Effects of extensive reading on reading attitudes in a foreign language

Extensive reading (ER) is an instructional option steadily gaining support and recognition in second language (L2) reading pedagogy. Even though many attempts have been made to unravel the impact of ER on L2 development, there is a paucity of investigation into the affective domains of reading. The current study helps fill this gap by examining the effect of ER on L2 reading attitude. Participants were 61 undergraduates learning English as a foreign language at a Japanese university. Five attitudinal variables were measured using a 22-item questionnaire scored on a Likert scale in the categories of Comfort, Anxiety, Intellectual Value, Practical Value, and Linguistic Value. After the removal of Linguistic Value because of a ceiling effect, the result showed increases in Comfort and Intellectual Value and a decrease in Anxiety, with no effect on Practical Value. Implications for research and pedagogy are discussed

Word recognition subcomponents and passage level reading in a foreign language

Despite the growing number of studies highlighting the complex process of acquiring second language (L2) word recognition skills, comparatively little research has examined the relationship between word recognition and passage-level reading ability in L2 learners; further, the existing results are inconclusive. This study aims to help fill the gap. Three word recognition subcomponents (decoding, sight word reading, and lexical meaning access) and general English language ability were examined in terms of their contributions to predicting the reading comprehension and reading rate of Japanese university students learning English. Multiple regression analyses revealed that, in addition to the contribution made by English language ability, lexical meaning access was a significant predictor of both reading comprehension and reading rate, and decoding was a predictor of reading rate only. These results not only supported some previous findings but also added new insight into the influence of efficiency of lexical meaning access to reading comprehension

Examining reading fluency in a foreign language: Effects of text segmentation on L2 readers

Grouping words into meaningful chunks is a fundamental process for fluent reading. The present study is an attempt to understand the relationship between chunking and second language (L2) reading fluency. The effects of text segmentation on comprehension, rate, and regression in L2 reading were investigated using a self-paced reading task in a moving-window condition. The participants were intermediate and advanced level Japanese EFL learners. The difficulty of chunking a text negatively affected comprehension and smoothness for the intermediate learners, while the advanced learners were able to overcome chunking difficulty. In this study, although the negative effects of chunking difficulty were observed, the positive effects of assisting chunking were not clearly detected, which was interpreted as suggesting that the relationship between chunking and reading needs to be considered in light of the complex interplay between text difficulty and different aspects of reading

Development of Motivational Scale in Japanese Language Learning: Focusing on Indonesian University Students

The main objective of the present research is to develop questionnaire items in Japanese language learning for Indonesian university students. A total of 157 university students participated in the study and completed the questionnaire online. First, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted in order to investigate a structure of motivational factors, which extracted a six-factor structure. Confirmatory factor analysis was then conducted through structural equation modeling and the validity of the six-factor model was examined. The Cronbach alpha coefficients were also calculated. The results of the two factor analyses provided a satisfactory reliability and validation of the questionnaire. Consequently, the extracted six-factor motivational structure was certified as an appropriate questionnaire battery to assess Japanese language learning motivation in Indonesia university students

Japan’s Energy Management Policy Experiences and Their Implications for Developing Countries

energy conservation, energy security, energy managment, Climate change

From symplectic cohomology to Lagrangian enumerative geometry

We build a bridge between Floer theory on open symplectic manifolds and the enumerative geometry of holomorphic disks inside their Fano compactifications, by detecting elements in symplectic cohomology which are mirror to Landau-Ginzburg potentials. We also treat the higher Maslov index versions of LG potentials. We discover a relation between higher disk potentials and symplectic cohomology rings of anticanonical divisor complements (themselves related to closed-string Gromov-Witten invariants), and explore several other applications to the geometry of Liouville domains.Comment: 47 pages, 13 figures; v2: reference fixes, minor correction