Knowledge Bank

This paper presents a newly created L2 Japanese Speaking Span Test (L2JSST) and reports preliminary results on its validity based on ten English speaking learners of Japanese. The Intermediate High ~ Advanced Japanese learners took two Japanese language proficiency tests and L1 English Speaking Span test. All scores correlated with the scores of the L2JSST. Given this finding, we believe that the current version of JSST can be used to measure English speaking learners’ working memory capacity in speech production in the same way that the L2 Japanese Reading Span Test (Itomitsu and Nakayama 2005a) does in reading.