Natural Conversation Reconstruction Tasks: The Language Classroom as a Meeting Place

This paper, drawing on Pratt’s notion of ‘transculturation’ and Bhabha’s ‘third space’, presents an example of language learning tasks that empower learners’ agency and promote their cross-cultural awareness and sensitivities to a different set of cultural expectations, using a naturally occurred Japanese thanking episodes. The paper discusses the merits of Natural Conversation Reconstruction Tasks (NCRTs) as a practical method for helping L2 learners develop this ‘intercultural competence’. It is based on a qualitative study of the results of one NCRT created for use in the context of teaching Japanese as a L2 in a multicultural society. It suggests the NCRT encourages the learners to explore the intersection where language use, speaker intention and L1 and L2 cultural norms meet. Such a process helps the learners become aware of socially expected patterns of communication in L1 and L2 in terms of the choices of speech act, formulaic expressions, sequential organization and politeness orientation. The learners’ comments suggest that the NCRT helps learners transcend their cultural boundaries by overcoming their narrow understanding of ‘thanking’ as ‘expressions of gratitude and appreciation’ and by cross-culturally widening their views of what counts as thanking. The NCRT with rich contextual information promotes the learners’ intercultural awareness, sensitivity to context and intercultural exploration in the space between L1 and L2, where they have authority and freedom of making sense of conversations, and pragmatics is fully integrated into language pedagogy

Extended Haplotype Homozygosity (EHH)を用いる正の自然選択検出法の検出力比較

要旨あり多様性と進化の統計解析研究ノー

Calibration of Curie temperatures for LiTaO3 single crystals by the LFB ultrasonic material characterization system

科研費報告書収録論文(課題番号:12450119・基盤研究(B)(2) ・H12～H14/研究代表者:櫛引, 淳一/UMS技術を用いた超高周波SAWデバイス用単結晶基板表面の評価技術の開発

Evaluation and selection of LiNbO3 and LiTaO3 substrates for SAW devices by the LFB ultrasonic material characterization system

科研費報告書収録論文(課題番号:12450119・基盤研究(B)(2) ・H12～H14/研究代表者:櫛引, 淳一/UMS技術を用いた超高周波SAWデバイス用単結晶基板表面の評価技術の開発

Evaluation of mass-produced commercial LiTaO3 single crystals using the LFB ultrasonic material characterization system

科研費報告書収録論文(課題番号:12450119・基盤研究(B)(2) ・H12～H14/研究代表者:櫛引, 淳一/UMS技術を用いた超高周波SAWデバイス用単結晶基板表面の評価技術の開発

Standardized evaluation of chemical compositions of LiTaO3 single crystals for SAW devices using the LFB ultrasonic material characterization system

科研費報告書収録論文(課題番号:12450119・基盤研究(B)(2) ・H12～H14/研究代表者:櫛引, 淳一/UMS技術を用いた超高周波SAWデバイス用単結晶基板表面の評価技術の開発

A Practical Genome Scan for Population-Specific Strong Selective Sweeps That Have Reached Fixation

Phenotypic divergences between modern human populations have developed as a result of genetic adaptation to local environments over the past 100,000 years. To identify genes involved in population-specific phenotypes, it is necessary to detect signatures of recent positive selection in the human genome. Although detection of elongated linkage disequilibrium (LD) has been a powerful tool in the field of evolutionary genetics, current LD-based approaches are not applicable to already fixed loci. Here, we report a method of scanning for population-specific strong selective sweeps that have reached fixation. In this method, genome-wide SNP data is used to analyze differences in the haplotype frequency, nucleotide diversity, and LD between populations, using the ratio of haplotype homozygosity between populations. To estimate the detection power of the statistics used in this study, we performed computer simulations and found that these tests are relatively robust against the density of typed SNPs and demographic parameters if the advantageous allele has reached fixation. Therefore, we could determine the threshold for maintaining high detection power, regardless of SNP density and demographic history. When this method was applied to the HapMap data, it was able to identify the candidates of population-specific strong selective sweeps more efficiently than the outlier approach that depends on the empirical distribution. This study, confirming strong positive selection on genes previously reported to be associated with specific phenotypes, also identifies other candidates that are likely to contribute to phenotypic differences between human populations