Results of a study involving 5 ninth-grade students showed that, after 20 online English conversation lessons, their speech output increased by approximately 1.4 times from the initial level and their use of multi-sentence expressions with subordinating conjunctions increased.
産経ヒューマンラーニング conducted a study of middle school students to assess speech output and expressive ability after continued enrollment in Online English Conversation Plus. Under the guidance of Yukio Tono (投野由紀夫), a professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, the students took a total of 20 lessons from April to December 2025, and their spontaneous speech was analyzed.
The participants were 5 ninth-grade students, and data from a total of 98 lessons was tracked over the long term. Reading aloud and repetitions of instructors' utterances were excluded, and the course requirement was 19 or 20 topic-talk lessons per year.
Analysis of the number of words spoken showed that, while the initial average was around 300 words, it reached approximately 470 to 490 words in the latter part of the course, an increase of approximately 1.4 times from the initial level. Continued opportunities for output increased speech volume, and a change toward a more proactive approach to output was observed.
As a change in expressive ability, the proportion of speech using subordinating conjunctions increased from 12.3% to 21.5%. The ability to connect sentences explaining reasons and time relationships became established, and a shift was observed from single-sentence responses to speaking that logically connects multiple sentences.