高等学校における英語多読指導の効果に関する実証的研究

広島大学(Hiroshima University)博士(教育学)Pedagogydoctora

The Results and Subsidiary Issues of Extensive Reading in English at a Senior High School

This study examined how the number of words senior high school students read in the one year extensive reading program would affect their self-assessed reading speed and the results of the reading comprehension test at a trial examination. The participants were 36 senior high school students in the eleventh grade. It yielded the following three results: first, this extensive reading program helped the students increase their reading speed regardless of their reading comprehension levels. Second, the more they read, the stronger tendency they showed toward reading faster. Third, the ability to read faster seemed to have a strong formative influence on their reading comprehension level. Thus, the study suggests that in order to read without much difficulty, students need to gain the reading speed by reading more through extensive reading programs

Case Report Near-Infrared Spectroscopy during the Verbal Fluency Task before and after Treatment with Image Exposure and SSRI Therapy in Patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Drug therapy with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) has been used as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In the present case report, exposure therapy was used in addition to escitalopram (20 mg) to treat a 28-year-old female patient with OCD for 6 months. Her obsessive-compulsive symptoms comprised thoughts of words such as rape, crematorium, neck hanging, unhappy, death, die, and kill and images such as a shelf of gods, a shrine, a Buddhist altar, the sun, the sky, and the faces of her parents, siblings, and relatives. As exposure therapy, she was asked to view the images associated with these symptoms three times a day along with drug therapy. With the combination of drug and exposure therapies, her obsessive-compulsive symptoms improved within 6 months, with no interference in her daily life. Multichannel near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) showed improvement of brain function in the temporal and frontal lobes after treatment. These results suggest that NIRS can be used as an indicator of brain function improvement in patients with OCD