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570Japanese conversations. Therefore, we hypothesized that this idea also applies to English conversations.The purpose of the current study was to examine how Japanese learners of English seek clarification in conversations and compare the strategies used by native speakers of English with those used by language learners. We conducted a questionnaire survey to both university students and instructors using Google Form. Participants Sixty-eight Japanese university students partici-pated in the study. They are all first-year students majoring in medicine. Their proficiency levels ranged from CEFR A2 to B2 based on the place-ment test they took after entering the university. Four faculty members of a university also took part in the study. We needed responses from native speakers of English, but because of the time constraint, the best way to get responses from native speakers was to ask questions to the instruc-tors at the university that we attended. Three of the instructors came from the US and one was from Canada.Materials We used the questionnaire because of two reasons. The first reason is that questionnaire suited the best for the purpose of the study. As the purpose of the study was to examine how language learners seek clarification in real-life communication, the best way to get the participants’ responses was to ask them to think back the time when they had communication problems, and choose their prefer-ences. The second reason is the COVID pandemic. As the study was conducted during the COVID pandemic, it was difficult to have in-person inter-views or conduct tests to the participants in person. We developed a questionnaire and distributed it to the respondents. It consisted of two questions (see Appendix). Question 1 was intended to determine the main reasons for the participants’ failure to hear English utterances correctly. Question 2 was designed to ascertain how the participants seek clarification when facing different situations of mishearing.Question 2 was comprised of four parts. Ques-tions 2a and 2b were meant to discover how partic-ipants seek clarification when they talk to people close to them. The first response option is requesting repetition, the second is requesting an explanation, the third is repeating unknown words, the fourth is checking for understanding, and the fifth is attempting to understand utterances indirectly. Questions 2c and 2d are the same, except that the situations involve individuals who are not close to the respondents.Procedure We distributed the questionnaire to the partici-pants. We used Google Form and sent the partici-pants the URL of the Google Form. It took about 5 to 10 minutes for the participants to finish answering the questionnaire. The questionnaire survey was conducted for the current study to investigate the main reasons of language learners’ failure to hear utterances and how they seek clarification when facing different situations of mishearing. The responses of language learners were also compared with those of native speakers of the target language. Figures 1 and 2 present the results of Question 1 (What is the major reason why you fail to hear?). Figure 1 shows the results of Q1a (When you cannot understand content). The majority of them (88 %) answered Figure 1　Question 1: What is the major reason why you fail to hear?Q1a: When you cannot understand contentMethodResults