approach the revision process, and it is thesethat matter most. In cases where the editor has not addressed conflicts or contradictions
among the reviewers’ comments, the wisest course of action is to contact the editor and seek
clarification. Authors also need to read reviewer feedback with extreme care (and more thanonce). The comments and suggestions made are not all equal in importance, and authors needto detect which matter most, and which are interesting but not essential recommendations forchange. They also need to understand that they aren’t obliged to make every change
recommended. When submitting a revised manuscript, authors are expected to also provide a
letter detailing the changes made in response to specific suggestions from reviewers, and toprovide a rationale for why some suggestions were not acted upon. Editors (and future
reviewers) can be persuaded that some reviewer suggestions were not appropriate. Thus,
authors have a voice, and an important one, in the revision process. However, it would be
extremely unwise to ignore or reject recommendations made by editors.

What Happens to Revised and Resubmitted Manuscripts
Something authors often misunderstand is what actually happens when a manuscript isrevised and resubmitted. What must first be understood here is that resubmission carries nopromise of acceptance. Unless otherwise indicated by the editor in the decision letter
governing the previous submission, the new version will also be sent out for peer review. In
these circumstances, the editor will likely seek the original reviewers of the manuscript.
However, there may be times when an editor wants a fresh set of eyes to look at the revision,

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and so will invite one new reviewer. The editor may also be dissatisfied with one of theprevious reviewers and thus want a replacement.
Nowadays, given the reviewer overload problem mentioned earlier, there’s a strong
chance that at least one of the original reviewers will not be available to review the revision.
In addition to being busy reviewing other manuscripts, a reviewer may also not want to lookat a new version. Many journals have a system in which, upon submitting a review, reviewers
are asked if they would be willing to review the resubmission. It’s not uncommon for them tosay no to this question.
Authors often ask if the reviewers of a revision are aware that it is a revision and haveaccess to the previous reviews. Answers to these questions may vary between journals, but
typically reviewers will know that they’re reading a resubmission and will have access not
only to the reviews, but also to the author’s letter in which the responses to reviewer andeditor comments are contained. Thus, reviewers are usually well informed upon reviewing a
resubmission. All of this information must be considered carefully when revising amanuscript, since the new review process will be influenced in some ways by what took place
before. In particular, authors who paid little or no attention to reviewer suggestions are not
likely to be seen in a positive light by the new reviewers (or the editor).

Communication with Editors
Many authors ask about what is and isn’t possible or advisable with respect tocontacting editors. In a time when the review process now runs much longer than used to be
the case, and when the pressure to publish, especially in top-tier journals, is greater than everbefore, authors are understandably anxious about the status of their manuscripts. Also, as
noted earlier, they may be uncertain as to how to respond to reviewer and editor comments.
There are also many cases in which authors are uncertain as to whether a manuscript issuitable for a particular journal. Let me briefly address each of these situations.

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With respect to the status of a manuscript, authors should proceed with great caution.
While their desire to know where things stand is entirely understandable, inquiries about amanuscript are not likely to be well received by editors. Though it is true that a manuscript
may occasionally “slip through the cracks” and get lost in the review shuffle, this is extremely
unlikely nowadays, when online manager systems do a thorough job handling manuscripts. If
the review process is taking what seems to be an inordinately long time, authors need tounderstand that there are valid reasons for this. First, as discussed earlier, the search forreviewers may take much longer than hoped. Second, it may well be necessary for an editor toseek an additional review after receiving the original one(s) due to significant differences in
how the reviewers evaluated the manuscript. This entails another reviewer search, as well as
the wait necessary while that review is completed. Editors, in addition to holding theirregular, full-time jobs and doing the work of editor at the same time (and thus not always able
to act as promptly as they’d like), are at the mercy of the reviewers and can only wait forreviews to arrive. Furthermore, once they do have the reviews, editors may discover that acomplex picture has emerged, and time and care are necessary in crafting a helpful andappropriate decision letter.
Given these circumstances, and as understandably difficult as it may be for them,authors need to be patient. Angry or impatient messages to editors will not speed up thereview process and will not be received joyously by editors. If inquiries are sent at all, theyneed to be polite and respectful, and it helps to acknowledge the difficult circumstances underwhich editors operate.
With respect to wondering whether a manuscript would be a good fit for a journal,
authors once again need to be cautious about their communication with editors. Sending anentire manuscript to an editor and asking for an opinion as to its suitability for that journal isvery unwise. First, the editor is being asked to read an entire manuscript that has not been
submitted to the journal while also dealing with those which have been submitted. This is51

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 36–54

asking too much of an editor. In addition, the editor is placed in an awkward position, in thattelling an author that the manuscript could be submitted to that journal may be incorrectly
read as a sign that the manuscript has a good chance of being accepted for publication. Editors
should not be placed in such a difficult position. The better course of action is to send a short
description of the manuscript, or perhaps an abstract, to the editor. This approach doesn’t
make unacceptable demands on the editor’s time and energy, and the editor’s suggestion as tosubmission will not be misinterpreted.

Concluding Remarks
In this article I have addressed some (probably not all) of the topics and issues that
authors raise most often in discussions with editors during “how to publish” sessions atconferences or in one-to-one conversations. The information and suggestions shared reflect
what I have heard most often from other journal editors and have shared myself in thecircumstances just described.
I think it’s safe to say that the world of academic publishing today is far more
complicated than it used to be, and perhaps far more unsatisfactory in some respects.
Frustration abounds. For instance, authors often complain, with justification, about how muchis involved in simply submitting a manuscript. Ironically, at a time when technology shouldmake things easier than before, it may be that things were simpler in the days when authorsmailed hard copies of manuscripts to editors. Negotiating with the rigid demands of online
manager systems is not a pleasant task, especially for those making the attempt for the firsttime. Second, with the number of manuscript submissions growing every year and reviewers
feeling increasingly overburdened, the review process is rarely short, unless conducted onlyby the editor (in which case the decision is not going to be a favorable one). Third, authors areunder ever increasing pressure to publish, particularly in top-tier, English medium journals.
Amidst that pressure, authors are competing with far greater numbers of other authors for a52

Current Perspectives on Publishing in International Journals
Hirvela, A.

relatively small number of publication spaces in journals. As such, the need for high quality inthe work submitted and patience during the review process is paramount, and yet not easy to
manage.
However, all is not lost. Indeed, these are also exciting times for academic publishing.
From an editor’s perspective, it is much easier nowadays (thanks to technology) to identify
and contact reviewers, and the online manager systems provide tremendous convenience andefficiency in the treatment of manuscripts. From an author’s perspective, today’s technology
allows accepted manuscripts to appear publicly much faster than in the past via the “earlyview” option on journal websites. While not appearing in an actual issue of a journal for sometime, an accepted manuscript is now accessible to readers relatively quickly; there is no need
to wait one or two years to have an article in circulation (and thus cited much faster than in
the past). Some journals are also adopting a “video abstracts” function by which authors canrecord comments about their manuscript. This allows them to share information not available
in the article itself. In addition to giving authors an exciting opportunity to discuss their workand so add meaning to it, this option provides readers with additional material that can bebeneficial in their reading and their use of the article. Also worth noting is the online
availability of journals, thus expanding the audience available to read published work.
My hope, then, is that authors will be excited (all things considered) by the new worldof publishing we operate in. I have already noted some of the advantages and opportunities
that exist today. It’s also worth remembering that, as discussed earlier, there is now muchgreater diversity in terms of those who review manuscripts. Journals are increasingly likely tohave both NES and NNES reviewers (including as members of their editorial advisoryboards), and to have representation among “periphery” as well “center” scholars.
I hope, too, that authors will understand and appreciate the challenges faced by journal
editors, who certainly strive to provide feedback and decisions in a timely and responsible
fashion, but who perform their duties under increasingly challenging circumstances.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 36–54

Let me close by noting one more positive point, and that is the increased number ofopportunities, like this one, for editors to demystify the world of publishing and for authors tolearn what publishing entails. Such opportunities have not always existed. In this regard, it
was impressive to see the 2013 JACET convention offering three sessions devoted toacademic publishing, and for the JACET organization to commission this article. They arecertainly to be applauded for this.

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Selected Papers

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 56–77

Questionnaire Survey on Business Meetings:
English Proficiency and Difficulty

Tamao Araki
University of Miyazaki
Masako Terui
Kinki University
Reiko Fujita
Tokai University
Masuyo Ando and Kosuke Miki
The Institute for International Business Communication
Hisashi Naito
Hokkai-Gakuen University

Abstract
Business meetings in English are becoming common in increasingly globalized companies
located in Japan. The present study is part of a larger research project that used an online
questionnaire to investigate how business meetings in English are conducted in thosecompanies with focus on the problems of business meetings in English and the relationship toEnglish proficiency of the meeting participants. The data set used for the present study wasthat of 277 business persons who were working in managerial positions for companies inJapan at the time of survey. The data was analyzed quantitatively by calculating Pearson’s rs
for the English proficiency of the business sections/divisions surveyed and the difficulty or
magnitude of problems they perceived at their meetings in English. The results showed thatbusiness sections with higher English proficiency have less difficulty and fewer problems intheir English at business meetings and that English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) also

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prevails in the respondents’ companies. Although English proficiency is not a “determining”
factor for difficulty or problems in business meetings, results still indicate its importance forsolving those difficulties and problems.

Keywords: business meeting, CEFR, difficulty, BELF, online questionnaire

Introduction
Globalization is not a new trend but is recently being enhanced with a rapid increase
and multiplication of connections across different people and organizations via the Internet(Friedman, 2007). International business is one of the fields that have been most affected bythis trend. In those business activities, linguistic and communication skills often play animportant role in business activity, which has made it imperative to understand linguistic andcommunication needs in the business field with large scale surveys (Barbara, Celani, Collins,& Scott, 1996; Hagen, 1999; Koike, Terauchi, Takada, & Matsui, 2010; Tsuji & Tsuji, 2012).
Survey research has pointed out that oral skills in business encounters are one of the
key aspects much in need of support. Barbara et al. (1996) found “meeting” is one of the mostfrequent linguistic events in Brazilian companies that are often conducted in English, as well
as “written report” and “memo” (Barbara et al., 1996, p. 64). Hagen (1999) used the data of
the survey in the EU’s Elucidate Project (1995-1997) and that of the U.K. Department ofTrade and Industry’s Language Study and examined the language needs perceived by 1,261
small and medium-sized companies in the U.K., France, Germany, and Spain. He found the
key interfaces for the companies’ international business activities were mainly oral and aural:
telephoning, negotiating, and meetings (Hagen, 1999, p. 16).
Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta (2011) researched the perceptions of businesspeople on the use of English in the context of international business communication, giventhat more and more people are now communicating with other non-native speakers in English

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because it is their shared language resource (i.e., lingua franca). Nine hundred eighty-sevenbusiness professionals with five international companies located in Finland responded to theonline questionnaire. The main objective of the survey was to confirm the components thatthe authors hypothesized as necessary for what they termed global communicativecompetence (GCC). Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta found that (a) businesspersons tend
to put more emphasis on getting things done as compared to communicating with the otherparty in a highly proficient way; (b) understanding the other person’s culture is important ininternational business; (c) to get business done, business persons tend to think they need to be
direct or clear in expressing their thoughts as compared with being polite, and so on. They
propose a new conceptual framework, GCC, which consists of four constituent competencies:
grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategiccompetence. The authors argue that these multiple competencies are implemented flexibly
and complementarily to manage international business communication at hand and that
education needs to consider this framework, especially when preparing students for businessencounters where the use of what they term English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF)
prevails (Louhiala-Salminen & Kankaanranta, 2011, pp. 259-260; see also LouhialaSalminen, Charles, & Kankaanranta, 2005).
In Japan’s context, there is a large-scale survey on business people’s use of English,
which was conducted by a research group led by Ikuo Koike and Hajime Terauchi (Koike &Terauchi, 2008; Koike et al., 2010). They conducted a questionnaire survey on English use of
7,354 business persons working for companies whose headquarters or branches were locatedin Japan. They also asked about their English proficiency by requesting that respondents
indicate their recent score in the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC),
which enabled the researchers to stratify the participants’ language needs according to theirEnglish proficiency level. The results showed that even highly proficient people might havedifficulty speaking and presenting their views on complicated issues in English (Koike et al.,58

Araki, T. et al.
Questionnaire Survey on Business Meetings

2010, pp. 51-65). Tsuji and Tsuji (2012) conducted a needs analysis of English use on 1,000
business persons working at manufacturing companies in Japan. Their results showed that
discussions, presentations, meetings, and videoconferences were difficult for businesspersons, though they thought that those modes of communication were relatively high in theirimportance (Tsuji & Tsuji, 2012, p. 406).
Though not having been approached with a large-scale survey, business meetings havebeen one of the topics that were frequently studied in the field of English for Business
Purposes (EBP) after a critical comment of St John’s (1996) on the then dearth of research ofthat topic in EBP. Approximately 17 years after her remark, many business meeting studies
were done in a variety of discourse analytic approaches, partly motivated by genre-analytic
methodology (Bhatia, 2004; Swales, 1990). Nickerson (2005), in a review of previous studies
on business discourse in the preceding decade, commented that negotiations, meetings, email, and business letters were the topics most often researched in that period (Nickerson,
2005, p. 369).
One recent and unique contribution to this research field is Handford’s (2010) corpus
approach to the spoken data of business meetings. This corpus consists of 912,734 words
compiled from 64 business meetings conducted in English at 26 companies located inEuropean countries and Japan. Informed by the previous studies of business discourse, he
used in his analysis four categories for the relationship of the speakers: peers and managersubordinate for internal meetings, on the one hand, and contractually-bound and noncontractually-bound relationships for external meetings, on the other hand. Other categories
used in his analysis are six major meeting purposes: reviewing, planning, giving and receiving
information/advice, task-/problem-oriented, buying/selling/promoting a product, andnegotiating. He used these categories to examine if there was any difference in terms offrequency of words or their collocations across those categories. For instance, he found thatthe word “negotiate” and its variants appeared differently between internal meetings and59

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 56–77

external meetings, being used in the situation of giving information/advice in the former,
while being used to signal a conflictual situation in the latter (Handford, 2010, pp. 11-12).
There is also small-scale survey research on business meetings in a European context.
Rogerson-Revell (2007) made some preliminary survey research on English use in business inthe European context. She conducted a questionnaire on the nature and role of English used inbusiness settings and collected data from 43 participants at an annual meeting of an EUrelated organization. Rogerson-Revell found that native speakers (NSs) of English sometimes
felt comprehending non-native speakers’ (NNSs) pronunciation is challenging; that NNSs
regarded speaking as the most difficult skill; and that NNSs did not necessarily feel
communicating with NSs or NNSs particularly challenging.
Although business meetings have been extensively studied from both qualitative (e.g.,
discourse analysis) and quantitative (e.g., corpus analysis) points of view and there is somesmall-scale survey, there is as yet no published report of large-scale survey research with a
specific focus on English use in business meetings. The current study is intended to add
additional empirical findings to the previous studies via the survey method on businesspersons’ perception of difficulties for business meetings in English in the context ofcompanies located in Japan.
The following questions have guided us throughout this study: Is English proficiency
related to the difficulty in business meetings? If so, how strong is that relation?

MethodSurvey and Participants
We conducted an online survey. The pilot survey was first conducted in the fall-winterperiod of 2012. The final version of the questionnaire was open to online access fromFebruary 5 to April 30, 2013. Two hundred and seventy-seven participants agreed to answer
the questionnaire after being asked to do so individually by our research team and their60

Araki, T. et al.
Questionnaire Survey on Business Meetings

associates. Six hundred and thirty-two participants answered the questionnaire after being
asked by an e-mail invitation that was sent to 267,228 subscribers of a portal website forEnglish learning. We call the data collected from the 277 participants “closed” as the
sampling of them is conducted within acquaintances of the research team; on the other hand,
we call the data collected from the 632 participants “open” as the invitation e-mail was sent toa far wider population, who are qualified only as subscribers of the portal website.1 The
average time needed for answering was 32 minutes. We will use only the closed data set for
discussion in the present study, partly for spatial reasons, and partly because mostcharacteristics found thus far in both data sets are similar.

Questionnaire
The questionnaire consisted of 21 questions, among which there were 19 closed and 2
open questions. The main focus of those questions was the difficulties that the members of thebusiness section to which the respondent belongs would encounter in business meetings
conducted in English. The closed questions also asked about various demographic data suchas the field and type of their corporations, the business section to which the respondent
belonged, the respondents’ position, and so on. For the purpose of this research, we focus on
the questions concerning the English proficiency of the respondents’ business section, thelinguistic backgrounds of business meeting participants, and the various types of difficulties
that respondents may encounter in those meetings.

English Proficiency
The average English proficiency was estimated by the respondents about the current
members of their own business sections using the Common European Framework ofReference for Languages (CEFR) scale. The respondents were also asked to answer the
English proficiency level that they hoped their colleagues would achieve in years to come.

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The descriptors used were those under the heading “FORMAL DISCUSSION AND
MEETINGS” (Council of Europe, 2001, p. 78).

Types of Meetings and Participants
As different types of meetings have different characteristics and procedures (Handford,2010), we asked respondents if they had any of the following types of meetings: “Internal
Meetings,” “Meetings with Contracted Partners,” and “External Meetings.” Respondents wereasked to indicate the first language and number of meeting participants speaking that
language: (a) Japanese, (b) English (“Inner Circle”), (c) English (“Outer Circle”), and (d)Other (“Expanding Circle”). These categories are based on Kachru’s classification of English
speakers (Kachru, 1985).

Difficulty and Magnitude of Problems
The difficulty that respondents encounter in their workplace was rated on a 4-point
Likert scale (strong difficulty, some difficulty, not much difficulty, and no difficulty at all) for
each item. We first asked respondents to rate how difficult it was to manage meetings for eachof Handford’s six meeting purposes: reviewing, planning, giving and receiving information,task-/problem-oriented, buying/selling/promoting a product, and negotiating (Handford, 2010,
p. 13). We then asked about the respondents’ perceived difficulties on 10 different stages ofmeeting processes. We asked about the applicability for each description of 10
communication problems, 10 linguistic problems, and seven psychological/mental issues totheir own workplace. The magnitude of these problems was rated using a 4-point Likert scale(very applicable, applicable, not applicable, and not applicable at all). We also asked the
respondents to elaborate on the difficulties with one open question that followed the above
closed questions, although the results of open questions will be examined in another study ofthis research project.

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Results
Respondent Profile
More than 50% of the questionnaire respondents had used English for their business forover 10 years, and 40% had been abroad for their business for at least one year. The top fiveindustries for the respondents’ industries were 42 (15.2%) in telecommunications/IT, 35(12.6%) in electronics, 22 (7.9%) in automobiles, 21 (7.6%) in machinery, and 19 (6.9%) in
precision machinery. Many of the respondents were in managerial positions at their company:
22 respondents (7.9%) were board members, 79 division managers (28.5%), 91 department
chiefs (32.9%), 26 section heads (9.4%), and 54 senior staff (19.5%). Of the respondents andthe top five industries, 70 (25.3%) belonged to the human resources/education department, 45(16.2%) to sales/marketing, 21 (7.6%) to corporate planning, 17 (6.1%) to technology/design,and 16 (5.8%) to research/development.

Linguistic Backgrounds of Business Meeting Participants
An average “internal” business meeting in English consists of the following memberswith respect to their mother tongues and native countries: 7.6 participants (SD = 28.32) wereJapanese native speakers; 2.5 participants (SD = 3.19) were English native speakers (“Inner
Circle”); 3.1 participants (SD = 2.28) were English native speakers (“Outer Circle”); and 2.1
participants were native speakers of the other languages (“Expanding Circle”). An averagebusiness meeting in English “with contracted partners” consists of 2.8 participants (SD =3.24) whose native language was Japanese, 2.1 participants (SD = 2.53) English (“Inner
Circle”), 1.2 participants (SD = 1.85) English (“Outer Circle”), and 1.4 participants (SD =1.64) another language (“Expanding Circle”). An average “external” business meeting in
English consists of 2.7 participants (SD = 3.26) whose mother tongue was Japanese, 1.9 (SD =2.47) English (“Inner Circle”), 1.1 (SD = 2.18) English (“Outer Circle”), and 2.0 (SD = 2.90)
another language (“Expanding Circle”). Although the data shows high variance, only around

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40% of participants at every business meeting in English were native English speakers (seeFigure 1).

Results

Figure 1. Composition of meeting participants in terms of their linguistic background forthree types of business meetings (internal meetings, meetings with contracted partners, andexternal meetings).

English Proficiency
One hundred and three respondents (37.2%) estimated that the current CEFR level ofthe members of their business section/division was B1. Fifty-one respondents (18.4%)
estimated that their business section/division was B2.1; 43 (15.5%) estimated A2.2; 40(14.4%) estimated A2.1; 30 (10.8%) B2.2; 6 (2.2%) C1; and 4 (1.4%) C2. As for the CEFR
level that they want their colleagues/subordinates to achieve in the years to come, 88
respondents (31.8%) considered B2.2 level as the goal of their business section/division’s
improvement. Sixty respondents (21.7%) answered C1; 60 (21.7%) B2.1; 32 (11.6%) C2; 26(9.4%) B1; 9 (3.2%) A2.2; and 2 (0.7%) A2.1 for the expected levels of their businesssection/divisions. Most respondents indicated that their business section/divisions were64

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expected to improve their English proficiency regarding meetings by one to three CEFR
levels (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Bubble chart indicating the number of respondents for each CEFR level (current
and expected). The lower diagonal line is the no improvement expected line, the bubbles
above which represent the respondents expecting their colleagues/subordinates’ improvementof English proficiency to any extent. The upper diagonal line is the 3-level improvement
expected line.

Correlation Between Proficiency and Difficulties/Problems
To see if there is correlation between the English proficiency and difficulty/problem inbusiness meetings, we calculated a Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient r for the
CEFR level and each item of difficulty or problem in business meetings. To calculate thecoefficients, a 7-point scale of CEFR level (C2, C1, B2.2, B2.1, B1, A2.2, and A2.1) was
mapped onto the numerical scale from 7 to 1, with the highest level being the largest value.

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On the other hand, the difficulty in business meetings was given values from 4 to 1, with 4
being the highest in difficulty (very difficult) while 1 being the least difficult (not difficult atall).
CEFR and difficulty: meeting purposes. A Pearson’s r was calculated for the current
CEFR level and the perceived difficulty for each of six different types of purposes, reviewing,planning, giving and receiving information/advice, task-/problem-oriented,
buying/selling/promoting a product, and negotiating, in each of three different types ofmeetings, internal meetings, meetings with contracted partners, and external meetings (seeTable 1). For internal meetings, difficulty in planning, giving and receiving
information/advice, and task-/problem-oriented showed the (negative) correlation of medium
effect size with the CEFR level (Cohen, 1992).2 The correlation between CEFR level anddifficulty in buying/selling/promoting a product or negotiating was not statistically significant(i.e., p > .05), probably because of small sample sizes (33 for the former; 49 for the latter).
On the other hand, for meetings with contracted partners, difficulty in all the six
meeting purposes showed negative correlation of medium effect size with the CEFR level,with buying/selling/promoting a product being relatively high in effect size (r = -.49; r2= .24).
For external meetings, giving and receiving information/advice, task-/problem-oriented,
buying/selling/promoting a product, and negotiating were the ones which showed a mediumsized correlation with CEFR level.

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67

49

33

147

163

146

173

n

-.27

-.29

-.31**-.35**-.30**-.27**

r[-.51, .09][-.58, -.05][-.46, -.17][-.48, -.21][-.44, -.15][-.41, -.13]

95% CI

Internal Meeting

Note. CI = confidence interval. *p < .05. **p < .01.

Negotiatinga product

Buying/selling/promoting

Task-/problem-oriented

information/advice

Giving and receiving

Planning

Reviewing(Closed Group)

80

53

85

99

68

95

n

-.32**-.49**-.34**-.33**-.38**-.40**

r

95% CI[-.51, -.11][-.67, -.26][-.51, -.14][-.49, -.14][-.56, -.15][-.56, -.21]

Partner

Meeting with Contracted

87

68

64

77

30

61

n

[-.56, .12][-.42, .06]

95% CI[-.51, -.08]-.33** [-.51, -.13]-.31*-.40** [-.58, -.17]-.33** [-.52, -.12]

-.26

-.19

r

External Meeting

Correlations Between the Current CEFR Level and Reported Difficulty for Different Meeting Purposes in Three Different Types of Meetings

Table 1

Araki, T. et al.
Questionnaire Survey on Business Meetings

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 56–77

CEFR and difficulty: meeting stages. The CEFR level scale, on the one hand, and the
difficulty in each of 10 different stages of a business meeting, on the other, showed thenegative correlation to some extent (see Table 2). The correlation of a medium effect size
were found in the pairs of CEFR level scale and difficulty in each of the following stages:
explaining/reviewing background/agenda, understanding explanation/report, proposing
solutions, confirming unclear points, responding to questions, exchanging ideas, organizing
different ideas and building consensus, and making decisions. The correlations between
CEFR level and the difficulty in preparing presentation materials and preparing handouts,
both of which are the stages normally with less spoken interactions, were those of a small
effect size.

Table 2
Correlations Between the Current CEFR Level and Reported Difficulty in Different Stages ofBusiness Meetings of All Types (Closed Group)r

95% CI

Preparing presentation materials-.29**[-.40, -.18]

Preparing handouts-.28**[-.38, -.16]

Explaining/reviewing background/agenda-.39**[-.49, -.29]

Understanding explanation/report-.38**[-.48, -.27]

Proposing solutions-.41**[-.50, -.30]

Confirming unclear points-.37**[-.47, -.26]

Responding to questions-.37**[-.47, -.26]

Exchanging ideas-.43**[-.52, -.33]-.40**[-.49, -.29]-.35**[-.45, -.24]

Organizing different ideas and building
consensus
Making decisions
Note. N = 277. CI = confidence interval. **p < .01.

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CEFR and problems in running meetings. All the pairs of CEFR level and the degreeof problems in running business meetings showed some negative correlations (see Table 3).

Table 3
Correlations Between the Current CEFR Level and the Degree of Problem in Running
Business Meetings (Closed Group)r

95% CI

Misunderstanding statements/ideas-.26**[-.36, -.14]

Not understanding the details-.27**[-.38, -.16]

Not understanding subtle nuances-.30**[-.40, -.18]

Speaking with English mistakes-.35**[-.45, -.25]

Not explaining with clear points-.33**[-.43, -.22]

Not explaining the details-.32**[-.42, -.21]

Not conveying subtle nuance-.33**[-.43, -.22]

Not showing emotions-.34**[-.44, -.23]

Not facilitating the meeting effectively-.29**[-.39, -.17]

Not gaining trust-.24**[-.35, -.13]

Note. N = 277. CI = confidence interval. **p < .01.

The correlations of medium-sized effects were those of CEFR level, on the one hand,and each of the following problems, on the other hand: not understanding subtle nuances,
speaking with English mistakes, not explaining with clear points, not explaining the details,
not conveying subtle nuance, and not showing emotions. CEFR level and each of thefollowing problems showed a correlation of small effect size: misunderstanding
statements/ideas, not understanding the details, not facilitating the meeting effectively, andnot gaining trust.
CEFR and problems of language factors. All the pairs of CEFR level and the degreeof language-related problem showed some correlations (see Table 4). Specific expressions for

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meetings/jobs, understanding English spoken fast, and understanding various pronunciations
were those whose correlation with CEFR level was of a medium effect size.
Vocabulary/technical terms, informal expressions for small talk, polite expressions, andhumorous expressions showed a small-sized correlation with CEFR level.

Table 4
Correlations Between the Current CEFR Level and the Degree of Problem of Language
Factors (Closed Group)r

95% CI

Vocabulary/technical terms-.23**[-.34, -.12]

Informal expressions for small talk-.28**[-.39, -.17]

Polite expressions-.28**[-.38, -.17]

Specific expressions for meetings/jobs-.33**[-.44, -.23]

Humorous expressions-.26**[-.37, -.15]

Understanding English spoken fast-.33**[-.43, -.22]

Understanding various pronunciations-.33**[-.43, -.22]

Note. N = 277. CI = confidence interval. **p < .01.

CEFR and problems of psychological/mental factors. A Pearson’s r was calculated
for the CEFR level, on the one hand, and each of five problems related to
psychological/mental factors, on the other, for three different meeting types (see Table 5). Forinternal meetings and meetings with contracted partners, there was only one pair that showed
a medium-sized correlation for each meeting type: CEFR level and lack of confidence in theirown English proficiency. For external meetings, however, both hesitative/lack of positive
attitude and lack of confidence in their own English proficiency showed a medium-sizednegative correlation with CEFR level.

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71

-.16*
-.30**

Not good at managing turn-taking

Lack of confidence in their own English

Note. CI = confidence interval. *p < .05. **p < .01.

Not managing unexpected situation-.19**-.07

Lack of sustained concentration

proficiency-.20**[-.32, -.06][-.41, -.17][-.29, -.03][-.20, -.07][-.32, -.06]

95% CI-.23**-.32**-.25**-.06-.28**

r[-.38, -.08][-.45, -.17][-.39, -.10][-.21, -.10][-.42, -.13]

95% CI

Partner (n = 157)(n = 217)

Hesitative/lack of positive attituder

Meeting with Contracted

Internal Meeting-.21**-.39**-.26**-.10-.32**

r[-.36, -.05][-.52, -.24][-.40, -.10][-.26, .06][-.45, -.16]

95% CI(n = 148)

External Meeting

Correlations Between the Current CEFR Level and the Degree of Problem of Psychological/Mental Factors (Closed Group)

Table 5

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 56–77

Discussion
The results of our questionnaire indicate that English proficiency plays a key role in
reducing the difficulty and the magnitude of problems in many aspects of business meetings.
Even though they were not a determining factor, which should be marked with a correlationof high effect size (r2 > .25, or r < -.50), many aspects showed medium effect sizes (.09 < r2<.25, or -.50 < r < -.20), which means that business sections with higher English proficiency
tend to have fewer problems in their meetings conducted in English. This would strongly
suggest that high English proficiency could be part of the solution for overcoming many
problems in business meetings.
Nevertheless, English proficiency is not a key factor for all difficulty/problems forbusiness meetings in English. Its effect seems to become more salient when business persons
are handling a task with relatively higher complexity in a real-time situation. Across three
types of meetings (internal meetings, meetings with contracted partners, and external
meetings), for example, meetings with such purposes as reviewing and giving and receiving
information/advice were relatively not high in difficulty, while meetings with such purposes
as task-/problem-oriented and buying/selling/promoting a product were rated high indifficulty (see Table 1). It is probably because reviewing and giving and receiving
information/advice could often be a one-sided activity where one party provides informationof relatively fixed or planned content to the other party, while meetings with the purpose oftask-/problem-oriented or buying/selling/promoting a product can often be highly interactivewith unexpected or unplanned consequences. The same tendency can be observed in thecorrelations between CEFR level and difficulty in different stages of meetings. Preparing
presentation materials and preparing handouts can be done with some linguistic assistancewell before the meeting, which must have led to relatively low difficulty compared with moreinteractive and improvisational stages such as exchanging ideas, organizing different ideas
and building consensus, and so on (see Table 2).

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The problems related to linguistic factors tend to be mitigated as a business sections’average English proficiency increases. Thus, Table 3 shows the magnitude of an obviously
linguistic problem, speaking with English mistakes, is high in its (negative) correlation withthe sections’ English proficiency while not gaining trust shows a relatively low correlation.
Among the linguistic problems, specific expressions for meetings/jobs, understanding
English spoken fast, and understanding various pronunciations were relatively salient, whichis in accordance with the above observation that English proficiency plays a more importantrole in handling the tasks with relatively higher complexity in a real-time situation. The highmagnitude of problems of listening skill was pointed out in Rogerson-Revell (2007), where
she indicates that the increase of so-called BELF communication has made this problem moresalient. The same observation would be applicable to our study.
Finally, English proficiency would be mostly irrelevant to the improvement of
psychological/mental aspects of English business meetings except the problem directly causedby the lack of English proficiency (lack of confidence in their own English proficiency).
There is, however, a tendency that the correlations are relatively high in external meetingscompared with those of the other two types, which might indicate that the improvement ofEnglish proficiency can be of help in situations with some degree of psychological/mentalpressure.
Although our results indicated that BELF is also increasingly common in English
business meetings in Japanese companies as in other regions (Ehrenreich, 2010; Kankaanranta& Planken, 2010; Louhiala-Salminen et al., 2005), English proficiency seems to play animportant role in improving many aspects of business meetings in English in thosecompanies. The question is why this is so. Although we need to see individual cases withsome qualitative approach to answer this question, the linguistic environment of Japan, which
is usually categorized as English as a Foreign Language (EFL), would have caused thisdifference. As Figure 2 shows, B1 was the level that the most respondents estimated to be the73JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 56–77

level of their business sections/divisions. Another study that was conducted withapproximately 7,354 business persons shows that business persons in Japan consider B2 or C1
to be the minimum level that they need to achieve before conducting international businessnegotiation effectively (Koike & Terauchi, 2008, p. 42). Although this needs to be empirically
proven, it is probable that business persons in Japan think that there is a more substantial gap
between their current English proficiency and their future goal as compared with the thinkingof business persons in the European case studies about the gap of their own.
The present study has focused mainly on the relationship between English proficiency
and perceived difficulty/problems in business meetings using a quantitative approach.
However, obviously, further qualitative examination using the data of open questions from thequestionnaire or conducting follow-up interviews with questionnaire respondents is needed.
For spatial reasons, however, this part of the research will be the focus of a future study tofollow the present one.

Acknowledgement
This report is a product of the two-year joint research project of Japan Association of College
English Teachers (JACET) and The Institute for International Business Communication(IIBC) funded by IIBC. We would first like to thank Professor Hajime Terauchi of Takachiho
University for his general guidance and invaluable advice during the research. We also wish
to thank three IIBC members for various kinds of supports: Mineo Mitsuhashi, Naoko
Kitamura, and Daisuke Matsushima. We are also particularly grateful to two businessprofessionals, Homare Takenaka and Katsumasa Miyata for their constructive comments
throughout this project. We are also indebted to JACET ESP-SIG members nationwide for
their support and comments in the earlier stages of the research. Finally, we would like toexpress our sincere gratitude to two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their valuable74

Araki, T. et al.
Questionnaire Survey on Business Meetingscomments and suggestions. None of the above, however, is responsible for any remaining
errors in this paper, which are entirely our own.

Notes
1

We reached the “closed” group with the help of our direct acquaintances and businessclients in various business fields and several JACET ESP-SIG members who have various
backgrounds in terms of their relationships in the business communities. Although we did notselect the respondents to the questionnaire in a random or stratified manner, we still consider
that the group reflects a wide range of professionals in Japan’s business world to some degree.
The response rate of the “open” groups was very small as only 632 out of 267,228 responded
to the questionnaire. This is one of the reasons why we regard the open dataset secondary to
the closed one in the present study. However, we still have confidence in thinking that these
two groups offer a legitimate base for analysis, because there have been few surveys in thebusiness fields with around 1,000 participants from various business communities.
2

Cohen (1992) defines effect sizes for Pearson’s product-moment coefficient r in thefollowing way: r2 = .01 is a small effect; r2 = .09 is a medium effect; and r2 = .25 is a large
effect (Cohen, 1992, p. 157; see also Larson-Hall, 2010). Not knowing any other literature on
this topic that gives us a better indication of effect sizes of correlation, we will follow
Cohen’s definition here.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 78–104

Listening Comprehension Problems Among Two Different Groups
and the Degree of Effectiveness to Which a Listening Skill is Applicable to
Their Problems

Yumiko Gunshima
Fukuoka Institute of Technology

Abstract
This current study diagnoses listening problems in lower and higher groups of university
students. It also tries to examine whether any method is effective in overcoming theirproblems. The participants took an immediate listening recall test and several months later,
they did an equivalent reading test to compare how different these two comprehension modes
are. In this way, the two tests were used to check the extent to which their listening problems
were related to perceptional deficits. The data was analyzed and scored by using idea unit
analysis. As a result, there was a wide margin between listening and reading comprehension,
especially in the higher level group. Based on the former and latter parts of discrimination
rates, the former part of speech showed a significantly lower perception. To address thisproblem, a verb tense confirmation strategy was initiated to check whether it could contributeto improved listening comprehension in both groups. The results showed that the effect was
only favorable in the lower level group. Therefore effective listening strategies depending ona person’s level of proficiency will be needed for them to acquire appropriate listening skills.

Keywords: listening problems, speech perception

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Listening Comprehension Problems Among Two Different Groups

Introduction
In a native language, listening is the very first communicative project that all humanbeings are destined to engage in. We have familiarized ourselves with various types of speechand subtle differences in sounds between words. Due to these accumulated layers of our richlanguage experience, it is unlikely that we cannot understand what people say in our native
language. Since we have not learned how to listen solely through school education, we take it
for granted that we can listen.
However, it is a different story in a foreign language setting. Despite paying full
attention to aural input, foreign language learners may not fully understand what they hear.
Listening comprehension is far from complete compared to reading comprehension even after
many years of language learning. Because of its uncontrollable and unexpected nature,foreign language learners place listening comprehension as the most difficult skill of all the
areas (Field, 2009; Vandergrift, 2004). Yet, listening takes a longer time for communication
than any other language skill (Gilman & Moody, 1984). What we say depends on what wehear. If we cannot listen well, we will not be able to fully participate in our communicative
activity in a meaningful way. Furthermore, listening time increases as the school years
advance (Feyten, 1991). Considering the fact that listening is the learning skill with thelongest time we are involved with, poor listening skills will surely narrow our further
opportunities to learn even in academic fields. It is obvious that greater listening ability is thegreat supplier for speaking, reading, and writing.
In this paper, I try to explore possible ways to help learners’ listening deficiencies. In
order to help learners to become more effective in listening, we first need to know how
acoustic input can be developed into meaningful interpretation, and at which stage of listening
comprehension, problems may occur. Knowing specific problems at each listening
comprehension stage can give us a hint to help learners.

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Literature Review
Listening Comprehension Problems
Goh (2000) identified 10 listening problems among EFL listeners based on three stagesof listening model, namely, perception, parsing, and utilization proposed by Anderson (1995).
In the perceptional stage, learners segment acoustic input into words. Then, in parsing, thenext phase, words are formed in light of grammatical knowledge. Finally, meaning is built
based on the knowledge and experience learners have. In Goh’s study, half of the problems
that students reported in their diaries are related to the perception level, which is the first stageof listening comprehension. Roughly speaking, two problems are posed when we think ofperception deficits. Firstly, lack of vocabulary; learners do not have enough word knowledge
to cover the text to which they are listening. In this case, expanding vocabulary should beprioritized to overcome the problem. Secondly, phonological problems; learners cannot
recognize the words they hear. This second problem is probably the main reason that makes
EFL learners feel that listening is much harder than reading, claiming that they cannot
recognize words they know. It is reported that more than 75% of lower-intermediate learners
cannot recognize many common words in an authentic narrative story (Field, 1998).

Difference Between Reading and Listening Abilities
Unlike reading, listening is quite a shaky ability for many EFL learners who have spentmuch time for learning vocabulary and grammar. In other words, it implies that knowledge ofvocabulary and grammar does not affect listening ability so much. This unbalanced ability
between listening and reading surely can dampen learners’ motivation. Evidence shows thatthough grammatical knowledge and vocabulary are significantly correlated with listening,they are not strong predictors to account for variance in listening comprehension (Mecartty,
2000; Vandergrift, 2006). Whereas, there has been ample evidence that vocabulary is strongly
correlated with reading (e.g., Laufer, 1992). Furthermore, in the study of van Zeeland and80

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Listening Comprehension Problems Among Two Different Groups

Schmitt (2013), non-native speakers arrived at 75% correct rates on the listening test withmultiple choices for a passage with word coverage around 90%. It would be assumed that
their actual understanding of the text would be much lower if those listeners were asked toshow what was actually said.
One disadvantage in listening is its uncontrollable nature. Learners can control reading,but not listening. In written English, each word is entitled to stand on its own in a piece oftext. Unrestricted power of freedom is given to readers if time permits. It is readers’ own
decisions and intentions as to how much attention span is directed to a particular piece of text.
So readers can skim or skip where in-depth understanding is not required. They stay in a part
where perusal is necessary. Readers can adjust their reading techniques to meet theirdemands. Even less skilled readers tend to pull together content words such as nouns, verbs,
and adjectives out of the sentence to build the meaning, ignoring function words. This maylead to successful meaning building in reading to some extent. However, that is not the case inlistening. In listening, absence of function words can create a difference in meaning. Even one
preposition and one auxiliary verb are critical to meaning building (Field, 2009). This
happens in about a second, so instantaneous judgment is necessary to achieve accuratecomprehension.
Another disadvantage is its unpredictable nature. Utterance can be changed dependingon the phonological conventions. In spoken English, each word is not pronounced in the samehierarchy. It is rather connected to one another (assimilation) or some sounds are dropped(elision) in natural speech. Therefore, EFL learners frequently perceive a few words as if they
are like one word, or vice versa (Field, 2008; Wu, 1998). These phonetic variations aredefinitely the most difficult obstacle for EFL learners when they recognize aural input. In fact,
assimilation does contribute to listening comprehension breakdown (Koster, 1987). The
phonological aspects of English are very natural to native speakers but very problematic to
EFL learners in Japan. We rarely have a chance to learn the spoken manners through our81

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 78–104

English classes at school. Listening instruction based on phonological features is one of themost important but most ignored areas in English education. Considering the limited time tolearn English in an EFL setting like Japan, acquiring phonetic discrimination skills should beundertaken in the first place.

Two Ways of Processing in Listening
When we try to understand spoken input, two types of processing are used. One is topdown processing based on pre-existing knowledge. Another is bottom-up processing based on
decoding linguistic input (Tsui & Fullilove, 1998). In much of listening comprehension, there
has been a general consensus that a good combination of top-down and bottom-up processes
is vital for successful listening (e.g., Vandergrift, 2004). However, it is extremely difficult tomake this happen especially for less skilled listeners. It should be aimed for, but the actual
situation that most EFL listeners are facing is not such an ideal one. The share of either one or
the other over two processes is quite dependent on the purpose of listening and the learners’
language proficiency. If a question asks you to answer the main idea of the passage, you may
use more of the top-down process. On the other hand, if a question asks you to answer a
specific item, the bottom-up process may be more active.
Language proficiency can also affect how well these two processes can be integrated(Bacon, 1992; Vandergrift, 1997). The shift and dominance over one way or the other isdirectly linked to a learner’s listening comprehension rate of the ongoing spoken message(Tsui & Fullilove, 1998). If learners have no problem about what they are listening to byusing bottom-up processing, top-down processing may serve as a supplement to refine andedit their comprehension. However, if they stumble with incoming data, they rely more on
top-down processing to compensate for missing parts of the spoken message. This biased useof processing could lead to information distortion especially among less skilled listeners(Bacon, 1992; Field, 2004; Long, 1990; Wu, 1998). This is exactly the problematic part about

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top-down dependency. As Long (1990) indicated, affluent background knowledge could harm
listening comprehension by adding what is not actually stated. Tsui and Fullilove (1998) also
report that comprehension rates drop when listeners face a text contradicting general schema.
Less skilled listeners jump onto a conclusion without judging what is heard in light of topdown knowledge (Bacon, 1992; Graham, Santos, & Vanderplank, 2008; Wu, 1998). In orderto build a successful interpretation, listeners are required to constantly adjust initialinterpretation according to the subsequent input (Field, 2008; Tsui & Fullilove, 1998).
Continuous negotiation of meaning has to be made as they listen along. In this sense, the roleof bottom-up processing is indispensable for precise understanding of the whole message.
Enhancing bottom-up skills will surely contribute to overall listening comprehension ability.
Therefore, it is highly meaningful to explore whether there is any tactic available to learners
and whether it is effective to overcome their perceptional problems.

MethodResearch Questions
In this paper, I tried to investigate the following things:
1. To identify listening problems among two different levels of learners.
2. To investigate whether a strategy appeared to be suitable to them is effective.

Diagnostic Approach to Probing Listeners’ Comprehension Problems
In order to help EFL learners with their problems, a diagnostic approach for assessing
them was adopted in this study. Therefore, the nature of this study is quite exploratory.
Outcomes from this study have to be turned for future study. Teaching learners how to listen
is very difficult and in addition care needs to be taken. Teaching strategies only limited tocertain tasks or without any links to real life listening should be avoided. Otherwise, it would
be a waste of time teaching and learning. Therefore, a learners’ listening ability must be

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assessed by using an appropriate test method suitable to what a researcher wants to reveal. In
this respect, choosing an appropriate test method is significant. It dictates task demands and alearners’ cognitive processes, which directly affects the reliability and validity of the test
(Buck, 1991). In this study, immediate written recall in learners’ L1 for assessing listening
ability was adopted to assess the rate of the meaning building, which is the final phase of thelistening comprehension process. Knowing learners’ cognitive processes in real time can give
us a clear description of what is not perceived by the learners. It is assumed that this method
can contribute to providing appropriate help to the learners.

Research Design 1
In order to determine listening problems as well as learners degree of comprehension, I
asked participants to listen to a piece of the material and to write everything in Japanese, thatis, what they thought they had understood. Every time they wrote, 20 seconds were given tothem. Five months later from this test to avoid the test effects, they took the reading test
which was exactly the same passage as the listening test. The same phrases and sentences in
the listening tests were projected through the PowerPoint on a screen, for only the samelength of time as they were given in the listening test. Each sentence on the screen
disappeared after the same duration as the utterance time. For example, the first sentence inthe listening script was Norman loves sports. The utterance time was two seconds. So it was
projected on the screen for two seconds. One of the notable differences between listening andreading is the time required for processing either spoken or written input. In listening, speechrate is considered to be one of the major variables affecting comprehension degree (Griffiths,
1992). In reading, returning to the point where comprehension has not been complete ispossible. Skipping easy parts also can occur. Attention and time allotment are easilyadjustable to a reader’s intention. In my research, I tried to eliminate those factors arisingfrom different comprehension manners that would probably affect the difference of the scores

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in listening and reading. By comparing two scores on the same piece of text under equal time
given, I tried to assess whether their listening problems originated from a lack of word
knowledge or sound discrimination skills.
Participants. This study included 16 lower level (second year) and 28 lowerintermediate level (first year) university students. Originally, there were 28 lower and 33
lower-intermediate students in the study. Because it took almost six months to complete thedata collection across the first and second semesters, more than 15 students dropped out fromthe research. Moreover, they had to take five different tests along the way, the numbers of thelower and the lower-intermediate students were reduced to 16 and 28, respectively.
Before conducting the study, they took the EIKEN Grade Pre-2 test to define theirlistening proficiency levels. The EIKEN test is a widely used English test in Japan ranging
from fifth to first grade. The mean score of the lower-intermediate group was 17.3 out of 30
and the lower group score was 9.53. The lower-intermediate group mean score wassignificantly higher than the lower group: t(42) = 7.75, p < .01. The margin between the twoscores was quite large, so the two groups were labeled as the higher group (HG) and the lower
group (LG), respectively in this study.
Material. In this study, the material was composed of three passages adopted from alistening section of the EIKEN Grade Pre-2 tests. Those passages were different from theones used in the previous test for defining the two groups. The first passage was 24 seconds
comprising 50 words, the second one was 27 seconds comprised of 59 words, and the last one
was 27 seconds comprising 60 words (see Appendix A). Overall, the passages were deliveredat the speed of 125 to 133 words per minute. The average speech rate was considered to be
slow (e.g., Griffiths, 1992). Each story did not require any background knowledge.
Data analysis. Listening and reading protocols were scored based on the idea unit
analysis (Carrell, 1985). Carrell states as follows:

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Each unit idea consisted of a single clause (main or subordinate, including adverbial
and relative clauses). Each infinitival construction, gerundive, nominalized verb phrase,and conjunct was also identified as a separate idea unit. (p.737)
Based on the guidelines, each item was scored as either right or wrong. Any partial
credits were not given to the units. After scoring the protocols, I discovered a problem thatwas not clearly revealed with this rule. In the passages, persons’ names (Norman, Rob, Mrs.
Peterson) were extremely less recognized than the other units. Because of this, single clauseunits including a person’s name in the data showed low percentages of the correct answers.
One of the major interests in this study was to reveal specific problems of learners’ listening
comprehension. Against the Carrell’s system, I decided to count a person’s name as one unit
in my data.
Thus, each answer sheet was analyzed twice by the author, with one month intervals(Sakai, 2009). The rate of the agreement for each case was more than 98%. With respect tothe items in disagreement on two occasions, the markings in the second one were adopted. As
Table 1 and 2 show, there was a large difference between listening and reading
comprehension with quite high Cronbach’s α ranging from .81 to .99. As a result, there was ahuge difference between listening and reading ability in both the HG and the LG. Even
though the same time was allocated for both listening and reading, the degrees ofcomprehension in the two modes varied.
The results from both the listening and reading tests indicated that even the words orphrases learners would have surely known in reading were unrecognized in listening. The
comprehension rates in two modalities in both groups are so divided. Right after the reading
test five months later from the listening test, I asked both groups whether the contents of thepassages were familiar to them. None of the learners in the LG remembered that they had
listened to the texts before. In the HG, only three learners reported that the passages were alittle familiar to them, but their memory was not clear enough to affect reading scores.

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Table 1
Descriptive Statistics of the Listening Immediate Recall Test
Mean (%)

SD

Cronbach’s α

HG (n = 28)

20.29 (32.73%)

7.89

.93

LG (n = 16)

9.38 (15.13%)

6.20

.94

Note. The full score of the test is 62. HG = higher group; LG = lower group.

Table 2
Descriptive Statistics of the Reading Immediate Recall Test
Mean (%)

SD

Cronbach’s α

HG (n = 28)

36.93 (59.56 %)

6.93

.81

LG (n = 16)

17.00 (27.42%)

10.57

.99

Note. The full score of the test is 62. HG = higher group; LG = lower group.

In sum, as we can see from the Table 1 and 2, 27% out of 59% correct answers inreading in the HG and 12% out of 27% those in the LG did not lead to meaning building due
to perceptional problems. Surprisingly, both groups of learners did not discriminate almost
half the known words and phrases in listening. As Field (2008) pointed out, these results
indicated that the learners failed to match what they heard with their known words.
Then, I looked for units with large differences in scores both listening and reading in
the two groups. It seemed very important to know what kind of known words could not beperceived in listening. Knowing their perceptional breakdown of their known words would bea shortcut to appropriate guidance for them. Then, 12 units with the widest margins inlistening and reading tests from the top were picked. Because there are units in the sameranking, 12 units are listed instead of 10 units as shown on Table 3 and 4.

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Table 3
Top 12 Units with Large Difference Between Listening and Reading Scores in the LG
No.

Unit

L (%)

R (%)

Dif (%)

1

Norman

0.00

68.75

68.75

2

loves sports

25.00

81.25

56.25

9

Norman

0.00

56.25

56.25

20

Rob

0.00

56.25

56.25

3

He likes

18.75

62.50

43.75

13

He needs

6.25

50.00

43.75

58

Ms. Peterson

0.00

37.50

37.50

4

to swim

62.20

93.75

31.25

11

important exams

0.00

31.25

31.25

19

after his exams

0.00

31.25

31.25

31

Rob

0.00

31.25

31.25

43

Ms. Peterson

0.00

31.25

31.25

Mean (%)/12 units

9.38

52.60

43.22

Mean (%)/62 units

15.12

26.81

11.69

Note. No. = unit number (see Appendix A); L = listening immediate recall test (percentage
score); R = reading immediate recall test (percentage score); Dif = difference of percentages
between tests.

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Listening Comprehension Problems Among Two Different Groups

Table 4
Top 12 Units with Large Difference Between Listening and Reading Scores in the HG
No.

Unit

L (%)

R (%)

Dif (%)

1

Norman

10.71

92.85

82.14

19

after his exam

3.57

75.00

71.43

22

to drive

14.28

85.71

71.43

21

started learning

0.00

71.42

71.42

20

Rob

14.28

82.14

67.86

33

to pay

0.00

64.28

64.28

28

but then

21.42

82.14

60.72

32

decided

14.28

75.00

60.72

2

loves sports

28.57

89.28

60.71

26

from his father

14.28

71.42

57.14

11

important exams

0.00

53.57

53.57

49

did not want to go

7.14

60.71

53.57

Mean (%)/12 units

10.71

75.29

64.58

Mean (%)/62 units

32.72

59.56

26.84

Note. No. = unit number (see Appendix A); L = listening immediate recall test (percentage
score); R = reading immediate recall test (percentage score); Dif = difference of percentages
between tests.

Comparing 12 units with large differences in scores, interesting phenomena emerged.
The mean listening scores of 12 units in both groups are much lower than the mean listening
scores of the total 62 units. Likewise, their equivalent reading scores in 12 units are muchhigher than their mean reading scores of the total 62 units. These extremely different
comprehension degrees indicate that more difficult words or phrases in listening are not

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necessarily difficult to discriminate in reading. They are rather lexically and syntacticallyeasier. Moreover, the HG has a much wider margin in listening and reading abilities.
However, the problems that the two groups face appeared to be different and various.
The two groups had only four out of 12 units in common. None of the learners in the LG
could recognize persons’ names in the first appearance. They could not perceive Rob (No. 31)
even when it appeared a second time. In the LG, nine out of 12 units were either subjects or
subjects and verbs. This tendency may be caused by memory loss. Since less skilled learners
have a limited working memory (Vandergrift, 2004), they may have forgotten the first part ofspeech by the time they wrote their answers. Or the first part of speech may be phoneticallymore difficult to discriminate than the other parts. On the other hand, in the HG those 12 mostdifficult units were seen everywhere in the sentences regardless of the former or latter
locations. Considering the quite high level of understanding in those units in reading among
the HG, their problems may have been mainly caused by lack of phonetic discrimination
skills. There seemed to be a tendency that subjects and verbs were more difficult todiscriminate than objects and other parts among the LG. All the units were divided into either
the former part; subjects and verbs or the latter part; objects, adverbial phrases, infinitives,and others. In order to confirm whether there was any significant difference between theformer and the latter parts, a series of t tests were conducted as shown in Table 5.

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Table 5Former– Latter Part of Sentence Recognition
Former (%)

Latter (%)

t

Significance

LG-Listening

7.11

22.15

t(14) = 6.16

p < .001

HG-Listening

24.24

40.26

t(26) = 7.07

p < .001

LG-Reading

30.38

24.24

t(14) = 2.19

p < .050

HG-Reading

61.57

59.42

t(26) = 1.28

n.s.

Note. HG = higher group; LG = lower group.

As a result, there were significant differences between the former and latter parts inlistening in the LG and HG: t(14) = 6.16, p < .001; t(26) = 7.07, p < .001, respectively. On thecontrary, a significant difference between the former and latter parts in reading
comprehension was only shown in the LG: t(14) = 2.19, p < .05. In the HG, there was no
significant difference between the former–latter distinctions in reading: t(26) = 1.28, n.s.
These differences between the former and latter reading parts show that the HG have morecapacity to oversee the whole sentence and grasp the meaning within the limited time,
whereas in the LG, time runs out before they arrive at the last word by reading a few words at
a time from left to right.
Furthermore, the listening comprehension rates in the former parts are apparently
different from the ones in reading in both groups; 7% vs. 30% and 24% vs. 62%, respectively.
The results suggest that these learners used different ways of processing in listening andreading. Considering the wider margins between listening and reading comprehension rates inboth groups, the former parts are more difficult to decode in listening. Probably, the words inthe former parts have more sound variations than the latter parts. It is assumed that thelearners in both groups in this study cannot deal with phonetic variations. Summarizing allthese issues, I came to the conclusion that these groups of students lack decoding skills to91

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 78–104

segment subjects and verbs. Their extremely low scores in the former part of speech directly
would have led to the poor comprehension degree of each sentence. It is assumed that theywould not have been able to understand the whole passages in the end.
Taking both learners’ problems into consideration, it appeared to me that paying extra
attention to verb tenses while listening may be effective in subject and verb segmentation. It
may be familiar to some of the students through their language learning. It does not require
any concrete strategy instruction under guidance. One of the difficult things in strategy
training is to confirm whether a learner has actually used an instructed strategy. It is quite
questionable as to whether or not the score gain in the post-test results from using it. In orderto maximize the use of the strategy as well as to verify its actual use, I decided to ask learners
to choose either one of the three tenses, namely, past, present, and future, every time theylistened to a sentence.

Research Design 2
The sentences for the pre-test and the post-test are 15, respectively. Past, present, andfuture sentences with forms of affirmative, interrogative, and negative contraction wereequally but randomly placed in both tests (see Appendix B and C). Time expressions which
can specify tenses were excluded from the test items because these tests were conducted tomake sure that perceptional decoding skills to segment subject and verb could be enhanced bypaying extra attention to a verb tense each time. All the sentences were read by an American
male English teacher. They were read as naturally as possible. Each sentence had from six toten words at most. Overall, the average speed of delivery was 150 to 165 words per minute. It
was somewhat faster than the previously conducted listening recall test in this study, but
considered to be a little slower than the medium speech rate in the listening literature (e.g.,
Griffiths, 1992).

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As a pre-test, participants listened to 15 sentences and wrote the first three words ofeach sentence. Each proficiency group was equally divided into two groups, either control orexperimental based on their scores; the LG, M = 10.93 (SD = 3.67) and the HG, M = 18.85(SD = 6.02). The following week, both the lower and higher control groups listened to another15 different sentences and wrote the first three words in the same manner they did theprevious week. The experimental groups in both the LG and HG also took the same test as thecontrol groups. The only difference was that each time the experimental groups checked thetense of each sentence out of the three: past, present, and future as seen in Figure 1.

Write the first three words of what you heard and check one of three tenses (for theexperimental groups).
過去・ 現在・ 未来
Example

He

won’t

buy

past

present

futureWrite the first three words of what you heard (for the control groups).
Example

He

won’t

buy

Figure 1. Examples from the post-test. The above example is a test with tense confirmation
check for the experimental groups. The second example is a test without tense confirmation
check for the control groups.

As to marking, 1 or 0 point was given per word based on either right or wrong. I did notgive any partial credit for each answer like the previous listening and reading recall tests toassess the complete perception rate in the first part of speech.

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Results
Table 6 and Figure 2 show the effect of confirming verb tense to higher and lower
proficiency learners. The results suggested that there was a significant difference between themean scores of the LGs: t(14) = 2.22, p < .05, showing a mild effect size (d = .51). Verb tense
confirmation strategy did affect the score gain in listening for the LG, whereas the scores ofthe HGs did not create any difference: t(26) = 0.41, n.s. Thus, the effects of verb confirmation
facilitated the LG. Although the participants in the LG were only 16, the mild effect (d = .51)of the verb confirmation strategy was somewhat promising. It also indicates that this strategy
is easy for the LG to incorporate, considering the fact that only a one-time application brought
its effect without any concrete guidance.
Unfortunately, it obviously did not contribute to segmenting subject and verb in the
HG. This strategy may have been familiar to the HG. Although the HG also had problems
concerning subject and verb segmentation, their problems were different types and levels
from ones in the LG. They may not be resolved by this simple strategy. It might be necessarythat other strategies rather than paying extra attention to verb tense will be needed for the HG.

Table 6
Effect of Verb Tense Confirmation While Listening
Control

ExperimentaltpEffect size

LG

14.00
(2.93)

18.25(3.54)

2.22

< .05

d = .51

HG

22.50(4.99)

23.93(3.65).410.69

d = .00

Note. The full score is 45. The number in parentheses represents SD. HG = higher group; LG= lower group.

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LG‐CON (n = 8)

LG‐EXP (n = 8)

HG‐CON (n = 14) HG‐EXP (n = 14)

Figure 2. Mean percentage recognition rates of pre- and post- tests across LG and HG. LG
and HG indicate the lower group and the higher group, respectively. In addition, CON and
EXP indicate the experimental group and the control group, respectively.

Discussion
Both higher and lower proficiency learners exhibited extreme difficulty in the first partof speech in the immediate listening recall tests. One thing we have to consider is thatmemory loss affected written answers, especially for the LG. By the time they heard the lastpart of the sentence, they may have lost quite a lot of what they heard. Another possible
reason is that first parts of the sentences in the passages in this study are more phoneticallydifficult to discriminate than the latter parts. The first parts in this study include persons’names, pronouns, and verb conjugations, which tend to create more sound change. Bothgroups are powerless when they deal with those phonetic variations.
A tense confirmation strategy for segmenting subject and verb was favorable for theLG, but not for the HG. The HG may have already used that strategy or they may have got
used to this test style of writing the first three words. Since all the participants took similar

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tests in both the pre- and post- tests, the scores of the HGs may have been affected by the test
effects. From a different point of view, just writing the beginning parts of speech repeatedly
may be a positive effect in raising recognition among the HG learners.
Nevertheless, they need to acquire the skill to quickly understand formulaic chunking
words in the first part of speech. Among the HG, the perception rate of the first three words
just reached about 50%. The frequently used formulaic expressions such as I won’t go to …
and I want to … sound phonetically similar to EFL learners, but they are significantly
different in their meanings. Without a doubt, they greatly confuse EFL learners. If learners
can discriminate those phonetic variations, they are more likely to understand the message
instantly. Then, their language learning will accelerate. To make this happen, they have toknow the system of phonology and strategy instruction based on phonological tactics (Field,2009). They will also need to not only listen and understand what they hear but repeat it in thesame manner as it is spoken. A new phrase should be leaned and stored in their mental
lexicon as one loop with orthographic, semantic, and phonological aspects, so it would get
activated if either one of the three were assessed. Then, we might be able to fill the perception
gaps between reading and listening. Without having the three dimensional linkage for each
expression, automatized real time processing will not be acquired.
Considering the fact of only a one-time application and no actual demonstration ofstrategy instruction, confirming verb tense in every sentence while listening might bepromising to beginning learners. It would help those learners narrow down a possible tense ofa sentence and help them to match the sounds of a chunk of words with the most candidate
words they know. Less skilled listeners tend to put more value on what they hear (Tsui &Fullilove, 1998; Wu, 1998). It would be helpful to exclude unlikely words they tend to pickbased on the words they heard. Detailed micro strategies like this will be more beneficial tothem rather than aiming at using contextual cues and linguistic decoding at the same time.

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Since less skilled listeners’ working memories’ consumption is limited, their attention should
be primarily directed to the first part of speech, which will affect the outline of the sentence.

Conclusion
The wide margins between the first and latter parts of speech in listening was asurprising finding. Unlike academic texts, conversations and stories tend to have fewer
syllable words, such as pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and prepositions in the place of subject andverb. As Toya (2005) implies, it is more likely for less proficient learners to encounter
sentences starting with fewer syllable words such as I and she. When those words areconnected in natural speech, they are “easier to see, but harder to hear.”According to the results, tense confirmation strategy was favorable only for the LG, but
not for the HG. Confirming verb tenses is one of the effective strategies that lower proficiency
listeners can use. There would be more effective strategies for both lower and higher learners.
Speech perception in beginning parts would be probably a problematic area for many EFL
learners even after many years of language learning. This is definitely one of the mostimportant areas that teachers have to tackle. The ability to segment subject and verb would
not be earned easily. Frequent formulaic chunks of words and their corresponding sounds inconnected speech should be stored as inseparable companions in a learners’ spoken repertoire.
Otherwise, gaps between listening and reading will not be bridged. Listening instruction
should put more emphasis on step by step decoding skills incorporating phonetic elements
especially for lower listeners (Vandergrift, 2004; Wilson, 2003). As Goh’s (2000) findings
show, many problems in the low level listeners in this study lie in their perceptional deficits.
Finally, there are some limitations in this research. Firstly, the scale of the research is
too small. The interpretation of the results needs caution due to the small numbers ofparticipants. For the next research, more participants should be included in this type of
medium-term research for unexpected dropouts. Secondly, more precise analysis of listening

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problems based on phonetic conventions such as assimilation and elision will be necessary.
Although the first part of speech is more difficult to discriminate, more precise investigationis necessary as to what are the key variables that make listening much harder. Thirdly, there
should be more effective strategies relevant to learners’ problems. In this study, the effect of
only one strategy, namely, the verb confirmation strategy, was examined. There would be
more promising strategies to help their difficulties. To raise their awareness of the relationshipconcerning written words and their corresponding sounds, matching a piece of aural input
with one out of a few candidate chunking words might be an effective activity for both lowerand higher groups. In future research, the effects of multiple strategies depending on levels of
proficiency should be carefully explored.

Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges anonymous reviewers with deepest gratitude for giving theinsightful comments on an early version of this paper. Any flaws and errors in this article
solely lie with the author.

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Appendix A: Listening and Reading Immediate Recall Tests

Passage 1
1. Norman

2. loves sports.// (3sec)

3. He likes

4. to swim

6. and he plays

7. for his high school’s football team.// (4sec)

8. Next month,

9. Norman

13. He needs

5. every morning.// (3sec)

10. has to take11. important exams

12. at school.// (5sec)

14. to study hard.// (2sec)

15. So he cannot go swimming

16. this month.// (3sec)

17. He is looking forward to swimming 18. again 19. after his exams.// (5sec)

Passage 2
20. Rob

21. started learning

22. to drive// (3sec)

23. when he was 18 years old.// (3sec)
24. At first,

25. he learned

28. but then

29. his father became too busy

31. Rob

32. decided

36. and he passed his test

26. from his father

33. to pay

27. for free,// (4sec)

30. to teach him.// (4sec)

34. for lessons

35. at a driving school,// (5sec)

37. six weeks later.// (3sec)

38. Now 39. he drives his father 40. Sometimes 41. to work 42. in the morning.// (5sec)

Passage 3
43. Ms. Peterson

44. went to Hawaii// (3sec)

45. with her daughter and grandchildren

46. last summer.// (3sec)

47. At first,

49. did not want to go// (4sec)

48. Ms. Peterson

50. because she had never been

51. on an airplane

53. and was afraid of flying.// (2sec)

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54. But after she saw

55. some pictures of Hawaii// (4sec)

56. She decided

57. to go.// (2sec)

58. Ms. Peterson

59. found// (2sec)

60. that she enjoyed

61. the flight

62. and her trip to Hawaii.// (5sec)

Note. // is the place where pause was inserted and ( ) is the length of the utterance.

Appendix B: Recorded Sentences for the Pre-test
1

I’ll give you back your money and present2

Did she get up early yesterday morning?

3

He brushes his teeth after breakfast

4

Did he have to take the test again?

5

I won’t go there by ten.

6

Does he read a newspaper every morning?

7

They didn’t send the document by email.

8

I didn’t meet any interesting people at school.

9

We won’t do our homework at home.

10

They’ll find something interesting during the vacation.

11

She goes to church every Sunday.

12

Does he go out with Amy on Sundays?

13

Did they take many pictures of the animals?

14

Does she teach English at high school?

15

We’ll clean our house before our friends come over.

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Appendix C: Recorded Sentences for the Post-test
1

He won’t buy food and drinks at the store.

2

She needs your help for this project.

3

He wants you to go there tonight for him.

4

They won’t run in the park in the morning.

5

She’ll be back by 7 o’clock.

6

She won’t take gifts to her grandfather.

7

I didn’t take many courses this year.

8

He didn’t use a computer to make his report.

9

She takes her son to the zoo every year.

10

Did you know about that accident in this town?

11

We didn’t have a party at our grandmother’s house.

12

Did we bring all the textbooks to school?

13

Does she take this train in the morning?

14

Does he have any ideas about the party?

15

He’ll meet you at the station at three.

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Verification of the Effects of Remedial Education
Aimed at Improving Students’ Basic English Ability

Shuji Hasegawa
Uekusa Gakuen University
Taichi Ochiai
Showa Gakuin Senior High School

Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to verify the effects of remedial education aimed at
improving students’ basic ability of English at Uekusa Gakuen University. The subjects werestudents who belonged to the lowest 10% of each grade in English ability, from freshmen toseniors. The contents of each class were a series of learning activities, involving listening,
vocabulary, grammar, and extensive reading. Under the small class system, each grade wasinstructed by the use of “a fresh learning method” and “a discovery method.” To verify theeffects, the students were administered a pre- and post-test, along with a pre- and postquestionnaire. The results revealed the following: (a) on English proficiency, the positiveeffect had been yielded not only in individual grades but also across all grades; (b) in each
grade’s attitudes toward English, it was suggested that the students had gained a normal
attitude toward English learning in accordance with their developmental stages; (c) in all
grades’ attitudes toward English, the students had acquired, more or less, a sense of selfefficacy, namely the belief that they can complete a given task, in this trial.

Key words: remedial education, instruction method, English proficiency,
attitudes toward English, self-efficacy

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Verification of the Effects of Remedial Education

Introduction
Recently in Japan, by a decrease in 18-year-old population, university entrance has
become popular and the selection methods for entrance examination diverse. As a result, thequalitative change of the freshmen and the academic ability difference among them have been
serious problems, to the extent that even the redefinition of the university as the educational
institution is demanded (Uchida, 2012, p. 41).
With the diversified selection methods, hereafter, it is expected that the decline in the
English ability of freshmen and the expansion of the English ability difference among themwill be accelerated in universities (Chujo, Yokota, Hasegawa, & Nishigaki, 2012, p. 49). In
order to achieve the original aims of specific classes at universities, therefore, it is an
important issue to devise the way to practice “remedial education” mainly on “the reeducation” of the high school stage (ibid., p. 49).
Uekusa Gakuen University, where the first author teaches English, is no exception to
the description given above. In 2012, the university was obliged to start remedial education inorder to improve all of the students’ basic ability of English. As the first step, focusing on thestudents who were in the lowest level of English ability, the number of subjects was restricted
to 10% of each grade. Related to this trial, the purpose of the present study was to verify theeffects of remedial education aimed at the improvement of the students’ basic ability ofEnglish at Uekusa Gakuen University.

Study of the Literature
As a technique to tackle remedial English education, Sakai (2011) claims the following
three points: (a) to let the applicable students learn English grammar, (b) to let them be
independent, and (c) to encourage them to use the interlanguage. The first point is based on
the fact that those who have low command of English are poor at sorting English words into agrammatical order in composition (Sakai, Ishige, & Nishimura, 2005). The second point

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results from the fact that those who have low performance of English are lacking in a sense of
self-efficacy, namely a feeling of oneself being able to complete a given task (Sakai &Takagi, 2009), with the ability for meta-recognition about English learning (Sakai et al.,2010). And the third point derives from an interview with Japanese Nobel prize winners(“Noberu-kagakusho jusho-kinen,” 2010) in which the scientists stress the importance ofbeing allowed to use English without being afraid of making mistakes.
Concerning the instruction of English grammar, Ano (2009) asserts that many of thestudents needing the remedial education have a strong negative reaction to the learning ofEnglish grammar and also to the technical terms used in explanation (p. 35). To diminish thereaction, Chujo, Yokota, et al. (2012) report that, utilizing the findings of the corpus
linguistics, they are developing teaching materials along with instruction methods for
remedial-level learners (p. 49). The new approach is based on Ono (2005), which maintains
that it is important for remedial education to incorporate “a fresh learning method” and also “adiscovery method.” The former means a method students have not experienced in highschool. And the latter is a method “whereby students are permitted to find solutions toproblems on their own or at their own pace, often jointly in group activities, either
independent of or under the guidance of a teacher” (“Discovery method,” n.d.).
As for the independence of the students, Kiyota (2011) contends that it is necessary forthe instructor not only to prepare appropriate teaching materials according to the students’degree of achievement, but also to let them realize the value of English learning and then todevise a method to motivate them (p. 31). Referring to the results of his research (Kiyota,
2010), Kiyota (2011) furthermore maintains that the main characteristic of mid- and lowranking university students in their English ability is having “no confidence in selfexpression,” in addition to carrying “uneasiness over building personal relationships” (p. 32).
According to Kiyota (2011), the personal relationships include those between students andinstructors as well as those of inter-students (p. 32).

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Verification of the Effects of Remedial Education

If the primary aim of English classes in the university is to foster English proficiency, it
goes without saying that “vocabulary” is an essential element. Meara (1996) claims that “allother things being equal, learners with big vocabularies are more proficient in a wide range oflanguage skills than learners with smaller vocabularies” (p. 37). Meara (ibid.) asserts then that“vocabulary skills make a significant contribution to almost all aspects of L2 proficiency” (p.
37). Folse (2004) also contends that “empirical studies have shown that good L2 readers,writers, speakers, and listeners have a more extensive vocabulary under their control” (p. 25).
Moreover, Schmitt (2010) maintains that “there is plenty of evidence pointing to theimportance of vocabulary in language use” (p. 4).
All of the reports cited above provide evidence of the features common to the learners
weak in English, both in their English proficiency and in their attitudes toward English.
However, none of these provide us with any evidence of successful results in experimentally
applying their analyses to practical instruction. Therefore, in tackling remedial English
education at Uekusa Gakuen University, it was thought to be a good opportunity to test the
specific elements asserted in these reports.
As far as we (the authors) investigated the previous studies related to ours, it was
impossible to find any trying to improve the students’ basic ability of English from freshmen
to seniors in a Japanese university. If restricted to studies of freshmen only, Chujo, Anthony,
Oghigian, and Uchibori (2012) reported the effectiveness of Data-Driven Learning (DDL),
through a comparative study of computer-based, paper-based, and combined type of
instruction using a parallel corpus for beginner-level students. As a limitation of this study,
the authors suggested that it might have been affected by the interest or skill of theparticipants, who were all engineering students. Therefore, if remedial education is to bepracticed incorporating DDL as “a fresh learning method” and “a discovery method,” thesubjects’ university majors have to be considered.

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Research Questions
The purpose of the present study was to verify the effects of remedial education aimed
at improving students’ basic ability of English at Uekusa Gakuen University. Considering thedetails about the subjects and also majors, the instruction was to be conducted incorporating
both “a fresh learning method” and “a discovery method.” In order to specify the purpose ofthis study, the following questions were asked:
1. Does this remedial education improve the students’ English proficiency?
2. Does this remedial education improve the students’ attitudes toward English?

MethodSubjects of the Remedial Education
The subjects of this study were the lowest 10% in English ability of each grade from
freshmen to seniors at Uekusa Gakuen University. Their majors were either education or
health sciences. To select the subjects, a 30-minute English proficiency test based on EIKEN
written test, Grade Pre-2 (high-school graduates’ minimum level) was given to all of thestudents on the first day of the academic year 2012 in April. The resulting number of students
selected was 17 freshmen, eight sophomores, nine juniors, and eight seniors.

Class Style
To support individual students, the small class system of 20 or fewer students per class
was adopted, with one instructor allotted to each class.

Frequency of the Classes
Conforming to the regular course format, fifteen 90-minute classes were conducted in
the first semester for freshmen and seniors, and then in the second semester for sophomores
and juniors.

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Contents of Each Class
In order to help determine the contents of each class, the subjects were asked to write
their request about the class in a questionnaire on their attitudes toward English, administeredprior to the first class. Based on the comments, the contents of each class were mainlycomposed of a series of learning activities of Listening, Vocabulary, Grammar, and Extensive
Reading, in this order.
In Listening instruction, English songs were utilized. Listening to popular songs, thestudents were required to fill in blank spaces on sheets of lyrics with key words they wereable to hear.
In Vocabulary instruction, crossword puzzles were employed. The vocabulary used in
the puzzles was extracted from a vocabulary list of high frequency words, collected from all
the English textbooks for junior and senior high schools in Japan.
In Grammar instruction, original printed materials starting from a junior high schoollevel were adopted, along with paper-based Data-Driven Learning (DDL). With the printed
materials, the students were able to proceed at their own pace from their own individual level.
And with the paper-based DDL, the students were presented with a list of English sentences,and then required to find a specific grammatical rule from the list “on their own or at theirown pace, often jointly in group activities, either independent of or under the guidance of ateacher” (“Discovery method,” n.d.).
In Extensive Reading instruction, the students were urged to read their favorite books
from the easier level to the more difficult level at their own pace. To develop a more rapid
reading ability, each student was advised to measure the Words Per Minute (WPM) and thento record it on a graph. All the books were prepared by the instructor.
To promote confidence in self-expression, the students were individually encouraged to
introduce the contents of the books they found interesting in front of the class. At the same

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time, they were obliged to answer questions from their classmates either in English or, if
impossible, in Japanese. The interlanguage was permitted to use in this activity.
In all these activities, the instructor devoted himself to resolving the problems eachindividual student was facing. To let each student be independent, the instructor adopted only
a supporting role to deal with all matters.
All this instruction incorporated “a fresh learning method” and “a discovery method.”
In particular, the impression of being “fresh” was carefully considered so that the students
could participate in the class with positive attitudes, relieved from their negative feelings
toward the method adopted in high school, such as that prevalent in lecture-style explanation.
Typical examples of the “fresh” learning method included the adoption of the paper-based
DDL (see Appendix A) and the students introducing the contents of books that they had foundinteresting in front of the class (see Appendix B).

Evaluation Method for Determining “Passed” or “Not Passed”
The students’ performance on each activity was evaluated numerically, and their abilityof English attained under the remedial education was measured by a final examination in
English. If the total of these points met the required standard, the student was considered“Passed,” and if not, “Not Passed.”

Verification of the Effects of the Remedial Education
The verification of the effects of the remedial education was conducted both on thestudents’ English proficiency and on their attitudes toward English which could affect theirEnglish learning. The English proficiency was investigated by means of a pre- and post-test.
Utilizing the initial selection test as the pre-test, the identical test was administered to thestudents as the post-test at the final class. On the other hand, attitudes toward English were111

Hasegawa, S. & Ochiai, T.
Verification of the Effects of Remedial Education

surveyed by means of a pre- and post-questionnaire, which included identical question items.
The details of the test and the questionnaire were as follows:
English proficiency test. The English proficiency test was a 30-minute test based on
EIKEN written test, Grade Pre-2 (high-school graduates’ minimum level), concerning
vocabulary, grammar, and reading. It consisted of a total of 30 questions, each of which wascounted as a mark of 1, with a perfect score being a mark of 30.
Questionnaire. In order to analyze the attitudes toward English, the questionnaire forthis study was based on the basic matters stated in the Course of Study for Junior and SeniorHigh Schools (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, 1998, 1999).
Thus, the questionnaire included 13 items representing the fundamental feelings of thestudents about English. Each of the items was answered by means of a five-point Likert scale.
The five potential choices were “5 = strongly agree,” “4 = agree,” “3 = neutral,” “2 =disagree,” and “1 = strongly disagree.” The specific 13 items, related both to the four skills in
English and to the instructions practiced in this trial, were as follows:
1. I can understand what I’ve listened to in English.
2. I can speak English.
3. I can read English sentences.
4. I can write English sentences.
5. I can read English sentences rapidly.
6. I have confidence in individual English words.
7. I can understand English grammar.
8. I can communicate in English.
9. I like English.
10. I like English classes.
11. I like instruction in English grammar.
12. I’d like to be more proficient in English.

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13. I like reading English books, including Japanese books.

Results
The results of the tests and the questionnaires administered to the students are
summarized in the following sections separately. Because the number of the students who
attended both of the pre- and post-test, along with both of the pre- and post-questionnaire, wassmaller than expected, a non-parametric dependent test, i.e., Wilcoxon signed-rank test, wasapplied to the specific evaluation.

Tests on the English Proficiency
Table 1 shows the results of the pre- and post-test conducted on the students’ English
proficiency. Compared with the pre-test Mean-values, all the post-test Mean-values increasedby 3 to 6 points in each grade. Wilcoxon signed-rank test produced a statistical significance inthe freshmen (p < .01) and also in the juniors (p < .05). In the sophomores, the difference was
not at the level of significance but at the level of marginal significance (.05 < p < .10). In theseniors, although the difference was not significant, each student gained 6 points. In all grades(see the Total row in Table 1) from freshmen to seniors, the difference was statisticallysignificant (p < .01).

Questionnaires on Attitudes Toward English
Each grade. Table 2 presents the results of the pre- and post-questionnaire conductedon each grade’s attitudes toward English (see Appendix C, D, E, and F for complete resultsfor each grade). Because there was no item that showed a statistically significant difference
between the pre- and post-questionnaire, those items which produced marginal significance(.05 < p < .10) were listed. In Table 2, therefore, each item listed is a characteristic feelingwhich represents each grade’s attitudes. After the remedial education, the following specific113

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Table 1Results of the Pre- and Post-Test on the Students’ English Proficiency
Grade

Test

n

Mean

SD

Pre

13

5.23

0.73

4

6

Post

13

8.08

2.18

3

11

Pre

8

4.88

0.99

3

6

Post

8

7.88

3.27

3

13

Pre

6

5.33

0.82

4

6

Post

6

8.50

1.87

7

12

Pre

2

3.00

4.24

0

6

Post

2

9.00

4.24

6

12

Pre

29

5.00

1.25

0

6

Post

29

8.17

2.47

3

13

Minimum

MaximumFreshmen

Sophomores

Juniors

Seniors

Total

pZ-value

-2.85

.00**

-1.84

.07

-2.21

.03*

-1.41

.16

-4.18

.00**

Note. *p < .05, **p < .01.

Table 2
Results of the Pre- and Post-Questionnaire on Each Grade’s Attitudes Toward English
Grade

Item

Freshmen

I can speak English.

Sophomores

Juniors

Seniors

Question-naire

n

Mean

SD

Pre

15

1.80

0.86

Post

15

2.13

0.99

Pre

8

1.63

0.74

Post

8

2.00

0.54

Pre

4

3.25

0.50

Post

4

4.00

0.82

Pre

4

1.25

0.50

Post

4

2.50

0.58

I can read English
sentences.
I like reading English books,
including Japanese books.

I can read English
sentences rapidly.

Z-value

p

-1.89

.06

-1.73

.08

-1.73

.08

-1.89

.06

Note. The items listed are those which produced marginal significance (.05 < p < .10).

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feelings had increased: “I can speak English.” for the freshmen, “I can read English
sentences.” for the sophomores, “I like reading English books, including Japanese books.” forthe juniors, and “I can read English sentences rapidly.” for the seniors.
All grades. Table 3 provides the results of the pre- and post-questionnaire on all
grades’ attitudes toward English. As is apparent from this table, all of the Mean-values in the
post-questionnaire items are higher than those correspondents in the pre-questionnaire items.
Out of the 13 items, Wilcoxon signed-rank test produced a statistical significance in thefollowing three items (p < .05, respectively): “I can read English sentences rapidly.,” “I cancommunicate in English.,” and “I like instruction in English grammar.” Additionally,
marginal significance (.05 < p < .10) was produced in the following one item: “I like reading
English books, including Japanese books.”

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Table 3Results of the Pre- and Post-Questionnaire on All Grades’ Attitudes Toward English
No.

Item

1

I can understand what I’ve
listened to in English.

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

11

12

13

n

Mean

SD

Pre

31

2.19

1.11

Post

31

2.32

0.83

Pre

31

1.68

0.79

Post

31

1.87

0.80

Pre

31

2.32

1.14

Post

31

2.39

0.96

Pre

31

1.87

0.92

Post

31

1.94

0.89

Pre

31

1.65

0.99

Post

31

2.00

0.82

Pre

31

1.74

0.82

Post

31

1.84

0.97

Pre

31

1.65

0.80

Post

31

1.77

0.76

Pre

31

1.61

0.67

Post

31

1.87

0.76

Pre

31

2.32

1.22

Post

31

2.39

1.17

Pre

31

2.39

1.36

Post

31

2.58

1.18

Pre

31

1.68

0.91

Post

31

2.00

1.00

Pre

31

3.87

1.12

Post

31

3.97

0.95

Pre

31

3.39

1.31

Post

31

3.71

1.16

I can speak English.

I can read English sentences.

I can write English
sentences.
I can read English sentences
rapidly.
I have confidence inindividual English words.
I can understand English
grammar.
I can communicate inEnglish.

9

10

Questionnaire

I like English.

I like English classes.

I like instruction in English
grammar.
I’d like to be more proficientin English.
I like reading English books,
including Japanese books.

Note. *p < .05.

116

Z-value

p

-0.79

.44

-1.41

.16

-0.36

.72

-0.50

.62

-2.08

.04*

-1.00

.32

-1.27

.21

-2.13

.04*

-0.28

.78

-0.96

.34

-1.98

.05*

-0.63

.53

-1.85

.06

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 105–130

Discussion
Effects on the Students’ English Proficiency
As is shown in Table 1, the results of the pre- and post-test prove that this remedial
education brought a positive effect to the students’ English proficiency. The positive effectwas yielded not only in each grade but also in all grades.
The effect is presumed to have been caused by a series of learning activities of
Listening, Vocabulary, Grammar, and Extensive Reading, each practiced by “a fresh learning
method” (Ono, 2005), namely a new approach that the students had not experienced in highschool. Especially in Grammar instruction, which is important for those who have lowcommand of English (Sakai, 2011), adopting original printed materials starting from a juniorhigh school level, along with the paper-based Data-Driven Learning (DDL), proved
successful. The original printed materials were applicable to each student’s individual level,
and the paper-based DDL was an application of “a discovery method” (Ono, 2005), in which“students are permitted to find solutions to problems on their own or at their own pace, often
jointly in group activities, either independent of or under the guidance of a teacher”(“Discovery method,” n.d.).
Based on the comments written on the prior questionnaire by the students, the contentsof the instruction, although not intended for the preparation of the post-test, roughly
corresponded to the elements of the English proficiency test concerning vocabulary, grammar,
and reading. Consequently, fulfilling the students’ needs using “a fresh learning method,”along with “a discovery method,” is considered to have led to the positive effect on thestudents’ English proficiency.

Effects on Each Grade’s Attitudes
In Table 2, the results of the pre- and post-questionnaire presented a characteristic
feeling which represents each grade’s attitudes toward English. The freshmen reported they117

Hasegawa, S. & Ochiai, T.
Verification of the Effects of Remedial Education“can speak English.,” the sophomores “can read English sentences.,” the juniors “like reading
English books, including Japanese books.,” and the seniors “can read English sentences
rapidly.”
Typical criticism for English education in Japan is that we cannot speak English even if
we have learned English for a total of six years in junior and senior high schools (Kanatani,
2008, p. iii). However, focusing on English speaking, the freshmen’s feeling after the
remedial education shows a positive reaction to the item. Notably, it appears that the focus
changes from English speaking to English reading, when it comes to the sophomores. And as
the scholastic year progresses, it is thought that the students’ interest goes in the direction of
improving reading skills, starting from sentence reading and progressing to rapid reading. Allof these grade changes suggest to us that the students have gained a normal attitude toward
English learning in accordance with their developmental stages. It must be noted that this is
not a longitudinal research on a single group of students, following their growth year by year.

Effects on All Grades’ Attitudes
On all grades’ attitudes toward English, as is provided in Table 3, the results of the preand post-questionnaire yielded significant positive effects in the following three items: “I canread English sentences rapidly.,” “I can communicate in English.,” and “I like instruction in
English grammar.” Additionally, a marginally significant positive effect was produced in thefollowing one item: “I like reading English books, including Japanese books.”
In the students’ feeling that “I can read English sentences rapidly.,” the instruction
method to advise the students to measure their WPM and then to record it into a graph isthought to have contributed to the significant positive effect. Concerning Extensive Reading,urging the students to read their favorite books from the easier level to the more difficult levelat their own pace is also thought to have had the marginally significant positive effect on the
feeling that “I like reading English books, including Japanese books.”118

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In the feeling that “I can communicate in English.,” the significant positive effect ispresumed to have been brought about by the instruction method of encouraging the students
to introduce the contents of the books they found interesting in front of the class and then to
answer the questions from their classmates either in English or, if impossible, in Japanese.
Permission to use the interlanguage, as is claimed by Sakai (2011), is thought to have lowered
obstacles in the promotion of confidence in self-expression and in building personal
relationships with others (Kiyota, 2011).
In the feeling that “I like instruction in English grammar.,” the cause of the significant
positive effect is possibly attributable to the method of adopting original printed materials
starting from a junior high school level, along with the paper-based DDL, both of which are
already referred to in the section about the effects on the students’ English proficiency. Whilere-learning English grammar with the original printed materials, participating in a discussion
to discover a specific rule in a list of sentences is considered to have been a challenging
activity for the students as if they were researchers (Gaviori, 2001, p. 110).
According to Bandura (1977), expectations of self-efficacy, which is referred to in
Sakai (2011) and also in Sakai and Takagi (2009), are “based on four major sources of
information: performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, andpsychological states” (p. 195). Concerning the first factor, the subjects of this study are
considered to have felt a sense of accomplishment through the visualization of theirperformance, such as recording their WPM into a graph, in the class. On the second factor,
they have experienced “seeing others perform threatening activities” (Bandura, 1977, p. 197)
in front of the class. Relating to the third factor, the students have been encouraged by the
instructor’s suggestive advice. As to the fourth factor, they have been instructed under none of
the “stressful and taxing situations” (ibid., p. 197). Consequently, it is thought that thestudents have acquired a certain sense of self-efficacy, namely the belief that they cancomplete a given task, in this trial.

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Conclusion
The purpose of the present study was to verify the effects of the remedial education
aimed at improving the students’ basic English ability at Uekusa Gakuen University. To
complete the study, those who belonged to the lowest 10% of each-year students in theirEnglish ability were selected as subjects from freshmen to seniors. The contents of each classwere a series of learning activities involving Listening, Vocabulary, Grammar, and Extensive
Reading. Under the small class system, each grade was instructed by the use of “a fresh
learning method” and “a discovery method.” Verification of the effects was conducted bothon the students’ English proficiency and on their attitudes toward English. The results
revealed the following:
1. On English proficiency, in the comparison of the pre- and post-test, all the post-test Meanvalues increased by 3 to 6 points in each grade. Wilcoxon signed-rank test produced astatistical significance in the freshmen (p < .01) and also in the juniors (p < .05). In the
sophomores, the difference was not at the level of significance but at the level of marginal
significance (.05 < p < .10). In the seniors, although the difference was not significant,each student gained 6 points. In the all grades from freshmen to seniors, the difference
was statistically significant (p < .01). Accordingly, it was presumed that positive effecthad been yielded not only in each grade but also in all grades.
2. On each grade’s attitudes toward English, in the comparison of the pre- and postquestionnaire, no item showed any statistical significance. However, with the increased
Mean-values, those which produced marginal significance (.05 < p < .10) were thefollowing specific items: “I can speak English.” for freshmen, “I can read English
sentences.” for sophomores, “I like reading English books, including Japanese books.” forjuniors, and “I can read English sentences rapidly.” for seniors. Accordingly, thissuggested that the students had gained a normal attitude toward English learning inaccordance with their developmental stages.

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3. On all grades’ attitudes toward English, all of the Mean-values in the post-questionnaire
items were higher than those correspondents in the pre-questionnaire items. Wilcoxon
signed-rank test produced a statistical significance in the three items (p < .05,
respectively): “I can read English sentences rapidly.,” “I can communicate in English.,”and “I like instruction in English grammar.” Additionally, marginal significance (.05 < p< .10) was produced in the one item: “I like reading English books, including Japanesebooks.” Accordingly, it was thought that the students had acquired a certain sense of selfefficacy, namely the belief that they can complete a given task, in this trial.
To sum up, the positive effects were shown both on the students’ English proficiency
and on their attitudes toward English. Consequently, it can be said that the remedial education
practiced in this study was successful in improving the students’ basic ability of English not
only in their performance of English but also in their attitudes toward English. The cause of
the success is attributed especially to the adoption of “a fresh learning method” that thestudents had not experienced in high school and of “a discovery method” by which thestudents were encouraged to behave independently.
The limitations of this study are the following: Firstly, there were not a few missing
values in juniors and seniors when performing the statistical analyses, because some of thesubjects were obliged to go for student teaching on the day when the relevant test orquestionnaire was administered. Secondly, to get stable results statistically, it was desirable
for the number of the subjects in each grade to be balanced. Thirdly, to firmly assert thesuccess of this trial, a control group should have been prepared for comparison, but was not,owing to the limited number of instructors.
Taking these reservations into consideration, along with the findings of this trial,
another study will have to be carried out in order to confirm that the method adopted in thisstudy was effective. In conclusion, referring to the results of this trial, it is hoped that future
remedial education will be refined for the next stage in the university.

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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and also
constructive comments.

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Appendix A: Example of the Paper-Based DDL (Data-Driven Learning)

文法の復習 ― a と an [Review of the grammar: “a” and “an”]
Ｌｏｏｋ 上と下のリストを比較してください。a と an をどのようなルールで使い分けるのか発見しましょう。[Compare the upper list and the lower, and then discover a rule to properly use “a” and “an.”]
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5

Kabuki has
People think of polo as
Joy lives in
I saw
The photo of

1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5

Bob became
My sister bought
Tom sent
London is
Ann isaaaaaunique speaking style.
European game.
one-room house.
UFO in the sky.
15-year-old girl was found.

（
（
（
（
（

）
）
）
）
）

（
（
（
（
（

）
）
）
）
）

歌舞伎ではユニークな話し方をします。
人々はポロをヨーロッパの競技だと思っています。
ジョンはワンルームの住宅に住んでいます。
私は空 UFO を見ました。
15 歳の少女の写真が見つかりました。

an
an
an
an
an

unhappy man.
ＭＤ player last week.
SOS to his friends.
hour away by air.
11-year-old girl.

ボブは不幸な男になりました。
先週，姉はMD プレーヤーを買いました。
トムは友達に SOS を送りました。
ロンドンは空路で１時間です。
アンは 11 歳の少女です。

**************************************************************************************
ヒント 1 上下のリスト中の下線を引いた単語を発音して，最初の音を比較してください。
[Hint 1: Pronounce the underlined words in the upper list and the lower, and then compare the initial sound of eachword.]
ヒント 2 上で発音した音をリストの横の（）にカタカナで書きましょう。
[Hint 2: Write the pronounced sound in katakana in the parentheses located to the right side of each example
listed.]**************************************************************************************
Understand

上段のリストa の直後の単語の発音は[Upper list: The pronunciation of a word following “a” begins with a
下段のリストan の直後の単語の発音は[Lower list: The pronunciation of a word following “an” begins with aで始まっています。
sound.]
で始まっています。
sound.]

a と an のルール [Rule of “a” and “an”]☆ 直後の単語の最初の音が母音のときは（ a / an ）[Where the initial sound of the following word is a vowel, (a / an)]
☆ 直後の単語の最初の音が子音のときは（ a / an ）[Where the initial sound of the following word is a consonant, (a / an)]125

Hasegawa, S. & Ochiai, T.
Verification of the Effects of Remedial Education

Appendix B: Example of the Students Introducing the Contents of the Books
They Found Interesting in Front of the Class

Figure 1. Example of the books used in the activity.

Figure 2. Example of one of the students introducing the contents of a book he foundinteresting in front of the class.

126

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 105–130

Appendix C: Results of the Pre- and Post-Questionnaire on
the Freshmen’s Attitudes Toward English
No.

Item

1

I can understand what I’ve
listened to in English.

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Questionnaire

n

Mean

SD

Minimum

Maximum

Pre

15

2.60

1.12

1

4

Post

15

2.60

0.91

1

4

Pre

15

1.80

0.86

1

3

Post

15

2.13

0.99

1

4

Pre

15

2.87

1.19

1

5

Post

15

2.47

1.06

1

4

Pre

15

2.33

0.98

1

4

Post

15

2.27

1.03

1

4

Pre

15

2.13

1.19

1

5

Post

15

2.13

0.83

1

4

Pre

15

2.13

0.92

1

4

Post

15

2.13

1.06

1

5

Pre

15

1.87

0.92

1

4

Post

15

1.87

0.64

1

3

Pre

15

1.67

0.72

1

3

Post

15

1.93

0.80

1

3

Pre

15

2.67

1.40

1

5

Post

15

2.33

1.18

1

5

Pre

15

2.60

1.40

1

5

Post

15

2.60

1.18

1

5

Pre

15

1.73

0.70

1

3

Post

15

1.93

0.70

1

3

Pre

15

3.93

1.10

2

5

Post

15

3.93

0.96

2

5

Pre

15

3.80

1.27

1

5

Post

15

3.73

1.39

2

5

I can speak English.

I can read English
sentences.
I can write English
sentences.
I can read English
sentences rapidly.
I have confidence inindividual English words.
I can understand English
grammar.
I can communicate inEnglish.

I like English.

I like English classes.

I like instruction in English
grammar.
I’d like to be more
proficient in English.
I like reading English books,
including Japanese books.

127

Z-value

p

0.00

1.00

-1.89

.06

-1.51

.13

-0.38

.71

-0.30

.76

0.00

1.00

0.00

1.00

-1.41

.16

-1.25

.21

-0.09

.93

-1.34

.18

0.00

1.00

-0.33

.74

Hasegawa, S. & Ochiai, T.
Verification of the Effects of Remedial Education

Appendix D: Results of the Pre- and Post-Questionnaire on
the Sophomores’ Attitudes Toward English
No.

Item

1

I can understand what I’ve
listened to in English.

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Questionnaire

n

Mean

SD

Minimum

Maximum

Pre

8

1.63

1.06

1

4

Post

8

1.88

0.64

1

3

Pre

8

1.50

0.76

1

3

Post

8

1.50

0.54

1

2

Pre

8

1.63

0.74

1

3

Post

8

2.00

0.54

1

3

Pre

8

1.38

0.52

1

2

Post

8

1.50

0.54

1

2

Pre

8

1.13

0.35

1

2

Post

8

1.38

0.52

1

2

Pre

8

1.25

0.46

1

2

Post

8

1.50

0.76

1

3

Pre

8

1.25

0.46

1

2

Post

8

1.50

0.76

1

3

Pre

8

1.50

0.54

1

2

Post

8

1.88

0.84

1

3

Pre

8

1.25

0.46

1

2

Post

8

1.88

1.13

1

4

Pre

8

1.75

1.39

1

5

Post

8

2.00

1.07

1

4

Pre

8

1.25

0.46

1

2

Post

8

1.63

0.92

1

3

Pre

8

3.13

1.36

1

5

Post

8

3.63

1.19

2

5

Pre

8

2.75

1.67

1

5

Post

8

3.38

1.06

2

5

I can speak English.

I can read English
sentences.
I can write English
sentences.
I can read English
sentences rapidly.
I have confidence inindividual English words.
I can understand English
grammar.
I can communicate inEnglish.

I like English.

I like English classes.

I like instruction in English
grammar.
I’d like to be more
proficient in English.
I like reading English books,
including Japanese books.

128

Z-value

p

-0.71

.48

0.00

1.00

-1.73

.08

-0.45

.66

-1.00

.32

-1.41

.16

-1.00

.32

-1.34

.18

-1.29

.20

-0.27

.79

-1.09

.28

-1.63

.10

-1.52

.13

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 105–130

Appendix E: Results of the Pre- and Post-Questionnaire on
the Juniors’ Attitudes Toward English
No.

Item

1

I can understand what I’ve
listened to in English.

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Questionnaire

n

Mean

SD

Minimum

Maximum

Pre

4

1.75

0.96

1

3

Post

4

2.25

0.96

1

3

Pre

4

1.50

1.00

1

3

Post

4

1.75

0.50

1

2

Pre

4

1.75

0.96

1

3

Post

4

2.50

1.29

1

4

Pre

4

1.50

1.00

1

3

Post

4

1.75

0.96

1

3

Pre

4

1.25

0.50

1

2

Post

4

2.25

0.96

1

3

Pre

4

1.25

0.50

1

2

Post

4

1.00

0.00

1

1

Pre

4

1.25

0.50

1

2

Post

4

1.50

0.58

1

2

Pre

4

1.25

0.50

1

2

Post

4

1.50

0.58

1

2

Pre

4

2.25

0.50

2

3

Post

4

2.25

0.96

1

3

Pre

4

1.75

0.96

1

3

Post

4

2.50

1.29

1

4

Pre

4

1.25

0.50

1

2

Post

4

1.50

0.58

1

2

Pre

4

4.00

0.82

3

5

Post

4

4.25

0.50

4

5

Pre

4

3.25

0.50

3

4

Post

4

4.00

0.82

3

5

I can speak English.

I can read English
sentences.
I can write English
sentences.
I can read English
sentences rapidly.
I have confidence inindividual English words.
I can understand English
grammar.
I can communicate inEnglish.

I like English.

I like English classes.

I like instruction in English
grammar.
I’d like to be more
proficient in English.
I like reading English books,
including Japanese books.

129

Z-value

p

-0.82

.41

-0.58

.56

-1.34

.18

-1.00

.32

-1.41

.16

-1.00

.32

-1.00

.32

-1.00

.32

0.00

1.00

-1.13

.26

-0.58

.56

-0.58

.56

-1.73

.08

Hasegawa, S. & Ochiai, T.
Verification of the Effects of Remedial Education

Appendix F: Results of the Pre- and Post-Questionnaire on
the Seniors’ Attitudes Toward English
No.

Item

1

I can understand what I’ve
listened to in English.

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Questionnaire

n

Mean

SD

Minimum

Maximum

Pre

4

2.25

0.96

1

3

Post

4

2.25

0.50

2

3

Pre

4

1.75

0.50

1

2

Post

4

1.75

0.50

1

2

Pre

4

2.25

0.96

1

3

Post

4

2.25

0.96

2

4

Pre

4

1.50

0.58

1

2

Post

4

1.75

0.50

1

2

Pre

4

1.25

0.50

1

2

Post

4

2.50

0.58

2

3

Pre

4

1.75

0.50

1

2

Post

4

2.25

0.96

1

3

Pre

4

2.00

0.82

1

3

Post

4

2.25

1.26

1

4

Pre

4

2.00

0.82

1

3

Post

4

2.00

0.82

1

3

Pre

4

3.25

0.50

3

4

Post

4

3.75

0.50

3

4

Pre

4

3.50

0.58

3

4

Post

4

3.75

0.50

3

4

Pre

4

2.75

1.71

1

5

Post

4

3.50

1.29

2

5

Pre

4

5.00

0.00

5

5

Post

4

4.50

0.58

4

5

Pre

4

3.25

0.96

2

4

Post

4

4.00

0.82

3

5

I can speak English.

I can read English
sentences.
I can write English
sentences.
I can read English
sentences rapidly.
I have confidence inindividual English words.
I can understand English
grammar.
I can communicate inEnglish.

I like English.

I like English classes.

I like instruction in English
grammar.
I’d like to be more
proficient in English.
I like reading English books,
including Japanese books.

130

Z-value

p

0.00

1.00

0.00

1.00

-1.41

.16

-0.58

.56

-1.89

.06

-1.41

.16

-1.00

.32

0.00

1.00

-1.41

.16

-1.00

.32

-1.00

.32

-1.41

.16

-1.34

.18

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressionsin Science and Engineering Research Presentations

Kazuko Tojo
Osaka Jogakuin University
Hiroko Hayashi
Osaka University
Judy Noguchi
Mukogawa Women’s University

Abstract
The oral research presentation is an important genre in science and engineering fields. To help
nonnative English speakers become better able to listen to and prepare research presentations,
we tried to define hint expressions that signal moves (sections of communicative purpose
occurring in logical progression) and identify the characteristics of these hint expressions. In
this study, we first defined “hint expressions” by comparing them with formulaic sequences
and then undertook the cataloguing of hint expressions for 12 moves from 16 English researchpresentations by expert native speakers in science and engineering (from a subcorpus of
JECPRESE, http://www.jecprese.sci.waseda.ac.jp/). Based on observations during a manual
tagging process, we hypothesized that the chronological sequencing of hint expressions withina text and the sensitive use of verb tense and modality appearing in them plays a key role inperceiving shifts in communicative purpose. Our analyses revealed a characteristic
distribution of verb tenses and modals across moves, which suggested that being aware of hint
expressions can help nonnative English speaker researchers become better able to perceive
and identify moves as well as prepare more effective research presentations. Our findings131

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

have pedagogical implications and should also contribute to the development of automatedpragmatic tagging of moves.

Keywords: research presentation, genre analysis, hint expressions, tense, modality

Introduction
One of the essential genres in a researcher’s repertoire is the professional researchpresentation. This is because no research is complete until it has been shared with members of
the professional community for evaluation, critique, and possible inclusion in the acceptedknowledge base of the field. In order to share research results, the researcher can write themup as a journal paper, present them in a poster session, or give an oral conference
presentation. Regardless of the genre chosen, the language employed will probably be English
in order to address the global scientific community. Such professional communication ischallenging, even for native English speakers (Robinson & Stoller, 2008, Stoller & Robinson,2013), and for those whose first language is not English, it can be a demanding enterpriserequiring much time and effort.
Fortunately, professional communication can be made more manageable for thenonnative English speaker by adopting a genre-based approach. By “genre,” we are referringto the Swales’ definition (Swales, 1981, 1985, 1990) summarized by Bhatia (1993):[Genre] is a recognizable communicative event characterized by a set of communicative
purpose(s) identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or
academic community in which it regularly occurs. Most often it is highly structured andconventionalized with constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their intent,
positioning, form and functional value. (p. 13)
More simply put is Hyland’s (2007) succinct definition: “Genre refers to abstract,socially recognized ways of using language” (p. 149). He points out that members of a132

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

community can easily recognize similar texts because they repeatedly encounter them. The
fact that a professional genre is “highly structured and conventionalized” offers the keys tomaking it easier to handle. Stoller and Robinson (2013) pointed out that “students who engage
in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) benefit from access and control of genres in theiracademic disciplines and workplace domains” (p. 45). Their work targeted third-year
undergraduate students at an American university but, as described by Noguchi (2003), suchan approach can also be very useful for nonnative speakers of the target language.
Here we describe our efforts to alleviate the burden of preparing oral researchpresentations for nonnative English-speaker researchers in science and engineering byoffering a corpus of science and engineering presentations tagged for moves. In this paper, we
focus on the concept of “hint expressions” that signal the moves and are important for theaudience listening to presentations as well as for the speakers giving them.

Framework of the Study
Previous Studies on Formulaic Expressions
Recurrent linguistic patterns have been of much interest over the past decades. One
study suggested that 58.6% of spoken English discourse and 52.3% of the written discourse
are composed of formulaic sequences (Erman & Warren, 2000) and another study concluded
that a conservative 32.3% of native speaker speech is made up of formulaic language (Foster,2001). The fact that formulaic sequences constitute large portions of written as well as spoken
English discourse is especially attractive for those engaging in studies of language acquisitionand language teaching, because, theoretically, the mastery of these sequences should lead to ahigh level of English proficiency.
Formulaic sequences are known by many alternative terms such as lexical patterning,
chunks, multi-word units, multi-word strings, prefabricated routines, collocation, andholophrases, to name a few. Wray (2002) in his work defines formulaic sequence as:133

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, orappears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at thetime of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language
grammar. (p. 9)
As Wray’s definition covers various aspects of formulaic sequences, a careful look at
each dimension with examples will help our discussion. The first obvious examples are
idioms, proverbs, and sayings. They are clearly formulaic expressions because they are “standalone” units in terms of meaning and syntactic structure. Pull someone’s legs is a verb phrase
meaning “tease” and a stitch in time saves nine is a well-known proverb. Discourse markers
usually taught in English academic writing (such as first of all and in conclusion) are also
formulaic sequences, which have a function of structuring the writing and signaling thewriter’s intent to the readers. Other types of sequences are more flexible in terms of form; thecolloquial sets of Would you please or I’d like to talk about, for example, are notgrammatically complete but have functions to indicate “requesting” or “intention.” Anothertype of strings is exemplified by prevent X from happening, or as far as X is concerned.
Wherever the strings are interrupted, the slot (X) can be always filled with an arbitrary wordor words in order to semantically and syntactically complete the sentence. Formulaic
sequences can be short or long, continuous or discontinuous, grammatically complete or
incomplete, or functional or non-functional, but share the criteria of being “prefabricated” and“stored and retrieved as a whole from memory at the time of use” (Wray, 2002, p. 9). Table 1
summarizes the types and features of various formulaic sequences.
Lexical bundles (Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan,1999) are strings of continuous words derived from a corpus solely on the basis of frequency
of appearance. When lexical bundles are mechanistically identified from a corpus, noconsideration is given as to semantic and syntactic independence. Thus, examples include in
the middle of the or what I want to which would not be found in a learner’s idiom book.

134

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

Table 1
Types of Formulaic Sequences
Type

ExampleFeaturesIdiom

pull someone’s leg; pain in the neck; skating on thinice
A stitch in time saves nine; A friend in need is afriend indeed.
first of all; in order to; on the other hand; last but
not least

Semantic,
syntactical
Semantic,
syntactical
Semantic,
syntactical,
functional
Functional

Proverb
Discourse
markerContinuous
formulaicsequence
Discontinuous
formulaicsequence
Recurrent
cluster/lexicalbundleWould you please; we must not forget that; to put
you in the picture; wait until I tellprevent X from happening; as far as X is concerned; Functional
the effect of X is; an increase in X often leads to; X
and Y are quite similar in terms of(Jones & Haywood, 2004, Appendix 1)
in the same way as; aim of this study; as shown inFunctional,
figure; to give you an example; I see what you; in the frequency-based
middle of the; you’ve got to have; in addition to the;is one of the most(Schmitt, Grandage, & Adolphs, 2004, p.136)

However, it is possible to identify the function represented by each bundle as stance,
discourse, referential, and so on (Biber et al., 1999). In conjunction with the definition of
formulaic sequences explored above, it remains questionable as to whether the entire chunksof lexical bundles are holistically planned, automatically produced, and stored in one’s mental
lexicon. As a matter of fact, Schmitt, Grandage, & Adolphs (2004) make a distinction
between “word strings which come from corpus analysis but which may or may not be stored
holistically in the mind” and “word strings which are stored in the mind as whole units but
which may or may not be identifiable through corpus analysis” and term the former as“recurrent clusters” and the latter as “formulaic sequences” (p. 128). Recurrent occurrence, atleast, is a common ground for both lexical bundles and formulaic sequences in that frequent

135

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

exposure to a linguistic unit can be expected to facilitate holistic acquisition, processing, andusage. Whether recurrent clusters derived from a corpus are psychologically valid units or not
must await further study (Schmitt et al., 2004).

Adding the Dimension of Textual Organization
In our search for linguistic signals to identify moves, we must go beyond the lexicogrammatical features of the language. Swales (1990) states that “identification of moves
needs to be based on both communicative intents and linguistic realization” and that“communicative intent can be expressed in different levels of discourse units, where
conformity to the convention plays the vital role” (p. 100). Given that the language use of agenre is constrained by the conventions shared by a given discourse community, the set
patterns of “textual organization” must also be considered. Moves can be only defined or
identified in the textual organization constrained by the genre. Thus, “textual organization” isa vital element for move identification but is an aspect that has been totally ignored in thediscussion of formulaic sequences. In other words, sense can be made of a language sequence
because of its position in the text, i.e., the point of its chronological appearance in the text.
The same expression may take on a different meaning depending on its location in the text.
When this is applied to the moves of a research presentation in science and engineering, thetime sequence of when the utterance appears (at the beginning of the presentation, at the
middle part, or at the end) helps determine the move.

Defining a “Hint Expression”
From the above considerations, we defined hint expressions as linguistic clues for move
identification based on position in a genre text. Hint expressions help the receiver of the text
(listener or reader) understand the presenter’s communicative purpose, or move. For example,
when the presenter says I will talk to you today about at the beginning, we would know that

136

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

he/she is trying to “overview” the presentation. Here are some other examples of hint
expressions retrieved from the corpus of science and engineering research presentations.
•Thank you very much for the introduction, and let me join the other speakers in thanking
the organizers for this wonderful opportunity to talk. (Speaker directly addressing
audience)•

I will talk to you today about what we have studied for about the last X years. (Speaker
overviewing the talk)•X are classical, but over the last Y decades the application for Z has been extended tomany disciplines. (Speaker presenting background)•

The problem, though, is that with many of these systems, they’re very unstable. (Speakerpresenting an issue)•

So this is an indication that X should be more Y. (Speaker making implication)•

And then to make this X, we first started with Y. (Speaker describing procedure)•

It remains to me to thank and acknowledge all the people that have been involved in thisresearch over the last X years, . . . (Speaker acknowledging)
As can be seen in the above examples, a hint expression can be one word or one phrase,or it can be a whole sentence or even a group of sentences. It can be a continuous string or adiscontinuous string where slots are filled with a specific content word or words. It guides the
structure of the text and has a functional purpose. It may or may not stand alone semanticallyor syntactically. Hint expressions can take a variety of forms, even reflecting individually
preferred language choices and unintentional production mistakes. Hint expressions are
spontaneously produced, are conventionalized but not quite rigidly prefabricated, and are
dependent on the text organization.
There are two distinctive characteristics of a hint expression: its use of conventionalizedmaterial and the inclusion of conjugated verb phrases. Conventionalized material includes
content words such as introduction, speaker and organizers as found in Thank you very much137

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

for the introduction, and let me join the other speakers in thanking the organizers for thiswonderful opportunity to talk and application and disciplines in X are classical, but over thelast Y decades the application for Z has been extended to many disciplines. The othercharacteristic that makes a hint expression distinguishable from formulaic sequences is thedistinct presence of conjugated verb phrases. While formulaic sequences are usually discussedwith decontextualized samples and verbs when included are shown in their root forms, hint
expressions encompass verb tenses and modal verbs as they appear in the texts. For example,
I will talk to you today about what we have studied for about the last X years and So this is anindication that X should be more Y.
For further clarification of our proposed hint expressions, let us consider the sequenceof in order to study which is regarded as a formulaic expression. Searching for this phrase in
one of the widely available search engines yields more that 39 million hits. Adding one word,
Here, in order to study yields 710 thousand hits, but the longer Here, in order to study theclinical usefulness of pinpoints the original source with a single hit. This example from thefield of medical science shows that a hint expression is not frequency-driven and may not be
efficiently retrieved by concordance software. A hint expression can include one or several
formulaic expressions, but it is much more specific with respect to content and context as wellas communicative intent in a given discourse community.
In summary, our proposed hint expressions are compared below with the definitions
given by Schmitt and Carter (2004) of formulaic sequences to more clearly delineate theircharacteristics.
1. “Formulaic sequences appear to be stored in the mind as holistic units, but they may not
be acquired in an all-or-nothing manner” (ibid., p. 4). On the other hand, hint expressions
are not acquired in an all-or-nothing manner, and they may not be stored in the mind as
holistic units.

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2. “Formulaic sequences can have slots to enable flexibility of use, but the slots typicallyhave semantic constraints” (ibid., p. 6). Hint expressions have the same feature.
3. “Formulaic expressions can have semantic prosody” (ibid., p. 7). Hint expressions havesemantic prosody but only as a secondary/flexible manifestation.
4. “Formulaic expressions are often tied to particular conditions of use” (ibid., p. 9). Hint
expressions have the same feature and reflect specific purposes or functions.
5. Formulaic expressions do not take textual organization into consideration. However, forhint expressions, textual organization is a vital construct.
In this paper, we describe our research leading to the definition of hint expressions andhow we tested the validity of using hint expressions to identify moves. Our findings offer
implications for the initiation of novices, both native and nonnative English speakers, into thediscourse of a professional discourse community.

MethodThe Corpus
The corpus used for the study is JECPRESE (Japanese-English Corpus of Presentationsin Science and Engineering). As described in Kunioshi, Noguchi, Tojo, and Hayashi (2012),
JECPRESE is a corpus including three types of oral presentations: master’s degree
presentations in Japanese, professional presentations at an international conference on
aromatic chemistry in English, and student presentations in English at an American
university. The oral presentations were video-taped and transcribed to constitute a corpus.
After developing an interface, we classified the moves used by the presenters to deliver theirmessages (Tables 2 and 3).

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Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

Table 2
Sections Found in English and Japanese Presentations in JECPRESE
Section
S
I
M
R
C
E
Q

Description
Start
Introduction
Materials and Methods
Results and Discussion
Conclusion
EndingQuestion and Answer

Note. Adapted from “An Online Support Site for Preparation of Oral Presentations in Scienceand Engineering,” by N. Kunioshi, J. Noguchi, H. Hayashi, & K. Tojo, 2012, European
Journal of Engineering Education, 37(6), 600–608. Copyright 2012 by the European Societyof Engineering Education.

Table 3
Moves Found in English and Japanese Presentations in JECPRESE
Move
Ack
Aud
Bkg
Des
Eva
Exp
Fur
Gap
Imp
Ovw
Prc
Wrk

Description
Acknowledgments
Audience Orientation
Background
Description
Evaluation
Explanation
Further Research
Gap
Implication
Overview
Procedure
Present Work

Note. Adapted from “An Online Support Site for Preparation of Oral Presentations in Scienceand Engineering,” by N. Kunioshi, J. Noguchi, H. Hayashi, & K. Tojo, 2012, European
Journal of Engineering Education, 37(6), 600–608. Copyright 2012 by the European Societyof Engineering Education.

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The Subcorpus for the Present Study
The subcorpus used for the present study consists of 16 English research presentations
by expert native speakers in science and engineering. Table 4 shows the composition of thesubcorpus based on English research presentations by expert native speakers. Although thesubcorpus used is quite small, it offers a highly specialized resource of spoken researchlanguage in the field of science and engineering. For move analysis, we manually classified
the sections and moves shown in the above tables. Table 5 shows the distribution of thesections and moves as a result of move tagging.
Table 4Composition of Subcorpus for the Present Study
Number of presentations

16

Number of words

68,727

Number of move tagging units

2,455

Number of verb phrases

7,311

Table 5Distribution of Sections and Moves of the Research Presentations
Start
Ack
Aud
Bkg
Des
Eva
Exp
Fur
Gap
Imp
Ovw
Prc
Wrk
%

3
37
-

1
-

4
-

1
1.6

Introduction
5
35
266
74
16
27
3
43
14
52
15
72
21.3

Methods
-

9
54
92
53
78
3
29
24
27
81
37
16.7

Res/DisConclusion
27
93
9
78
463
5
187
8
271
69
7
76
101
8
60
17
148
1
116
1
56.9
2.8

Note: A transcribed sentence may be double-counted for a move.

141

Ending
3
19
-

1
-

0.8

%
1.3
6.9
13.6
21.8
9.0
12.9
2.8
5.1
5.0
5.5
8.4
7.8
100

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

As shown in Table 5, predominant moves in each section play significant roles inrealizing the communicative functions. In the Start Section, Aud (Audience Orientation) plays
a major role in effectively establishing rapport with the audience. Aud is a move frequently
found in oral research presentations, but not explicitly found in research articles. The
Introduction Section of research presentations shares the communicative purpose of theintroduction of research articles; i.e., reviewing the background of the research field with alook at previous work, indicating the gap, and presenting the novelty of the present study. The
values in the Introduction Section in Table 5 reflect the major roles played by the moves ofBkg (Background), Des (Description), and Wrk (Present Work). The Methods Section has
moves such as Des, Prc (Procedures) and Exp (Explanation). More than half of the moves are
devoted to the Results/Discussion Section, where Des and Exp account for a significant
portion of the moves. Note the presence of Eva (Evaluation) and Imp (Implication) moves fordiscussing and evaluating the results obtained. The Conclusion Section basically restates thepresent work mainly with the Ovw (Overview) move, and the Ending Section brings thepresentation to a close with Aud.

Identifying Hint Expressions in Actual Research Presentations
Our observations during the manual tagging process led us to hypothesize that verb
tense, aspect, and modality play major roles in influencing move identification. We therefore
classified all the verb phrases observed in each move-tagged unit according to tense, voice(active or passive), and modality. A total of 7,311 target verb phrases were sorted using
Shallow Parser1 into five tense types (past perfect, past, present perfect, present, and future),each of which was divided into the secondary category of active or passive voice. At the sametime, modal verbs were classified into five types (can, could, would, should/must/have to, andmight/may). 2

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Results
Distributions of Verb Tenses and Modals Across Sections
Table 6 and Figures 1 and 2 show the frequency distributions of verb tenses and modals
across sections. Taking the subcorpus size (68,727 words) into consideration, the frequencies
were normalized per 1,000 words. (For the raw frequency data, see Appendix A.) All sections
revealed the consistent preference of the present tense, which was considered to be an
attribute of spoken presentations. The Start and Ending Sections displayed similar
proportional patterns except the present perfect tense was more frequently used in the former
and the past tense more frequently used in the latter. Introduction, Methods, andResults/Discussion displayed good synchrony in terms of the distribution of tense types, withthe present tense being predominant (51.27 per 1,000 words in Introduction, 65.00 in
Methods, and 62.05 in Results/Discussion), followed by the past tense (11.74 in Introduction,
15.37 in Methods, and 12.32 in Results/Discussion). What was noteworthy was the distinct
tense distribution in the Conclusion Section with more frequent use of the past and present
perfect tenses and less frequent use of the present tense compared with the other sections. The
past perfect tense did not occur with noticeable frequency and was excluded from our
discussion.

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144

activepassive

activepassive

activepassive

activepassive

activepassive
Subtotal (Verb)
Modal
can
could
would
should/must/have tomight/may
Subtotal (Modal)
Total

FuturePres.

Pres. Perf.

Past

Past Perf.

-

6.42
3.85
1.28
21.19
135.59

-

64.87
63.58
1.28
9.63
8.99
0.64
112.40
9.63

-

11.56
10.92
0.64
9.63
9.63

Start

11.74
10.78
0.96
3.52
2.78
0.74
51.27
48.15
3.12
3.40
3.35
0.06
69.93
5.39
0.23
2.78
1.70
0.62
10.72
80.65

-

Introduction

-

78.34
4.87
0.37
3.37
1.50
0.37
10.49
88.83

-

78.51
5.29
0.72
2.61
1.33
0.59
10.54
89.05

-

36.36
36.36

-

1.12
1.12

-

27.74
26.24
1.50
13.12
13.12

Conclusion

12.32
11.87
0.45
3.85
3.47
0.38
62.05
59.87
2.18
2.63
2.63

-

-

15.37
14.85
0.51
3.24
2.87
0.37
65.00
62.50
2.50
3.60
3.53
0.07
87.29
11.84
0.59
1.47
1.10
0.81
15.81
103.10Res/Dis0.05
0.05

Methods
0.07
0.07

Distribution of Verb Tenses and Modals Across Sections (Frequency per 1,000 Words)

Table 6

-

3.61
1.81
1.81
14.44
113.72

-

99.28
7.22

-

18.05
10.83
7.22
3.61
1.81
1.81
68.59
64.98
3.61
9.03
9.03

EndingTojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

Figure 1. Frequencies of verb tenses across sections. The frequencies are normalized per
1,000 words.

Figure 2. Frequencies of modals across sections. The frequencies are normalized per 1,000
words.

As for the distributions of modals across sections, Start employed the modals mostfrequently followed by Methods and Ending. As was the case with the tense type, Start andEnding revealed similar distributional proportions. More interesting was the distribution
synchrony among Introduction, Results/Discussion and Conclusion where can was the most145

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

frequently used modal (5.39, 5.29, and 4.87, respectively) and would was the next (2.78, 2.61,
and 3.37, respectively). Ranked third was should/must/have to (1.70, 1.33, and 1.50,
respectively). Methods, on the other hand, showed more dependency on can (11.84) and lessthe use of would (1.47) compared with the other sections.

Distributions of Verb Tenses and Modals Across Moves
Table 7 and Figures 3 and 4 indicate the frequency distribution of verb tenses andmodals across moves. (For the raw frequency data, see Appendix B.) The present tense was
the predominant tense for all moves; the three largest frequency figures were 72.18 (Des),70.95 (Aud), and 61.39 (Gap). Next preferred was the past tense with distinct occurrences in
Ack (42.08), Wrk (23.02), Bkg (17.48), and Prc (17.45). The present perfect tense was usedmost frequently in Ack (14.27) followed by Fur (6.84), Wrk (6.40), and Ovw (6.03). Bkg,
which describes previous work, also showed the substantial frequency of the present perfecttense (5.27). The characteristic distribution of the past tense was found in Ack, which is likely
to be due to the distinct communicative purpose of the move addressing those who
contributed to the research.

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147

activepassive

activepassive

activepassive

activepassive

activepassive
Subtotal (Verb)
Modal
can
could
would
should/must/have tomight/may
Subtotal (Modal)
Total

FuturePres.

Pres. Perf.

Past

Past Perf.

Aud
15.66
15.43
0.23
5.53
4.84
0.69
70.95
69.57
1.38
7.14
7.14
99.29
4.15
0.92
4.84
1.15
0.92
11.98
111.26

Ack

42.08
37.09
4.99
14.27
13.55
0.71
32.81
32.10
0.71
1.43
1.43
90.58
5.71
4.28
9.99
100.57

Bkg
0.08
0.08
17.48
15.30
2.17
5.27
3.93
1.34
55.94
51.84
4.10
2.59
2.51
0.08
81.36
6.69
0.25
2.93
1.76
0.59
12.21
93.57
8.53
7.92
0.61
3.29
2.80
0.49
72.18
69.31
2.87
2.50
2.50
86.50
7.68
1.83
0.18
0.06
9.75
96.26

Des
10.40
10.40
2.38
2.38
51.87
50.83
1.04
0.89
0.89
65.55
5.05
0.59
1.34
0.59
0.30
7.88
73.42

Eva

Exp
0.09
0.09
8.38
8.29
0.09
2.46
2.28
0.18
58.68
55.31
3.37
3.74
3.74
73.35
6.29
0.64
3.28
1.91
0.82
12.94
86.29

Distribution of Verb Tenses and Modals across Moves (Frequency per 1,000 Words)

Table 7

Fur
0.38
0.38
7.60
7.60
6.84
6.84
57.35
55.83
1.52
1.14
1.14
73.30
2.66
3.42
1.52
0.76
8.36
81.66
12.82
12.82
4.37
3.55
0.82
61.39
59.75
1.64
0.82
0.82
79.40
3.82
1.36
3.27
4.64
1.09
14.19
93.59

Gap
4.87
4.65
0.22
2.65
2.43
0.22
51.55
50.22
1.33
2.65
2.65
61.73
8.63
1.77
4.20
1.99
1.55
18.14
79.87

Imp
9.55
9.30
0.25
6.03
5.78
0.25
52.55
51.29
1.26
8.30
8.05
0.25
76.44
5.78
0.25
2.77
1.26
1.01
11.06
87.50

Ovw
17.45
16.90
0.55
1.79
1.65
0.14
51.80
49.74
2.06
3.98
3.98
75.02
9.21
0.82
0.69
0.82
0.55
12.09
87.11

Prc

23.02
22.71
0.30
6.40
6.40
53.20
52.13
1.07
2.59
2.44
0.15
85.21
7.01
1.07
1.68
2.13
1.22
13.11
98.32

Wrk

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

Figure 3. Frequencies of verb tenses across moves. The frequencies are normalized per 1,000
words.

Figure 4. Frequencies of modals across moves. The frequencies are normalized per 1,000
words.

The distributions of modals across moves were very diverse and no two moves showed
any similar pattern, which indicates that modal usage was consistently move-dependent. Can
was the most frequently used modal overall, showing frequent occurrences in Prc (9.21 per
1,000 words), Imp (8.63), Des (7.68), and Wrk (7.01). Although overall use of could wasminimal among the five modal types, comparatively more instances were seen in Imp (1.77),

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Gap (1.36), and Wrk (1.07). Would, on the other hand, was the second most frequently used
modal, which may reflect the spoken features of the corpus. This was supported by the factthat Ack had the highest frequency of 5.71 per 1,000 words and Aud 4.84. The obligatory
modals should/must/have to were most frequently used in Gap (4.64) and Ack (4.28) followed
by Imp (1.99) and Bkg (1.76). This was predictable because in the Gap move, the speakerneeds to clearly state what “should” be done and in the Ack move, the speaker would be
obliged to acknowledge the people involved in the research. The last group of might/may was
not frequently used, except in Imp (1.55) and Gap (1.09). From a move type point of view,
Imp uses modals most frequently, followed by Gap, Wrk, and Exp.
The proportion of the passive voice to the active voice was very small throughout the
moves. Figure 5 shows that Bkg, Des, and Exp together with Ack had more instances ofpassive than other moves. This implies that the passive form may be used in spoken
presentations where an objective statement or description is expected.

Figure 5. Frequencies of passive voice across moves. The frequencies are normalized per
1,000 words.

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Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

Descriptive Analyses of Moves
Along with the quantitative analyses of identifying characteristics in terms of verb
tense, verb aspect and modality, we also extracted all the hint expressions in the texts
analyzed. The characteristics of each move are described below with actual examples. The
moves are presented in alphabetical order, not in the order in which they appeared in the texts.
The sections are indicated by abbreviations: S (Start), I (Introduction), M (Methods), R(Results/Discussion), C (Conclusion), and E (Ending). Underlining is used to indicate thetense and modal usages characteristic of a move.
Acknowledgement (Ack). The Ack move used the past and present perfect tenses.
Approximately 90 percent of the verb phrases use main verbs (Appendix B) and modal verbs
are least employed with the exception of would and should/must/have to. Acknowledging
those who have helped with the work can be considered to be a well-established convention in
the research community.
•

I have to give credit to the students that did this work. (C)•So, let me finish by thanking people that I’ve collaborated with. (E)•It remains to me to thank and acknowledge all the people that have been involved in thisresearch over the last X years. (E)Audience orientation (Aud). Aud is a move not found in research articles. When thepresenter directly addresses the audience to draw attention to something or give guidance, thepresent tense is preferred. The relatively frequent use of the future tense also characterizes thismove. Would is quite often chosen in the sequence of I would like to, which expresses
conventionalized politeness when addressing the audience.
•

I would also like to offer a welcome to all of the new people that are here for the firsttime, as it is to me. (S)•Many of you will recognize this as a view of X. (S)•Where are we going with some of these things? (R)150

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163•

So, what this is telling us? (R)•So, are we there yet? Or are we still a long way away? (R)•So, we want to start asking some alternative questions now, at the end of the talk here. (R)•So, what we’ve learned about this? (R)Background (Bkg). The present perfect tense is widely known as the preferred tense in

the Bkg move of research articles. Here, the examples support the frequent use of the present
perfect tense and the passive voice.
•

Xs are classical, but over the last Y decades the application for X has been extended tomany disciplines. (I)•This principle has been well established in the search for X by SURNAME, as reported in
his review. (I)•The group has done some really nice work on X. (I)•Now, this has been known since 19XX, SURNAME was one of the first people to make Y.
(I)•

And a number of X have been looked at, the group has done a lot of beautiful work on
that, and Y has been examined . . . (R)Description (Des). Methods and results are described mostly with the present tense,with nearly 90 percent expressed by main verbs (Appendix B). With low dependency onmodal verbs, objectivity is aimed for in these descriptions.
•

These are the type of things that we’re talking about. (M)•The outcome of this reaction depends upon the X. (M)•This is clearly not X. (R/D)•. . . the two best systems are the X which shows up about Y . . . (R)•So, one of the characteristics of the X that are shown down here is . . . (R)•This is just the highlights of what we’ve done for the past years. (C)151

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

Evaluation (Eva). Contrary to our expectation, the Eva move often uses the present
tense and shows less dependency on modal verbs. As shown in the following example,
content words such as adjectives and/or adverbs, not functional words such as modals, areused to present judgment on the quality of the research findings.
•

Now the advantages of these X are pretty easy to assemble for commercial available
materials. (M)•This works really well, and we can do this in X. (M)•Unfortunately, X is not as good . . . (R)•And then in some sense, it’s surprising, you have to think about this. (R)•X are not too bad, not great . . . (R)•And it proceeded nicely, we now have X, quite easy to work with. (R)Explanation (Exp). The linguistic structure of the Exp move enjoys much freedom andemploys a variety of verb tenses. The hint expressions usually come with because or if. Whenthe if-clause is used, the subjunctive form is seen with the modal would.
•

X is not very useful here because you have a lot of different Y . . . (M)•If we had X, it would be Y. (M)•We thought this was ok, because we would still be able to make X, but we found that . . .
(R)•

An important thing about those pictures is that they do this to X . . . (R)•If a given X can see Y, this would be a large quantity, this would indicate a big change inZ. (R)•You get a nice X again, so . . . (R)•If we were to observe any of the X, we would expect a very strong Y instead what we see
are Z. (R)•We also thought that we could use X. (R)•Therefore, we have taken this kind of approach, the consecutive fashion . . . (R)152

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

Further research (Fur). Fur takes a variety of tense types with less dependency onmodal verbs. The communicative signal that further work needs to be done is expressed by
combinations of several tense types and/or the choice of main verbs.
•. . . we still have not been able to X. (R)•And thus, we hope to go from something in the order of X to may be Y. (R)•So, we’re in the process of making these X we’ve already made, the other Y we’re still
being worked on. (R)•Then, we started doing this with relatively standard X, but now we’ve replaced Y, we’resettling now . . . (R)•If that’s so, that should be just X, and we’re now endeavoring to make Y. (R)•That’s the guess that we have now. We haven’t done the X experiments that would provethat Y is . . . (R)Gap (Gap). The Gap move is one of the critical functions which can determine theeffectiveness of the research presentation. Notable characteristics are the predominantly
frequent use of should/must/have to, which is justifiable as the communicative purpose is toindicate what is lacking in previous work and to express the necessity of the present work.
The hint expressions for this move often accompany negative terms such as the problem andunfortunately.
•

For understanding X, we have to consider all of this together, Y-theory would not work,
the reason for that is that . . . (I)•The problem, though, is that with many of these systems, they’re very unstable. And in thecase of all of these X systems, you must have Y. (I)•The problem with this is that . . . (I)•What they had to do is not a very simple X procedure. (I)•. . . we have been using this newer X, but unfortunately they have low yields. (I)153

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

Implication (Imp). In the Imp move, researchers can relatively freely express theirscientific judgment without assuming ultimate responsibility. The hint expressions reveal
flexible linguistic structures and this might be one of the most problematic moves for novice
non-native researchers to perceive. The Imp move most frequently employs various types ofmodals, and the modal distribution does not tend toward any single modal type. Could andmight/may or their semantically relevant adverbial words or phrases characterize this move.
•So, the idea of X is perhaps reasonable. (M)•. . . so this is some indication that X should be more Y. (M)•. . . and this I think means that X . . . (R)•But it seems to be a general phenomenon as well. (R)•. . . and then we could interpret this to X . . . (R)•. . . so that also X could be performed. (R)•It certainly would be evidence for a X, if these were the outcome of the experiment. (R)Overview (Ovw). The Ovw move is characterized by the preferred use of the futuretense, as the function of this move is to project and organize what will follow in thepresentation.
•

What I’d like to do today is, first, explain a little bit about the nature about X. (S)•Here, we’ll go. I will talk to you today about X which we have been studied for about thelast Y years. (I)•And when I was preparing the abstract I thought I was able to say a little bit about thesesystems but the reality I’m going to have to restrict it to the series of compounds one, twoand five in this morning presentation. (I)•I’ve introduced you to two concepts, one is the X . . . Now, specifically what I will betalking about is X. (C)•* So, to wrap up with what you’ve seen in this morning is that we were able to prepare
X . . . (C)154

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163•* Finally, I’d just like to conclude by showing that we have been able to do a wide varietyof X, and we were able to Y, and we hope that in future we are able to work with people
that have the tools to which we can investigate Z. (C)Ovw appears in various sections. At the beginning of the Start and Introduction

Sections, the presenter overviews what will be talked about, and when the presentation iscoming to a close in the Conclusion Section, the presenter overviews what has been stated, as
can be seen from the last two examples (marked with asterisks). Therefore, the tense choice
can be expected to shift from the future and present tenses to the present perfect and pasttenses.
Procedure (Prc). With this move, the use of can is notable. Main verbs usually appear
with and and/or then. The past tense is frequently seen together with the present tense.
•

And then we do the X and then we generate Y and then we Z . . . (M)•. . . we actually have to make this, and the way that we do that is via X. (M)•I just briefly run through how we make X, strategically we take Y . . . (M)•. . . so we prepare these X. (M)•We can make X pretty easily. (R)•And then to make this X, we first started with Y. (R)•We’ll then be able to use this X, add to Y and make here another Z . . . (R)Present work (Wrk). Wrk is expressed using the past and present perfect tenses.

•

So, we thought it was worthy investigating what was likely to happen. (I)•So what we wanted to do is to look at something that is actually more X. (I)•And so, we wanted to try something a bit different. (I)•So what we decided to do was to do the final X . . . (M)•And we propose a X, which is probably even more hypothetical. (M)•Now I mentioned that we’d like to make X and Y is the first step towards that goal. (M)•And so, we’ve looked at both X as well as Y. (R)155

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

Discussion
With the aim of trying to identify recurrently used patterns in professional genre texts,
we built JECPRESE and manually tagged the moves in the corpus files. Move tagging
presupposes adequate move identification. In the move identification process, the move rater
largely relies on his/her intuition which is backed by his/her expertise as well as linguisticcompetence. As far as raters rely on their intuition, tagging outcomes can vary from rater torater. In one study, 70 percent was considered to be a reasonable inter-rater reliability rate
(Biber, Conner, & Upton, 2007). The more expertise one has in a discourse community, thebetter the intuitive judgment can be. However, as human judgment cannot be totally free fromsubjectivity, the difference in the psychological reality of moves among raters is unavoidable.
In our study, we had to repeat the tagging process several times until discrepancies among thefour raters were minimized and agreement could be reached. We realized that ourdisagreements on the move identifications may have been due to differences in our
backgrounds in terms of field of specialization and first language.
The questions then arose of: How novice nonnative researchers could perceive moves
in an English research presentation? Could they use their intuition, which is what expert
native speakers do? Are there any strategies that they can use? If so, what are some of theclues that they might rely on? In the present study, triggered by such questions, we tried todevelop a rationale that could be used for move identification. We started by examining
lexical clues that were objectively analyzable because “moves represent semantic andfunctional units of text with specific communicative purposes” (Biber et al., 2007, p. 24). We
termed these lexical clues that signal the moves “hint expressions.”
Our findings disclosed the linguistic dimensions of hint expressions that can be used to
identify move types in the research presentations in science and engineering. Although verb
tense distributions across sections, with the present tense being the dominant tense, did notshow significant differences, the distribution across moves indicated several characteristics;

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

frequent use of the past tense in Ack, Bkg, Prc, and Wrk moves, more use of the present
perfect tense in Ack, Bkg, Ovw, and Wrk, and more instances of the future tense in Ovw. The
modality distribution, on the other hand, revealed highly diverse patterns especially acrossmoves. Frequent use of would in Ack, Aud, and Ovw, the distinct use of should/must/have toin Gap, and prominent occurrence of can in Prc, Des, and Wrk can serve as clues to help
nonnative speakers of English perceive moves in presentations. The results of the distribution
analyses of verb tenses and modals across sections and moves complement our observations
from descriptive analyses of hint expressions across moves. They showed how hint
expressions can be used to identify and express the speaker’s communicative intent.

Conclusion
The present study identified the characteristics of hint expressions that can reveal
speaker intent in an oral presentation. One of the salient features is the characteristic use ofverb tenses and modals. Sensitivity to verb tense or modality can help us perceive
communicative purposes in a given discourse. Acquiring the competency to recognize tense
and modality can be difficult for nonnative speakers of English, especially as the perceptionof tense is considered to be culture-bound. Pedagogically speaking, verb tense is usuallytaught according to time lines and it is not sufficiently nor appropriately considered in theteaching of scientists (Salager-Meyer, 1992). Another important aspect of hint expressions istheir chronological location within the presentation flow. Similar hint expressions can havedifferent functions if they appear at different chronological locations within the text. Finally,in spoken research presentations by native speakers of English, hint expressions can beproduced spontaneously and flexibly. This means that they may not be obvious if the texts are
examined only with frequency searches.
Our definition and description of hint expressions show that they have identifiablecharacteristics. This should enable conscious learning of hint expressions as well as the157Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressionsacquisition of an awareness of their existence. Hint expressions can help novice nonnative
English-speaking researchers properly perceive and identify moves, and use them to prepare
effective research presentations. We hope that our findings can contribute to the developmentof more automated pragmatic tagging of moves.

Acknowledgements
The research was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (21520601). We
thank Nilson Kunioshi for his aid and support, without which this work could not have beenpossible. We also would like to thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments.

Notes
1

Shallow Parser (http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/download/software/8) is an open

software provided by Cognitive Computation Group, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Unlike POS tagging which would tag each and every word in the input sentence,
Shallow Parser, a “chunker,” provides the groupings of words with their representations in theform of phrases such as verb phrase, noun phrase, adverbial phrase, and prepositional phrase.
Shallow Parser enabled us to sort the verb phrases in terms of tense type, voice type (active or
passive), and modal type. Here are examples of verb phrase tags obtained via Shallow Parser
and their sorting under the present study.
[VP works] – present/active; [VP took] – past/active; [VP want to talk] – present/active;[VP will be talking] – future/active; [VP was organized] – past/passive;[VP ’re going to do] – future/active; [VP have discussed] – present perfect/active;[VP could go] – modal (could); [VP might work] – modal (might);[VP have to do] – semi-modal (have to)
For the present study, be going to as well as will was considered to be a “future” tense
indicator.

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JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

2Groupings of modal verbs vary depending on the analysis viewpoint. Biber (2006), forexample, classifies modals into three categories according to their functions; can, may, might,
and could with possibility/permission/ability functions, ought, must, and should withnecessity/obligation functions and will, would, and shall with predictive/volition functions. As
mentioned in Note 1, we decided to use will as a future tense indictor, which was supported
by Biber’s analysis that “the modal will is used to announce future class actions/events”(Biber, 2006, p. 97). We also separated can/could and may/might because in science andengineering fields, can/could commonly expresses ability rather than possibility while
may/might expresses possibility rather than ability. We further wanted to separate can andcould because assertion made by could be less direct or weaker than can, which is a typicalhedging expression. The semi-modal have to was grouped with should/must/have to.

References
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to describe discourse structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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spoken and written English. Harlow: Longman.
Erman, B., & Warren, B. (2000). The idiom principle and the open-choice principle. Text, 20,
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162

activepassive

activepassive

activepassive

activepassive

activepassive
Subtotal (Verb)
Modal
can
could
would
should/must/have tomight/may
Subtotal (Modal)
Total

FuturePres.

Pres. Perf.

Past

Past Perf.

Start

-

-

10
6
2
33
182

-

207
190
17
62
49
13
904
849
55
60
59
1
1233
95
4
49
30
11
189
1422

-

-

18
17
1
15
15
0
101
99
2
15
14
1
149
15

-

-

Introduction

-

1
1
187
180
7
44
39
5
906
872
34
49
48
1
1187
161
8
20
15
11
215
1402

Methods

-

219
13
1
9
4
1
28
247

-

3593
235
32
116
59
26
468
4061

-

-

-

74
70
4
35
35
107
106
1
3
3

-

2
2

Conclusion

547
527
20
171
154
17
2756
2659
97
117
117

Res/DisAppendix A: Distribution of Verb Tenses and Modals Across Sections (Raw Frequency)
Ending

2
1
1
8
63

-

55
4

-

10
6
4
2
1
1
38
36
2
5
5

-

-

-

Tojo, K. et al.
Linguistic Dimensions of Hint Expressions

163

Modal

Future

Pres.

52

14
141

Subtotal (Modal)

Total

483

18
4
21
5
4

can
could
would
should/must/have tomight/may

8
6
-

31
-

31

302
6

431

2
-

2

45
1

308

3

127

activepassive

activepassive46

1

passive

21

24

20
19

67
1

52
7

activeactivepassive--passive
68--

active
59

-

Aud
-

Subtotal (Verb)

Pres. Perf.

Past

Past Perf.

Ack

-

1

1

1119

146

80
3
35
21
7

973

30
1

31

620
49

669

16

47

63

183
26

209

Bkg

-

-

-

1579

160

126
30
3
1

1419

41
-

41

1137
47

1184

8

46

54

130
10

140

Des

-

-

-

1

1

494

53

34
4
9
4
2

441

6
-

6

342
7

947

142

69
7
36
21
9

805

41
-

41

607
37

644

2

349

25

27

91
1

92

Exp

16

16

70
-

70

Eva

-

1

1

215

22

7
9
4
2

193

3
-

3

147
4

151

-

18

18

20
-

20

Fur

-

-

-

343

52

14
5
12
17
4

291

3
-

3

219
6

225

3

13

16

47
-

47

Gap

-

-

-

361

82

39
8
19
9
7

279

12
-

12

227
6

233

1

11

12

21
1

22

Imp

Appendix B: Distribution of Verb Tenses and Modals Across Moves (Raw Frequency)

-

-

-

348

44

23
1
11
5
4

304

32
1

33

204
5

209

1

23

24

37
1

38

Ovw

-

-

-

634

88

67
6
5
6
4

546

29
-

29

362
15

377

1

12

13

123
4

127

Prc

-

-

-

645

86

46
7
11
14
8

559

16
1

17

342
7

349

-

42

42

149
2

151

Wrk

JACET Selected Papers Vol. 1 (2014), 131–163

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