Previous analyses revealed that the students in an English program at a bilingual university in Tokyo significantly improved their English proficiency over their first year. Further statistical analyses such as structural equation modeling, however, were unable to discover what factors contributed to the improvement positively or negatively. Thus, to investigate what factors contribute to the success of English learners in the English program, we asked both successful and less successful students how they studied during the first year of their university education in and out of class. The results showed that successful and less successful learners employed no different learning strategies, but two factors, English-speaking selves and test familiarity, emerged as possible factors that might influence the improvement of their English proficiency.
Yagi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.