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.