Is english our lingua franca or the native speaker's property? The native speaker orientation among middle school students in Japan

This paper reports the first empirical study to date that sought to examine the native speaker orientation among middle school EFL students in Japan. To this end, this preliminary study measured their language attitudes in this respect addressing age-stratified and gender variations. The data was elicited from an attitude survey with 318 eighth and ninth graders at a public middle school. The findings suggest that the students gave the highest evaluations to native than to nonnative varieties of English. Second, they opted for learning English for its currency and utility in the English as a native language setting, rather than for its transnational function as a lingua franca. Lastly, the finding indicated a possible developmental trajectory of their native speaker orientation

創傷被覆材としての高分子ナノシートの開発

早大学位記番号:新6465早稲田大

Postal reminder with reduced burden of clinic information seeking for equitable participation in general health check-ups: A randomized controlled trial

High participation rate and low inequality in participation are key to the program success of general health check-ups in Japan. This study examined the effectiveness of a postal reminder including nearest clinic information, compared to the standard postal reminder including details of all local clinics, on participation rate and income-based participation rate in general health checks. This was a single-blind, two-arm, prospective, randomized controlled study conducted at the Fukuoka Branch of Japan Health Insurance Association. Dependents (family members) of insured persons aged 40–69 years were randomly assigned (1:1) to the intervention group that received a tailored postal reminder intervention (showing information on the nearest clinic from each participant's address) or to the control group that received an original template postal reminder (containing just the URL of the website listing all available clinics). Allocation was concealed from participants and service providers of general health check-up. The primary outcome was participation in general health check-ups within 1 month of intervention. Between February 1 and February 10, 2017, 21, 017 were randomly assigned to the intervention (n = 10, 474) or control (n = 10, 543) group. The participation rate in the intervention group was higher than control group (3.2% vs. 2.1%; OR: 1.55, 95% CI: 1.31–1.85, P < 0.001). The intervention effect was estimated to decrease as the income category increased (P for interaction = 0.037). Tailored postal reminders with information on the nearest clinic were able to improve the overall participation rate and reduce income-based inequality in participation for general health check-ups in Japan