The push for better English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pedagogy continues in Asia. In Japan, particularly, developing self-regulated learning (SRL) skills is a major objective in the new national curriculum for primary and secondary schools. Research in education suggests the practice of formative assessment (FA) in the classroom fosters SRL skills. The importance of FA in EFL is discussed here, along with an investigation of the relationship between FA and SRL skills of Japanese university students. An examination of 118 participants measured secondary school experiences of FA practices and its connection to the development of participants’ SRL skills. Quantitative results showed that participants experienced FA practices in secondary schools, however, qualitative data showed these experiences did not sufficiently lead to the development of SRL skills to the extent of participants’ out-of-class study time. In conclusion, we recommend EFL teachers to implement more FA practices and explicit instruction of SRL skills to meet curriculum objectives of fostering the lifelong language learner.
We report on two experiments, published originally in Japanese, on judged goodness and simplicity of dot patterns with reflectional and rotational symmetries (with 1-4 reflection axes and repeats, respectively) under free-viewing tasks. We found that (a) both goodness and simplicity increase monotonously with the number of transformations under which a pattern is invariant; (b) stimulus outlines, such as squares and hexagons, affect both goodness and simplicity; and (c) factors such as contrast polarity and collinearity affect simplicity rather than goodness. The employed free-viewing tasks contrast with detection tasks involving short presentation times, and based on behavioural and neurophysiological evidence, we conclude that this transformational approach captures late rather than early aspects of visio-cognitive processing of visual regularities.
While most research is written from the teacher’s perspective, this paper, which originated as a self-assigned report by the first author, considers the outcomes of a university English course from a student’s viewpoint. Many teachers criticize students for having no motivation or learning goals, forgetting they place students in teacher-controlled situations that influence motivation and goal-setting. In this pilot study, we explore the influence a more democratic classroom has on motivation when students work to achieve their own goals. Two courses were compared with a democratically-taught course for first-year engineering majors. Questionnaire results and student journal entries indicate students had positive attitudes and high motivation at the end of the course. Compared with the two other courses, the democratic course received higher marks in both satisfaction and achievement. 多くの授業研究の成果は教師の視点から書かれている。しかし本論は学生の視点から、大学生向けのある必修英語シラバスの効果を述べたものである。多くの教師が、最近の学生には目標や動機づけがないと批判しているが、実際は教師が授業の目標と進度を決めることで、学生の目標設定や動機づけを制御しているのではないだろうか。本研究では、工学部1年生の3つの必修英語クラスを比較することで、学生が目標を達成しようとするとき、より民主的な授業法が動機づけに及ぼす影響を調べた。アンケート結果と学生の日誌から、伝統的なシラバスより、教師のサポートで学生が自ら目標や進度を決める方法のほうが、学生の積極的な態度を養い、また動機づけを高めることが示された。他の2クラスと比べると、この民主的なクラスは満足感と達成度において、より高い評価を得た。
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