Conventional wisdom holds that reading, writing, and grammar are emphasized more than speaking and listening in Japanese secondary education (Aiga, 1990). However, when one begins to look in detail at students' writing experience, we find that students' Junior and Senior High School writing experience has been mainly at the sentence level (Okada, et al, 1995) and such sentence level experience mainly deals with spelling and grammar (Yamada, 1993). In a recent study on writing apprehension, over 75% of recent high school graduates (n= 372) reported that they had little or no writing experience beyond the sentence level while in high school (Cornwell & McKay, 1997). Students enter university English programs with little or no experience in producing paragraphs or essays, let alone extended research papers. Japanese Universities which emphasize academic writing must take students through the long and difficult process of first producing paragraphs in English, then short essays, and finally longer, documented research papers. This is not an easy process.