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For many sociolinguists, the issue of shyness and hesitation phenomenon has been problematic for Japanese L1 and L2 speakers, particularly in gendered interactions. Over the past decade, more Japanese are shunning conversations, relationships, and isolating themselves, which is accelerating the demographic crisis in Japan. Thus, this paper focuses on the variables concerning fluency, syntactical and lexical complexity to see if there are significant differences between gendered and same-sex interactions. It seeks to answer questions such as 'is hesitation phenomenon more marked in gendered discourse than in same-sex interactions,' and 'which gender exhibits the most fluency and dysfluency?' Results showed a significant difference in the speech between males and females in regard to speaking rates and number of words, but no significance was noted between gendered and same-sex interactions, or for the variables in lexical and syntactical complexity.

This study focused on the grammatical accuracy of Japanese students who were learning English. The database for the errors came from the Japanese University Student Corpus (JUSC) comprising 61 transcripts containing 51,061 words. An inventory, containing 400 errors in context, was taken from this corpus. The first research question related to the most common errors Japanese L2 learners made in spontaneous speech whereas the second question focused on the interpretability and recognition of errors as being intralingual or interlingual. Results showed that the primary errors were articles, verb tense, prepositions, omission, modifier errors, and subject-verb agreement. These results indicate that L1 is a factor in grammatical accuracy. We concluded that this data highlights the need for language teachers to focus on getting students to use the grammatical forms in actual dialogues.

Detailed research concerning the issue fluency, specifically relating to pauses, mean length runs, and fluency rates in Japanese EFL learners, is limited. Furthermore, the issue of tracking fluency gains has often been ignored, misunderstood or minimized in EFL educational research. The present study, which is based on six monologues conducted over a school year (2010-2011), focuses on changes in fluency and accuracy concerning students' use of the simple past and present perfect, present perfect progressive, and past perfect verb tenses. Based on the results of a university placement exam, twenty students were selected. Two groups of ten students with the highest and lowest scores were interviewed for period of six months, three times in each school semester. Research aims focus on whether or not there are changes in pausing (duration and frequency), mean length runs, fluency rates and grammatical accuracy between the two groups over the school year. Students were then videotaped concerning how they responded to different questions, which concerned students' past experiences, and views. Results, based on the transcripts of the student monologues, indicated that there was significant improvement relating to the mean length runs, and on one fluency rate, but there were no significant differences in grammatical errors either in percentage of error free clauses or in errors per 100 words between the two groups. The findings help to further our understanding of specific language gains as it relates to fluency and grammatical accuracy in students' unrehearsed speech over a school year.

In this experiment, students individually conduct one of several variations of an E2 dehydrohalogenation reaction on a cyclohexyl halide substrate for 30 min, which is sufficient only for a partial reaction to occur. The variations examine reaction conditions including different leaving groups, decreased reaction temperature, or reduced base concentration. Analysis of the quenched reaction products by GC or NMR allows students to compute the percent completion of their individual reaction. In a subsequent lab, the student results are compiled and averaged, and statistics are generated. The students perform a collaborative group analysis to draw conclusions as to how the different factors affected the rate of reaction based on percent completion and the impact of any errors observed. The statistical compilation of data from repeated trials for the group analysis demonstrates to students an approach to research that is analogous to real-world research technique. (Contains 1 scheme and 1 table.)