Most universities and colleges in Japan expend substantial resources to include at least one mandatory General English course in their curriculum, even in departments where the primary content focus is not English. This paper examines whether the General English courses, titled Integrated English A and B, at one private Japanese university, significantly improved participating students’ English proficiency, as intended. Participants were divided into Group 1 (higher proficiency) and Group 2 (lower proficiency) using their scores from the Cambridge English: Key (KET) tests of Reading and Writing and a five-minute, one-to-one English conversation with a native English-speaking teacher. This KET test was also used as the pre-course measure and matched with the results of a different form of the KET Reading and Writing test at the end of the academic year. Paired, one-tailed Student’s t-tests indicated a significant improvement in English proficiency for Group 1 (t=3.3896, p=0.05) and Combined Groups 1 and 2 (t=1.8098, p=0.05), but not for Group 2 alone. These results are explained and discussed with reference to Spolsky’s (1989) conditions for second language learning and other literature relating to the influence of affect and cognition on language learning. Limitations are acknowledged.
Moritoshi et al. (Fri,) studied this question.