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1)School of Medicine, Juntendo University, Tokyo, Japan2)Department of General Education, Juntendo University Faculty of Medicine, Chiba, JapanTeamwork Among First Year Medical Students- Student Reports in 2020 -Corresponding author: Ryoko Fujita (ORCID: 0000-0001-6650-8710)Faculty of Medicine, Juntendo UniversitySakura Campus, 1-1 Hirakagakuendai, Inzai-shi, Chiba 270-1695, JapanTEL: +81-476-98-1001 (ext. 339)　FAX: +81-476-98-1011　E-mail: r-fujita@juntendo.ac.jp〔Received　Jan. 28, 2022〕〔Accepted　Aug. 29, 2022〕J-STAGE Advance published date: Nov. 18, 2022Copyright © 2022 The Juntendo Medical Society. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original source is properly credited. doi: 10.14789/jmj.JMJ21-0054-OTObjective: This study was aimed at investigating the best way to seek clarification when failing to correctly understand the meaning of an English utterance.Materials and Methods: We administered a survey to Japanese freshmen majoring in medicine to determine the main reasons for their failure to hear utterances and how they seek clarification when facing different situations of mishearing. The same survey was distributed to four teachers who are native English speakers.Results: Generally, the students obtained a low percentage of correct answers to multiple-choice questions. The use of a particular test-taking strategy depended primarily on an individual, but the students evaluated all the choices when answering multiple-choice questions.Conclusions: The current study revealed that the most common causes of mishearing among the participants were a lack of vocabulary and speech speed. The most popular strategy for seeking clarification was asking for it directly. Finally, the native speakers and highly proficient students tended to attempt to understand utterances indirectly.Key words: seeking clarification, response, communication strategy, surveyJuntendo Medical Journal2022. 68(6), 568-575What’s New from Juntendo University, TokyoProblem-Based Learning to Encourage Active Learning and What is the Best Response When Listeners Fail to Hear English Correctly? (Course name: Listening Skills: Development and Assessment)IntroductionSeeking clarification is one of the vital skills that language learners need to acquire. Compared with native speakers, language learners encounter many occasions where they cannot understand what the other people are saying. The lack of understanding comes from various reasons, such as insufficient vocabulary knowledge, limited cultural knowledge, or simply the fast speech rate. A member of our team is an international student who understands the difficulty of learning a foreign language. Adapting to life in a foreign country necessitates the ability to seek clarification when failing to understand the meanings of utterances. Even when there are no language barriers, we need to seek clarification in many occasions. For example, during lectures, an unavoidable problem for the students is that students sometimes fail to hear an utterance correctly owing to a loss of concentration1). If we cannot understand what the others are saying, various problems arise. For language learners, they cannot communicate Mokan KAKU1), Mirei SHIROYANAGI1), Haruhi MIZUMA1), Ryoko FUJITA2)568