Kansai University Bilingual Essay Corpus Project and Prospects for Research and Pedagogical Applications

This is an interim report of the Kansai University Bilingual Essay Corpus Project currently being undertaken at the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies of Kansai University (KU) by the above authors. The project officially began in April 2012 for the primary purposes of (1) collecting essaydata written both in English and Japanese on 13 different topics by the KU students and compiling them into a large-scale bilingual corpus, and (2) analyzing the corpus data from various viewpoints, be they lexical, syntactic, organizational, rhetorical or otherwise, to properly assess and gain insights into the students’ linguistic and compositional competences in both languages. The English part of the corpus (ver. 2012) currently contains approx. 650,000 running words, and the Japanese part approx. 1.5 million Kana-kanji characters. The corpus size will be twice as large as that of the current version by the end of 2013. The project also aims to develop an error tagger and a logical/organizational features editor, which the authors believe will be instrumental in otherwise time-consumingannotation work. Some of the research questions the authors plan to pursue in the course of the next phase of the project will also be outlined at the end of this report.研究ノート平成25年度関西大学教育研究高度化促進

Using Blended-learning for Fostering Vocabulary Learning: An Interim Report of the Newly Implemented “Grammar & Vocabulary Development” Course

This is an interim report on the effectiveness of a newly implemented blended-learning course designed to foster vocabulary and grammar learning targeted at the 1st year students at the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies, Kansai University. The course, entitled “Grammar & Vocabulary Development,”constitutes one of the core courses in the new curriculum implemented from 2013 at the FFLS. This report begins with the rationale of the said course, which is followed by some data and statistical analyses thereof as to the overall effectiveness of the course. It concludes with suggestions for possible improvement and future direction of this experimental endeavor.実践報

ICTを活用した英語アカデミック・ライティング指導 : 支援ツールの開発と実践

平成27-28年度関西大学研究拠点形成支援「国際的な研究拠点としての関西大学英語ライティング・ハブの設立および英語論文ライティング支援ツールの開発

The Ganymede Laser Altimeter (GALA) for the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE): Mission, science, and instrumentation of its receiver modules

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is a science mission led by the European Space Agency, being developed for launch in 2023. The Ganymede Laser Altimeter (GALA) is an instrument onboard JUICE, whose main scientific goals are to understand ice tectonics based on topographic data, the subsurface structure by measuring tidal response, and small-scale roughness and albedo of the surface. In addition, from the perspective of astrobiology, it is imperative to study the subsurface ocean scientifically. The development of GALA has proceeded through an international collaboration between Germany (the lead), Japan, Switzerland, and Spain. Within this framework, the Japanese team (GALA-J) is responsible for developing three receiver modules: the Backend Optics (BEO), the Focal Plane Assembly (FPA), and the Analog Electronics Module (AEM). Like the German team, GALA-J also developed software to simulate the performance of the entire GALA system (performance model). In July 2020, the Proto-Flight Models of BEO, FPA, and AEM were delivered from Japan to Germany. This paper presents an overview of JUICE/GALA and its scientific objectives and describes the instrumentation, mainly focusing on Japan’s contribution