This paper presents the results of a study that examined whether or not (1) watching English subtitled YouTube videos could help L1 Japanese EFL learners to improve on measures of listening comprehension, reading comprehension or reading speed, and (2) enjoyment, amount of time spent watching or tendency to re-watch videos affected improvement in any of these areas. The results suggest that (1) some gains were made in reading comprehension and speed, but not listening comprehension, although it is not clear how much of this is due to the class and how much is due solely to watching YouTube videos, and that (2) if students tended to watch more videos or exhibit a tendency to re-watch videos and also enjoyed them for linguistic reasons (rather than preference or content-based reasons), they tended to show more improvement in reading comprehension. Though it is unclear how successfully improvement in listening comprehension was able to be measured in this study, the results suggest that watching subtitled videos can be helpful to EFL learners' general language improvement, such as reading ability, not only listening ability, as previously thought. Furthermore, they suggest that students can enhance the benefits of watching subtitled videos by re-watching them and focusing on the language being used in them.

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This paper will argue the potential effectiveness of an out-of-class video report activity from the viewpoint of autonomous learning using YouTube, which most L2 learners are very familiar with in terms of accessibility and usability. Due to the focus on autonomous learning, design of the activity was based on two concepts: simplicity and freedom of choice, in order to encourage learners to form a regular habit of information gathering in the target language. At the development stage of this activity, extensive reading/listening programs were examined as models of out-of-class activities which have been recognized as promoting autonomous learning. This task was assigned to 94 Japanese university students in a total of three classes majoring in EFL. Observation of their video reports was conducted, including the number of videos watched, the vocabulary they learned from the videos, summaries or comments on the videos, as well as their comments in review of the task itself. The results suggest that this kind of video report activity has real validity as an effective out-of-class learning method for the promotion of autonomous learning in an Internet-connected globalized society, and the study indicates the need for further research into ways to foster autonomous and independent learners.

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The purpose of this study is to foster education for 'global-minded human resources' by using DVD material "Glee", an American drama series for young people, in an English course. The author conducted a questionnaire in the beginning of the course and asked the students to write their impressions and learning concerning 'globalization' or 'intercultural communication'. The text data was analyzed by NVivo11. As a result, the students found the importance of expressing their opinions clearly, respecting others, using gestures in communication, acquiring conversational vocabulary/strategy in English, and learning to know more about the difference of laws or rules of other countries for being active in the globalized society. In addition, they gave more detailed comments after watching the DVD and realized the differences between American and Japanese cultures. In conclusion, English classes using DVD materials could be useful for raising awareness of the students who will contribute to globalized society in future.

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In the Media English class the author teaches, different types of active learning activities are implemented, including role playing, discussions, making CM taglines, producing self-promotion videos, and poster presentations. Among these activities, this classroom practice report introduces a "cover-letter video" activity students carried out last year. The idea of short video productions came from the movie, The Intern, in which a retired businessman applied for a job by producing a cover-letter video. The use of videos in the job application process may be fairly new, but recently, it is more employed in the process of selecting candidates for university applications, international exchange programs, internships, and different job positions. In this report, the procedures of producing a cover-letter video for a virtual job application are explained and also the features of Japanese university students' self-promotion videos are examined. The production of cover-letter videos encouraged students to reflect on their activities as students, analyze their strengths, and think about their future career goals. The peer review of students' videos also helped them realize the importance of the contents as well as the delivery of their speech. These activities utilizing smartphone videos can be further employed as a useful tool in helping to engage students in active learning in English education.

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In Japanese, there is a set of sentence-final particles exclusively used by women, indicating the gender of the speaker. Although these female-particles (FPs) have been less likely to be used in modern Japanese, they are still frequently employed in the translation of foreign novels or the Japanese subtitles of foreign movies. They are also used in Japanese comic books for girls or TV dramas, where the female characters speak with FPs only when they are excited, or angry etc. In this paper, the meanings and the functions of FPs are examined, and it is argued that they have acquired two pragmatically derived meanings; 1) the marker that the speaker is a non-Japanese woman and 2) the marker that the speaker wants to convey some feelings or emotions depending on the context. It is considered that both meanings were derived as the frequency of the FP-use decreased: Because the FP is not commonly used in everyday speech, it is implied that the speaker using FPs is less likely to be a Japanese native speaker. On the other hand, when a person speaks with FPs that she hardly uses, it is implied that she wants to convey some special feelings such as excitement, anger, confidence etc.

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Analyses of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, which have been integral to the studies of literature and culture, have led to discussions of social relations systems. Age is a marginalized category of investigation compared with the other categories, but it is currently gaining prominence as it cooperates with disability studies. This article accounts for aging as a cultural and ideological narrative by which we are governed, dealing with F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (1922) and David Fincher's film adaptation of the same (2008). The main character, Benjamin Button, embodies reverse aging: he enters life as a septuagenarian and becomes younger as time passes. Through this symbolic protagonist, Fitzgerald's story and its film adaptation present us with the question of what the normative life course is, contrastively representing the gap between what an individual really is and what he/she is supposed to be. This article explores the differences between each work's approaches to the issue of aging and how film adaptations contribute to the evolution of literary work over time.

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The "American Dream" was long associated with a series of "rags-to-riches" stories written by the nineteenth-century novelist Horatio Alger, but after the Great Depression of the 1930s, it lost its vigor and reality. Alger's stories became folktales, and the "American Dream" came to be almost synonymous with a "pie-in-the-sky" dream. Since the 1980s, however, the "American Dream" has shown signs of revival, but in a very different way from that of Alger. Forrest Gump, a 1986 novel by Winston Groom, is an example. This novel was cinematized by Hollywood in 1994, winning the Academy Awards in six categories, and Bollywood has reportedly started to remake the movie for 2020. Under the hypothesis that Groom is the Horatio Alger of the twentieth century, and under the framework of Robert Bellah, who views American intellectual history from the dynamic interaction between the two traditions, "utilitarian individualism" and "biblical religion," this paper will explore how closely the "American Dream" is related to the people's view of capitalism in America and thus to the tradition of utilitarian individualism, how it was affected by the Great Depression, and what the new vistas emerging out of the interaction of the two traditions of the 1980s are.

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