EIKEN(STEP) Research

I browsed several articles from STEP site. They give me a useful hints for me to find out some interesting topics to implement in secondary level.

The first interesting topic is about Vocabulary. Research about analyzing learners' corpus, and comparing words of textbooks and NRT test such as Center Test, EIKEN, TOEIC, and TOEFL, is what i am now interested in. Dr.Tono's site seems insightful, and Center Test soft data is available here.

The second one is about Reading. Though reading is primal area high school teacher teach, empirical testing about reading seems hard. Some articles from this Eiken Research did not give me reliable info becausae of many many variables they could not control. But WPM(Word Per Minute) and ER(Extensive Reading) is one of what i would like to try and research in high school context.

The third one is about Motivation. At first until recently, i thought motivation is peripheral area for language learning/teaching, and this area is not what language teacher focuse on to research, but it turnds out this area is interesting in terms of first, testing/researching to make a construct of target students motivation, and second, how the result obtained can be applicable to actual teaching. For example Dr.Hiromori's article provides me with hints about the relationships between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. He reevaluate the importance of extrinsic motivation, which is just what i have thought for a long time. His research satisfy both the two needs on motivation research i said above.

The last one is about evaluation/testing. Dr.Yamamori's research about evaluation using Genenarizability Theory is really insightful for me. Generalizability seems to be useful for evaluation of writing activity as we can see at Mr.Yamanishi's article and Ms.Okubo's article.

I would like to keep those interesting topics in mind when teaching English, and adjust those topics into my teaching contexts to come up with helpful research ideas both for me and other researchers/teachers.