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Papers by akiyo hirai

English language education, 2023

Jacet journal, Oct 31, 2013

In Japan, four commercialized English proficiency tests, TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Lang... more In Japan, four commercialized English proficiency tests, TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), TOEIC(Test of English for international Communication), STEP(the Society for Testing English Proficiency) ..

Language Testing in Asia

Addressing the lack of English tests that measure critical thinking (CT) abilities of EFL learner... more Addressing the lack of English tests that measure critical thinking (CT) abilities of EFL learners, this study aims to develop an English Critical Thinking Test (ECTT) designed to measure the consistency, analysis, and inference CT skills. It is a follow-up to a pilot study to accumulate validity evidence for the use of the ECTT. A total of 262 Japanese EFL learners who were first-year college students took the ECTT, a Japanese Critical Thinking Test (JCTT), and an English proficiency test (EPT). The result of the internal structures of ECTT and JCTT revealed that both CT tests fit two-factor models better than three-factor models, with consistency as one factor and analysis and inference as the other factor. This implies that it is difficult to measure the CT skills’ hierarchical nature. However, the model that included the three tests fit the data well and indicated moderately high correlations between the ECTT and EPT (r = .64) and between the ECTT and JCTT (r = .55). In addition...

Impact, 2021

Storytelling and story-retelling have the potential to be used as tools to assist with foreign la... more Storytelling and story-retelling have the potential to be used as tools to assist with foreign language teaching and learning. Professor Akiyo Hirai, University of Tsukuba, Japan, has been interested in this concept since 2005. She is researching Second Language Acquisition and observed that students from European countries and South America learning English tended to master the language more quickly than Asian students and particularly Japanese students. This highlighted that teaching methods that are effective for one demographic may not necessarily be suited to another demographic. In order to help her Japanese students overcome the issues they were facing with learning English, Hirai experimented with combining reading a story and telling that story to others as an activity for learning and practising speaking. This led to a method of teaching English called the Story Retelling Speaking Test (SRST), which requires students to read a story and retell it using around five keywords...

A Story Retelling Speaking [Ibst (SRST) was developed to provide a speaking assessment tool that ... more A Story Retelling Speaking [Ibst (SRST) was developed to provide a speaking assessment tool that has high practicality and positive impact on teaching and leaming. The current study aims to investigate the test quality ofthe SRST' by analyzing test-takers' actual test perfbrmance based upon four test components-story length, reading comprehension questions, keywords, and opinions. The results showed that the fbur SRST components function fully or partially as intended, which is positive evidence fbr the validity of the test. The effects of text length on production volume were shown to be not consistent, whieh suggests negligible impact ofmemory on the SRST perfbrmance. Additionally, most test-takers understood the story's content in the reading section and most keywords were used in thc retelling section. A substantial nurnber of test-takers stated opinions; further, revisions fbr fiLrther eliciting opinions have been preposed.

students' oral perfbrmances prior to assessment. Students' oral performances in story ret... more students' oral perfbrmances prior to assessment. Students' oral performances in story retelling tasks were rated by their peers and teacher and these assessments were subsequently compared. The results showed that (1) peer and teacher assessments were significantly correlated when anonymity of raters was preserved and (2) determining ratings in pairs did not increase the correlation between peer and teacher assessments. These results suggest that whether peer assessment is a genuine tool for evaluation remams open to questlon.