ショネンジ キョウイク トシテ ヒッシュウ エイゴ カモク ノ ハタシウル キノウ コミュニケーション ノウリョク イクセイ オ シヤ ニ イレテ

昨今， 「コミュニケーション能力育成」 が声高に謳われている． 新入生が 1 年間同じクラスメートとともに学ぶ場である必修英語は， 学生が新しい人間関係を築き， 大学での居場所作りをする機会となりうる． クラスメートとともに活動する機会が増えれば， 人とコミュニケーションをとることへの興味関心や積極性を伸ばし， 言語を問わず， コミュニケーション能力の育成を図ることができるのではないだろうか． 本稿は筆者が 2012 年度に担当した名古屋産業大学と日本福祉大学での必修英語クラスでの試みの記録である． 授業中に実施したアンケート調査に基づいて， コミュニケーション， 英語学習についての受講生の意識がどのように変化したか考察し， 必修英語科目を英語の授業としてだけでなく， 初年次教育の場としても利用できる可能性があると主張する．This paper proposes that an obligatory English class can be an effective scene to help freshmen not only enjoy learning English but also learn how to spend a meaningful campus life, make friends with their classmates, and develop the communicative faculty through various activities given in class. One of the important things for freshmen is to acclimate themselves to the campus life, in other words, to feel that they belong at the university. For that, it seems that making friends with others through various classroom activities is easy since a person will generally feel comfortable and even needed when he/she communicates with someone. This paper shows the development of the communicative faculty of the students in the author\u27s classes at Nagoya Sangyo University and Nihon Fukushi University in the spring semester, 2012. Based on the questionnaires given before and after the semester, I suggest that an obligatory English class can function as a helpful means for encouraging freshmen to communicate with one another actively and to learn English actively as well

Contextualized Automatic Speech Recognition with Attention-Based Bias Phrase Boosted Beam Search

End-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) methods exhibit remarkable performance. However, since the performance of such methods is intrinsically linked to the context present in the training data, E2E-ASR methods do not perform as desired for unseen user contexts (e.g., technical terms, personal names, and playlists). Thus, E2E-ASR methods must be easily contextualized by the user or developer. This paper proposes an attention-based contextual biasing method that can be customized using an editable phrase list (referred to as a bias list). The proposed method can be trained effectively by combining a bias phrase index loss and special tokens to detect the bias phrases in the input speech data. In addition, to improve the contextualization performance during inference further, we propose a bias phrase boosted (BPB) beam search algorithm based on the bias phrase index probability. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves the word error rate and the character error rate of the target phrases in the bias list on both the Librispeech-960 (English) and our in-house (Japanese) dataset, respectively.Comment: accepted by ICASSP2022

Age- and sex-related differences of muscle cross-sectional area in iliocapsularis: a cross-sectional study

[Background] This study aimed to determine in how many individuals the iliocapsularis muscle (IC) could be identified on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and whether age and sex are associated with the cross-sectional area (CSA) of the IC. [Methods] Thirty-seven healthy younger adults and 40 healthy older adults were assigned to four groups: 1) 20 younger men; 2) 17 younger women; 3) 20 older men; and 4) 20 older women. The CSAs of the IC, IP, the rectus femoris (RF) and the quadriceps (QUAD) were quantified on an axial MRI. [Results] The number of individuals with the identified IC was n = 17 (85.0%) of 20 younger men, n = 15 (88.2%) of 17 younger women, n = 18 (90.0%) of 20 older men, and 19 (95.0%) of 20 older women. Our results showed the main effect of sex, but not age, in the CSA of the IC. The men-groups had larger CSA of the IC than the women-groups; however, no difference in CSA of the IC was found between the younger and older groups. Meanwhile, the main effects of age and sex were found for the IP, RF, and QUAD; thus, younger or men groups have larger CSAs of the three muscles than the older or women groups. The IC muscle can be discriminated in 85% – 95% of healthy individuals. [Conclusion] Although sex and age are associated with the CSA of lower-limb muscles other than the IC, only sex is associated with the CSA of the IC

Skeletal muscle quality assessed from echo intensity is associated with muscle strength of middle-aged and elderly persons.

Enhanced echo intensity (EI) on an ultrasound image of skeletal muscle indicates changes in muscle quality, including increases in intramuscular fibrous and adipose tissues. However, it is not known whether muscle quality assessed from the EI of computer-aided gray-scale analysis of an ultrasound image is associated with the muscle strength or body composition of a subject. The objectives of this study were to investigate whether muscle quality assessed from EI measured using gray-scale analysis is associated with muscle strength independently of age or muscle thickness (MT), and to examine the relationship between muscle EI and body composition. Ninety-two healthy women with a mean age of 70.4 ± 5.5 years (range, 51-87 years) dwelling in Kyoto, Japan, participated in the study. The MT, subcutaneous fat thickness (FT), and EI of the quadriceps femoris on the right extremity were assessed from transverse ultrasound images. Knee extensor isometric strength was used as a measure of the quadriceps femoris muscle strength. EI was significantly correlated with quadriceps strength independently of age or MT, and stepwise regression analysis revealed that MT and EI were independently associated with quadriceps strength. Importantly, EI showed no significant correlations with FT, percentage of body fat (%BF), or body mass index (BMI), while FT, BMI, and %BF did not significantly influence muscle strength. These data suggest that muscle quantity (i.e., MT) and muscle quality assessed from EI measured using computer-aided gray-scale analysis independently contribute to muscle strength in middle-aged and elderly persons

Cut-off Values for Lower Limb Muscle Thickness to Detect Low Muscle Mass for Sarcopenia in Older Adults

Purpose: Ultrasound-based prediction methods for the detection of low muscle mass for sarcopenia in older adults have been explored previously; however, the muscle that most accurately predicts it is unclear. This study aimed to clarify prediction accuracy and cut-off values for ultrasound-derived thigh and lower leg muscle thickness (MT) to detect low skeletal muscle mass index (SMI) in older adults and to estimate cut-off values based on two standard deviations (SD) below younger adult means for the corresponding muscles as an early detection tool for site-specific low muscle mass. Methods: This study included 204 community-dwelling older (64 males, 140 females, mean age: 75.4 years) and 59 younger (31 males, 28 females, mean age: 22.3 years) adults. The MT of the rectus femoris, vastus intermedius, gastrocnemius, and soleus muscles was measured using ultrasound; SMI was measured using bioelectrical impedance analysis. Results: The prevalence of a low SMI among older adults was 20.3% (n=13) for males and 21.4% (n=30) for females. The receiver operating characteristic analysis revealed that the total MT for the four muscles measured presented the highest area under the curve (AUC) value to predict low SMI for males (0.849) and females (0.776). The AUC value was the highest for the total MT of the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles for males and the gastrocnemius for females (0.836, 0.748; cut-off value: 5.67 cm, 1.42 cm, respectively). Muscle-specific differences between the low SMI-predicting and SD-based cut-off values were observed. The SD-based value for the rectus femoris (1.85 cm) was substantially higher than the low SMI-predicting value (1.51 cm) in males. Conclusion: Ultrasound measurement of lower leg muscles may be a simple, robust measure to detect low muscle mass for sarcopenia. Additionally, cut-off values for site-specific muscle mass loss may not always agree with those for whole-limb muscle mass loss