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In 1990 the governor of Guam committed suicide in front of the statue of great Chief Kepuha of 17 century. This episode illustrates the plight Guam's people have now. This paper intends to clarify their struggle to establish their identity under the US's dominance. The Chamorro, the original native people, have been seeking their identity under "Englsh Only" policy, by means of Chamorro instruction at school and its extensive use in Guam as their own language. The efforts by the Guam Commission on Self-Determination and other patriotic people moved the Guam Legislature to modify the Government Code of Guam, and resulted in prescribing one hour a week mandatory instruction at elementary school. However, in reality, the instruction at school remains at a position of a foreign language, not as their own native language. Besides, the program suffers from lack of well-qualified teachers, the elaborated syllabus and teaching materials. To make matters worse, the population has changed unfavorably to them, with increasing number of Filipino immigrants, which has resulted in the increase of Tagalog usage on Guam to the percentage of 20.1% almost close to 29.3% of Chamorro. Incidentally, the residents who speak only English at home amount to 37.3% according to 1990 national statistics. In this situation Guam people's English literacy remains low compared to the standard of the mainland US, though it is not independently tallied by the Census Bureau. Half of the young dropout before graduation of high school. The cultural diversity and difference Guam people have should attribute to the difficulty for acquiring English. The English imposed on them is nothing but the American English developed in a low context culture, while Guam people including the Chamorro remains in a high context culture. The writer asserts that drastic changes in English instruction should be planned to admit and establish Guam English based on their own cultural identity, and eventually the Guam English will help establish their identity including not only native Chamorro but also Filipino people.

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English text readability employing numerical calculation has been widely accepted by U.S. reading pedagogy, but it has not been accepted in Japan. This paper, after discussion of Japan's rejection of readability, introduces how text readability has been assessed and its assessment practically utilized in American education, and proposes the active use of readability formulas in English language teaching in Japan. Emphasis in ELT textbook compilation in Japan's secondary education has been on strict observance of the Course of Study, which stipulates the number and the kind of vocabulary and sentence structures. Besides, the text-centered attitude in the traditional grammar translation method still prevailing in Japan's educational environment does not put so much emphasis on proper matching between the students (readers) and the textbook (text). Both of the reasons above have turned the teachers' eyes away from the text readability. Thus, research on reading done without objective assessment of text readability reduces its validity for wider application of the results. Readability, which, originated in the 1920s, was first elaborated for wide use by Dale & Chall, based on the assessment of the difficulty of the vocabulary and the complexity of the sentences used in the text. Cognitive psychology and linguistics criticized the formulas in terms of that they did not rightly value the abstract and symbolic expressions and coherence in the sentences. However, the difficulty of numerical assessment of these factors and high correlation between the existing readability scores and actual readability lead to the revised methods of readability assessment. As for actual assessment in the classroom, the Cloze Readability Score is introduced as a practical way to assess the matching between the text and the proposed readers and its implication in reading classes. Two formulas named Flesch Reading Ease and Fog Index are demonstrated with the extracts from junior high school and university textbooks, best-seller and children's books, and TIME and Newsweek. While the readability of best-seller and children's books stays within the 'standard' level, and TIME and Newsweek at 'fairly difficult', college textbooks used in Japan's reading classes range from 'fairly difficult' to 'extremely difficult'. Thus, reading textbooks employed college English classes are sometimes too difficult for Japanese students even compared with those used for the native English speaking counterparts. This unmatching readability of the text is another reason for tangue-tied Japanese students. The author proposes the practical use of these readability assessment tools and employment of English textbooks appropriate for the Japanese students.

This paper discusses how to develop fluent, independent readers in a TEFL reading program in Japan. It shows the way toward critical reading. First it reviews the reader's role in the reading process historically in terms of the relative position between the original text and the reader, and on the shift from text supremacy to reader independence. In the grammar translation method the original text was the sovereign and the teacher helped the reader to grasp the meaning which was supposed to inherently exist in the text. The reader's role in the reading process was recognized for the first time when a psycholinguistic perspective on reading was introduced by Goodman (1967) and Smith (1971). It was followed by the schema theory, theoretically framed by Grabe (1991), which gave a revolutionary conceptual basis to the reading pedagogy. The policies in the schema theory are now followed by most of the textbooks used at high schools and colleges, and various attempts have been made to help activate readers' background knowledge. Identifying the formal schemata, here the author maintains the importance of intercultural concepts to develop genuine English communication styles in contrast to the Japanese one, especially in the areas of logical development and clear statement of the conclusion. However, the schema theory has some limitations in that it tries to approximate the understanding of the reader to the original text. Instead the reader should develop self-sufficient confidence to take the meaning out of the text, independent of the intent of the writer. The meaning of the text is inevitably created through the interaction of reader and text, and the reading pedagogy should develop the interaction between them, giving an equivalent position to the reader. The theoretical development and analysis of reading pedagogy mentioned above are illustrated by practical teaching procedures. The semantic mapping which especially activates and utilizes the reader's background knowledge is introduced as having tremendous effects even on the students who previously failed in English. The use of Reading Sheet which induces students to analyze the logical development of the text and to write some critical comments gives them confidence in reading. This recognition of the reader's role leads to critical reading by which students willingly tackle and enjoy a text.

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The students' course evaluation is reasonably incorporated in the self-evaluation of the universities as an important component, and is employed by a yearly increasing number of universities and colleges in Japan. This paper discusses its effectiveness as a powerful tool for the improvement of instruction per se, rather than for evaluation of instructors themselves. This numerical data has the objectivity for the comparison between classes and beyond the school year or inter-collegial classes, in contrast to the students' feedback on the instruction, usually done as a form of essay type impressions or requests, which is usually restricted to in-class observation. One of the examples introduced here is the comparison between classes at W University and at M University, which proved the effectiveness of two-minute speeches by each student in building a favorable classroom atmosphere. This is confirmed in the classes at M University in 1998, the next year. Another discovery is of the effectiveness of semantic mapping, a technique of teaching reading, in the instruction of students who had failed in the previous year. Thus, students' course evaluation proves to be a powerful tool for measuring the students' attitude and consequently examining the significance of a teaching method. It should be actively employed for the betterment of college instruction.

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