Japan is faced with an imminent challenge of cultivating ‘global human resources’, as the whole society delves into the global information society. The Course of Study defined by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports and Technology (MEXT) of the Japanese government has emphasized communicative competence and / or ‘communication skills’ as a focus of the foreign language subjects (e.g.,...

In patients with so-called roentgenologically occult intraluminal lung tumours, an accurate assessment of tumour size, its location and peribronchial tumour extent is important prior to any intraluminal bronchoscopic therapy (IBT) with curative intent. In twenty patients with so-called occult early-stage lung cancers, clinical outcome was compared to high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) f...

The butyrate derivative isobutyramide (IBT) increases fetal hemoglobin (HbF) in patients with beta-hemoglobinopathies, but little is known about its usefulness for prolonged therapeutic use. We treated 8 patients with transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia with 350 mg/kg of body weight per day of oral IBT for 126 to 384 days. During the trial period, the hemoglobin level was maintained between ...

Recent work on the problem of detecting synonymy through corpus analysis has used the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) as a benchmark. However, this test involves as few as 80 questions, prompting questions regarding the statistical significance of reported results. We overcome this limitation by generating a TOEFL-like test using WordNet, containing thousands of questions and comp...

Recently, we did some comparative evaluation of the commercial English-to-Japanese MT systems by using the TOEFL, Test of English as a Foreign Language. The passages in the Reading Comprehension part of the Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension section were extracted from a TOEFL guide book [1], and were translated into Japanese by using the MT systems. Then the translated tests were taken by th...

The main purpose of this study was to compare the strategies used by Chinesespeaking students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in a multiplechoice format reading comprehension test. The focus was on describing what students do when they are taking reading comprehension tests by asking students to verbalize their thoughts. The strategies were further compared with participa...

BACKGROUND Type 2 diabetes is a chronic, progressive disease with a multi-faceted pathophysiology. Beyond the known defects of insulin resistance and beta-cell insufficiency, derangement of incretin hormones normally produced from the gut wall in response to food intake play an important role. In recent years, the 'incretin-based' therapies (IBTs) have been developed to address hyperglycemia th...

The present study investigates the nature of communicative language ability as manifested in performance on the TOEFL iBT test, as well as the relationship between this ability with test-takers’ study-abroad and learning experiences. The research interest in the nature of language ability is shared by the language testing community, whereas understanding the factors that affect language acquisi...

Students whose native language is not English must meet certain English-language proficiency standards before they are accepted into any program in the English Department. To qualify for admission, students must have passed (within the past year) the test(s) listed below with score(s) at or above those indicated: 1. TOEFL score of 600 with no section score lower than 60 and a minimum TWE (Test ...