This paper aims to explore gender stereotypes used by Japanese and Chinese female hosts in television interviews, and how the gender stereotypes impact the construction of politeness strategies. I found that expressions such as ‘women should cook for men' ‘it is a mother's duty to do the washing' ‘women should get married at early age' ‘women should take the responsibility for raising children' tend to appear in Japanese discourses, whereas ‘mianzi (face) is more important for men than for women' appear in Chinese discourses. An expression ‘women should get married at early age' was found both in Japanese and Chinese discourses, however, hosts used different politeness strategies when talking about the same topic. It was also found that gender stereotypes affect the ways in which the female hosts use politeness strategies. This relationship, between the gender stereotypes and politeness strategies, can be supported by the politeness theory which explains how people use politeness strategies in language to ensure smooth communication.

Shandong province is a coastal province with large population located in the east of China. This study was conducted to investigate the disparity of opportunities for entering top-rank universities among Chinese students of Shandong province. This study also tried to analyze the contexts in which disparity occurred and progressed. Previous studies focused on the entrance examination in the Chinese colleges and suggested that the Chinese government should regard the disparity issues as a matter of great urgency. However, the disparity in the previous studies was defined in terms of disparity between developing provinces and remote provinces of China. However, the situation within a province has not been researched properly, especially within a developing province. Therefore, this study paid attention to the disparity of opportunities for entering top-rank universities among Chinese students focusing on the Shandong province. Although Shandong province is treated as a developing area in China, this study found that the disparity exists in Shandong province as well and that it has a fixed trend. In addition, this study showed that the disparity in Shandong province is related to the economic level of different regions within the province.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the significance and the function of the instruction of discipline, following Bueb's debate about discipline.

The German word "Disziplin" was avoided in Germany after the Second World War, because of its association with Nazism. However in 2006, Bueb (2006) restored the concept of "Disziplin" and because of his proposal, there were some critical responses to Bueb from researchers which have led to a new reconsideration concerning the instruction of discipline. In recent years, not only the criticism against Bueb but also the reconstruction of discipline has been proposed by Becker (2009) who emphasized cooperative decision of rule and demands from children to a teacher to get over the indoctrination, and Frech-Becker (2015) who related the discipline with the "Bildung" theory.

The significance of this study is to reveal that discipline is not regarded as an external control, but based on the "Bildung" theory, discipline promotes the acquisition of knowledge and leads to self-formation. The goal of this study is to consider how to decide the lesson rules in cooperation with learners and how the instruction of discipline is connected with subjects and leads to self-formation.