# An Acoustic Way to Support Japanese Children's Effective English Learning in School Classrooms
## 4 Conclusions  
The current study has demonstrated the importance of delivering good acoustic conditions in classrooms to help children learn English more effectively through a scientific approach, using data collected in a real-life school classroom in Japan.  
The statistical results of English listening tests taken by 216 Japanese children (aged between 11 and 12 years) using two sound amplification systems revealed the following three points. (1) There is association between the acoustic conditions in classrooms and the correct answer rate of the English tests taken by children in the classroom. (2) Using sound amplification systems with loudspeaker arrays can reduce the existing inequality in a classroom due to the heterogeneous sound fields that depend on the seat positions. (3) English word combinations including phonemes that do not exist in L1 are particularly hard for Japanese children to discriminate, and they negatively affect the correct answer rate of the English tests. Hence, teaching those words particularly requires extra care. Furthermore, the joint results with the multiple acoustic measurements show that even when the difference in acoustic characteristics realised by the two systems is at the magnitude of what has been shown, its impact on children's learning is still noteworthy. The observed differences in our acoustic measurements were not so noticeable in the RT values but they were evident in the transfer functions.  
Although improvement can be made to the English listening test materials for any future studies of similar kinds, as a consequence, we illustrated that more adequately adjusted acoustics could play a significant role to contrive children's learning at their schools. More research should be encouraged, for example, to set guidelines regarding acoustic quality in classrooms at schools in any countries without them.  
Figure 5: Box-and-whisker plots of sub groups divided according to sound amplification systems and seat locations. The centre line of the box is the median, the ends of the box are the quartiles, and the ends of the whiskers extend to 1.5 times the inter quartile range, in Seat vs. System analyses.  
**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, N.E.; methodology, N.E. and K.K.; measurement, N.E., M.K., I.S. and K.K.; formal analysis, N.E. and K.K.; writing--original draft preparation, N.E.; writing--review and editing, N.E., M.K., I.S., T.S. and K.K.; visualization, N.E. and K.K.; project administration, N.E. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grants No. 19H04282.  
The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Japan (protocol code R1-16, 3 December 2019).  
Written informed consent was obtained from the principal of the participating school. In addition, an opportunity to reject participation or use of the children's data was provided to the children's legal guardians using a document specifically prepared for this purpose as an opt-out method.  
The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to ethical issues.  
N.E. gratefully acknowledges guidance on designing the English tests provided by associate [PERSON] at Kyoto University (Japan).  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.