This paper reports the results of a November 2008 survey sent to 899 Japanese college graduates of computer science and computer engineering courses regarding their use of English in the workplace since graduating from the university. The results, based on a 17.4 % response rate, indicate that the most frequent English-language tasks for computer specialists in the professional workplace in Japan are the reading of manuals and instructions (for installation, etc.), and the writing of email, faxes, and business letters. Englishlanguage speaking and listening tasks are reported by respondents to be not as common in the workplace as English-language writing and reading tasks. Findings suggest that academic institutions training engineers in non-English-language environments should avoid an institutional bias toward English for research purposes by balancing curricula between future professional and workplace needs of the majority of graduates and the needs of faculty for trained graduate students within the academy.

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In 2014, the University of Aizu was accepted for participation in Japan's national TOP Global University (TGU) initiative. In this paper, we describe our use of video interviewing to prepare Japanese students for our Global Experience Gateway study abroad TGU project. Our university specializes in computer science education at undergraduate and graduate levels. Our students are preparing for careers or further research in either software or hardware specializations, and it is expected that English will be required increasingly in computer-related research and business. Within Japanese education, there is a view that the youth are reluctant to speak English (King, 2013), and our students use English infrequently. We have created a study abroad programme, which is intended to motivate students to study more in their regular English language classes to improve language skills and attain higher TOEIC scores. However, improved course grades and test scores do not prepare students with interpersonal communication skills required to function in an Englishspeaking context. Recent literature on language learning outside of the classroom (Nunan & Richards, 2014) supports our use of video interviewing to prepare students for study abroad. We are teaching Japanese students to conduct and videorecord interviews with non-Japanese speakers in preparation for the conversational demands of study abroad. Practice with video equipment, interviewing techniques, simple camera work and editing helps our students to interact with our international

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Analysis of publicly available language learning corpora can be useful for extracting characteristic features of learners from different proficiency levels. This can then be used to support language learning research and the creation of educational resources. In this paper, we classify the words and parts of speech of transcripts from different speaking proficiency levels found in the NICT-JLE corpus. The characteristic features of learners who have the equivalent spoken proficiency of CEFR levels A1 through to B2 were extracted by analyzing the data with the support vector machine method. In particular, we apply feature selection to find a set of characteristic features that achieve optimal classification performance, which can be used to predict spoken learner proficiency.