Hajime Umeda
Minnesota State University-Akita

A. Method
　1. Subject: The subjects are made up of 36 students from Malaysia, the Republic of China, and Japan, 12 students each. All the subjects are graduate students in an American university.
　2. Material: A questionnaire consisting of 20 questions was prepared. (See Appendix.)
　3. Task: The subjects' task was to read the questions and respond to them.

B. Results

　The students from Malaysia begin to learn English at the age of 7, and both the Chinese and Japanese students at age 13. (See Table 1.) This perhaps accounts for the fact that Malaysian students gain more confidence in English proficiency.
　The style of English education falls into two major types: ESL and EFL.
(A) ESL: The instructional medium is English from elementary school.
(B) EFL: English is taught as part of the total school curriculum. The teachers often use the students' native language for the explanation of grammar and meanings.
　The distribution of ESL and EFL in the three countries under discussion is shown below.

　AS Table 2 shows, 67% of the Malaysian students surveyed attended schools where English is used as the sole medium of instruction, whereas all the Chinese and Japanese students learned English through their first languages.
　The results of Question 3 also show that Malaysian students often use English outside the classroom to communicate with each other while both Chinese and Japanese students use their own mother tongues. Because Malaysians have many more opportunities to use and develop communicative English at home (in fact, many of them do attend school where the means of instruction is exclusively English), their English proficiency exceeds that of Chinese or Japanese students. A similar observation has also been made by Stern (1973), when he claims that foreign language learning can be much more effective if students are exposed to sufficient linguistic environments.
　Malaysian students appear to have high-level ESL skills, which are supposed to come from their ESL educational system in their own country. If that is the case, our next question is how their English skills affect them in their behavior in America. Do they speak up in class because of their excellence in communicative English acquired in Malaysia? Do they often express their opinions in front of their American classmates? Figure 1 indicates how well the students usually understand English in class.

　Obviously enough, the results show that Malaysian students understand academic English much better than Chinese and Japanese students do. On the other hand, there appears to be little difference in percentage between Chinese and Japanese students. The higher level of ESL background among Malaysians ----- most relevantly, their good listening ability ----- seems to account for the relatively small trouble they have in understanding English in class.
　Our next task is to see if Malaysians frequently give opinions or ask questions in class. We are interested in finding out if they behave as American students normally do with the use of their excellent communicative skills. Figure 2 shows how often the students express their opinions in class.

　It is evident that as a whole Malaysian students are slightly more active than Chinese and Japanese students. Judging from these results, it is assumed that Malaysian students do not speak up much in class in spite of the fact that they are more familiar with and competent in English than the other two groups.
　In conclusion, Malaysian students in general have better communicative skills than Chinese and Japanese students. The reason for this may be attributed to the fact that the former group of students are exposed to English from the earlier age and more extensively in and out of school. Malaysian students have greater confidence in their English, and thus normally they can understand lectures better than the two other East Asian groups. On the other hand, curiously, our data do not show significant difference in the depth of class participation between the ESL group and the EFL groups.
　It is pointed out by Barnlund (1973), for example, that Japanese people are characterized as being reserved, formal, silent and cautious, while Americans as self assertive, informal, spontaneous, and frank. I have not yet had an opportunity to study the national characters of Malaysians and Chinese, but it seems that they share characteristics common to Asian peoples. In reference to this phenomenon, Gaies (1983) also observes that Asian students are rather reticent about active participation in class.
　Finally, I would like to make a more extensive study of comparison between Chinese and Japanese groups in their English abilities and classroom behavior in the near future because there seems to be some difference between the two groups in spite of the fact that the two countries adopt similar English education systems.

References

Barnlund, D. C. (1973). Public and Private Self in Japan and the UnitedStates. (Translation by S. Nishiyama: Nihonjin no hyougen kouzou. Tokyo: The Simul Press, Inc.)

Gaies, S. J. (1983). "The Investigation of Language Classroom Processes." TESOL Quarterly 17.

Hartford, Beverly (1984). "Learner Factors Affecting Contrastive Analysis." (Lecture given at Indiana University)

Stern, H. H. (1973). "Bilingual Schooling and Second Language Teaching: A Review of Recent North American Experience," in J. W. Oller, Jr. and J. C. Richards (Eds.): Focus on the Learner: Pragmatic Perspectives for the Language Teacher. Newbury House Publishers, Inc.

　The result of this questionnaire will be used as the data for my empirical research. I would appreciate it very much if you could respond to the following questions.

(1) Your native country:_________________
(2) Native language:____________
(3) Age:_______
(4) Sex:_______

Section I: Questions concerning the English education system in your country.

Q1. At what age did you start learning English? Age:_______
In what school? (e.g. elementary school) School:__________________

Q2. Under which system were you educated when you were in elementary and junior high school?
　A. Instruction was given in English (ESL) in every class. _______
　B. English was taught as part of the curriculum. (=EFL) _______

Q3. Which language did you use to communicate with your friends outside class?
　A. Native language
　B. English
　C. Both

Section II: Questions concerning academic life on American campus.

Q4. How much do you generally understand lectures given by American professors?
　A. Perfectly
　B. 90%
　C. 80%
　D. 70%
　E. 60%
　F. 50% or less

 Q5. How often do you speak up or give opinions in class?
　A. Almost always
　B. Frequently
　C. Sometimes
　D. Seldom
　E. Never

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