The significance of teaching critical thinking and the teachers’ role in helping students to think critically in their classes have received significant attention since the turn of the 21st century. In this paper, a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) -based project will be examined. This CLIL project has students critically review their textbook’s explanation regarding Japanese onomatopoeia by collecting and categorizing their own collected Japanese onomatopoeias. The objectives of this paper are to investigate (1) how students thought critically during this project, (2) how students’ attitudes toward critical thinking changed through this project, and (3) how this CLIL-based project encouraged students to think critically.

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In recent decades, states in the East Asia region have been sharpening their defense strategies and capabilities to effectively deal with their national and regional security uncertainties. Among the various capabilities being modernized, there has been particular emphasis on airpower as a critical means to ensure tactical superiority in the air domain, as well as to establish an anti-access and area-denial arrangement against adversaries.

Against this backdrop, airpower along with seapower will continue to further grow in their importance for the East Asian states. While force modernization efforts may achieve greater security from the state-centric viewpoint, there are numerous concerns in the regional stability context. Focusing on tactical combat aircraft, this study examines the developments in airpower in East Asia and the implications on regional security and stability by addressing the following questions: What are the key characteristics of airpower? How are the East Asian states developing their airpower capabilities, and what are the distinct characteristics of airpower in the region? What are the regional security implications of the developments in airpower? This paper will conclude that while the regional developments in airpower are still in their early stages, the future developments highlight the risks of a regional arms race and actualized conflict, requiring new measures to ensure regional stability.

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Arabic is the largest donor language to Turkish and is also one of the primary donor languages to Malay. This study conducted a vocabulary survey of 30 Arabic-origin Turkish words to help Malay-speaking students learn Turkish. It examined the benefits of presenting Turkish words and those same words but with slightly modified spellings closer to the original pronunciation in Arabic. The participants were 40 Malay-speaking students at a major Malaysian university. Participants had an average of 26.10 correct answers out of 30 questions. They learned 13.05 new words on an average. At a 5% confidence level, a statistically significant difference was found between the participants’ scores before and after the demonstration of the rearranged spellings (p = 0.000). The study concluded that presenting Turkish words of Arabic origin with modified spellings closer to the original pronunciation could assist Malay-speaking students in learning Turkish vocabulary.

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The Japanese loanword prosodic feature has been a major obstacle to learning Japanese as a foreign language because of enormous dissimilarities in the sound impression between loanwords and their source words, which are mainly from English vocabulary items (Quackenbush 1977). On the other hand, many English initialisms, such as CD and ATM, and their loaned counterparts in Japanese share strikingly similar prosodic features (Kubozono 2003, 2006, 2010). This paper discusses the similarities and the differences in the initialisms in both languages, as well as the cause of the similarities. Then, this paper will suggest how the similarities can be used to help English speaking learners acquire the prosodic feature of Japanese.

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How did eighteenth-century intellectuals in Japan make sense of the natural world? They were presented with two diverging choices of approach. Either they could remain with the primarily Chinese worldview, representing the world according to the stylized rules of, e.g., bird and flower paintings and the often efficacious but occasionally fanciful notions of traditional Chinese medicine, or they could embrace the Linnaean Western view and aspire to a more photo-representational approach in their paintings and other creative works, attempting to catalogue and record information through such heretofore purely artistic activities as painting. The late eighteenth century became a fascinating point in history where these two worldviews began to merge, ultimately into the Japanese practice of honzōgaku. But this syncretic approach did not arise thanks to an exceptional few; instead, it came into being as a result of sophisticated networks of information (and collection) sharing. Thus, painters like Itō Jakuchū, when attempting an approach of greater verisimilitude in his depictions of the natural world, were only able to manage this because they were participants in wideranging networks of like-minded individuals. Standing behind the achievements of any one individual, then, is a powerful support network which literally informed any single person’s work.

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This paper tests the heuristic power of Cultural Historical Activity System Theory (CHAT) to analyze the implementation of residential learning communities, known as Themed Houses, at an English medium of instruction liberal arts college in Japan. The study examines the practice of implementation from the point of view of administration, faculty supervisors and the student residents. It identifies contradictions arising from the dynamic activity systems that mediate the implementation of Themed Houses, examines how these contradictions have been or could be resolved, and then develops generalizable findings that can be used by other colleges that may be considering similar initiatives.

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