An annual review article entitled “Overseas research: Review and perspectives” in Modern English Teaching (Kenkyusha) was a large-scale project led by Professor Naomi Kakita in the Department of English Language Education at Hiroshima University. The present author was a project member for six years and thereby acquired not only a new, comprehensive perspective in this and related fields but also the professional reading, writing, and thinking skills to conduct academic research. Thanks to that precious experience, he even now enjoys doing a lot of reading and writing in the psycholinguistic and related areas. From this vantage point, he now finds that little or no research has been available regarding the effects of explicit, effective instruction in a classroom setting, a core component of English language education. Presented here is an example of an ideal explanation of the usage of the apparently most “difficult” spatial prepositions in and on. Also discussed is the McGurk illusion, which may be subsumed under the rubric of cognitive perception and provide a hint for new research and effective explicit instruction.