Making Reading Comprehension Questions:Some Ideas

The General English course at Shinshu University has been implemented since April, 2006. Reading, both extensive reading and short texts, forms an important part of the course. The development of the course books is an ongoing process. An issue involved in this process is: How can the reading activities in the course book be further developed? Also, are the reading tasks (questions and activities) offering varied and holistic stimuli for the learners? With these questions in mind, it is the purpose of this paper to undertake a study of the reading comprehension tasks in the General English course books, contrast them with an international general English text book and then seek to offer some suggestions based on the findings. The aim is to broaden material developer’s choices when writing and reviewing the course book material, from the perspectives of structural variety and skills and strategies employed by the learners to complete the tasks.Article信州大学人文社会科学研究 3: 18-33(2009)departmental bulletin pape

An Introduction to the New Literacy Studies

Article信州大学人文社会科学研究 7: 25-30(2013)departmental bulletin pape

Locating the Analysis of Digital Media Literacy Events in the Context of the Philosophy of Social Sciences

Article信州大学人文社会科学研究 6: 95-105(2012)departmental bulletin pape

Why is culture an important issue for language teaching and language learning?

Article信州大学人文社会科学研究 4: 119-126(2010)departmental bulletin pape

Growth poles and multipolarity

This paper develops an empirical measure of growth poles and uses it to examine the phenomenon of multipolarity. The authors formally define several alternative measures, provide theoretical justifications for these measures, and compute polarity values for nation states in the global economy. The calculations suggest that China, Western Europe, and the United States have been important growth poles over the broad course of world history, and in modern economic history the United States, Japan, Germany, and China have had prominent periods of growth polarity. The paper goes on to analyze the economic and institutional determinants, both at the proximate and fundamental level, that underlie this measure of polarity, as well as compute measures of dispersion in growth polarity shares for the major growth poles.Economic Theory&Research,Achieving Shared Growth,Economic Growth,Population Policies,Currencies and Exchange Rates

Teachers as Curriculum Developers -Negotiating Standardized Goals-

Article信州大学人文社会科学研究 2: 105-120(2008)departmental bulletin pape

Quarantine urban ecologies

As of April 2020, billions of people around the world are living under differing degrees of physical confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, reshaping the ways in which we represent, affect, and sense urban space. Covid-19 has altered the mobilities and ordinary affects of human and nonhuman animal life in unprecedented ways (Stewart 2007). Confinement has shaken up the quotidian rhythms of urbanites, both human and nonhuman, actual and virtual. We explore these quarantine urban ecologies as they manifest in two prominent and interlinked forms: digital ecologies and ecologies of abandonment. We feel these ecologies differently, and feel differently about them, because they are ecologically different. Until now only virtually evoked through thought experiments (e.g., Weisman 2007), Covid-19 is actualizing these ecologies on a global scale

Quarantine encounters with digital animals: more-than-human geographies of lockdown life

Quarantine conditions led to the proliferation of digital encounters with nonhuman animals. Here, we explore three prominent forms: creaturely cameos, avatar acquaintances and background birding. These virtual encounters afforded during lockdown life generated novel and affective human–animal relations that could have lasting effects for humans and nonhumans post-quarantine, posing interesting questions for more-than-human scholarship

Institutions, Education, and Economic Performance

This paper considers the interactions between governance, educational outcomes, and economic performance. More specifically, we seek to establish the linkages by which institutional quality affect growth by considering its mediating impact on education. While the contribution of both human capital and institutions to growth are often acknowledged, the channels by which institutions affect human capital and, in turn, growth, has been relatively underexplored. Our empirical approach adopts a two-stage strategy that estimates national-level educational production functions which include institutional governance as a covariate, and uses these estimates as instruments for human capital in cross-country growth regressions