1. Contact hours/week. The majors w

1. Contact hours/week. The majors were taking seven 90-minute classes per week in English. These students were pseudo-randomly assigned by the school to one of 8 sections (“kumi” in Japanese). Students in a particular section at Kyoto Sangyo University take classes together in all but two of of their seven ‘practical’ courses. It was not feasible to vary the content of all of the courses, so only two courses, “Extensive Reading” and “Listening/Pronunciation” were used in the experimental design. The other five courses taken by the majors included “Intensive Reading”, “Grammar”, “Composition”, “Conversation” and “General Cultural Studies”. An assumption was made that the content of the other courses would be roughly similar and would therefore not jeopardize the validity of the study. Two of the sections, 7 & 8, were English majors with a specialization in International Relations. These students had a slightly different program with a content course instead of grammar. The results with these classes both included and excluded were essentially the same, so this minor difference will henceforth be ignored.
Most, but not all, non-majors had two classes per week, one of which, “Applied English” was part of this study. The other class, “Reading” was a traditional reading class which concentrated on the careful reading and understanding of short passages of text. While it would have been better if this class, too, had been included in the study, this was unfeasible. Since all students were receiving a like amount of this reading
practice however, this additional class should have made little difference in the overall outcome. The Applied English class met for a maximum of 27 class sessions during the school year for a maximum of 40.5 hours of contact time.