The purpose of this paper is to clarify how infants feel "warabe-uta" (nursery songs) and express joy by analyzing episode descriptions and acquiring knowledge regarding infant childcare practice. Infancy is an important time for forming relationships with caregivers through an appropriate behavior of caregivers for emotion regulation. "Warabe-uta" nursery songs are a part of infant childcare useful for the development of emotions. However, their relationship with emotion regulation is not clear. Therefore, I observed infants aged 0–3 years and created 163 episode descriptions throughout one year and analyzed the most heart-shaken episode descriptions of positive emotion regulation.

Consequently, I arrived at three suggestions for infants' childcare practice. First, nursery teachers should practice "warabe-uta" while being conscious of positive emotion regulation. Second, they should practice "warabe-uta" with the consciousness of its importance in infant development. Third, engaging in "warabe-uta" could increase nursery teachers' sensitivity to inter-subjectivity. I was able to determine that childcare practice incorporating "warabe-uta" encouraged the regulation of infants' pleasant emotions and could lead to infant's development based on relationships with nursery teachers.

This paper reviews the results of contrastive studies on persuasive writing and considers the future topics. Previous studies in contrastive rhetoric on persuasive writing have been conducted from various perspectives. First, the paper summarizes contrastive rhetoric studies on the positioning of the topic sentence. Secondly, it introduces studies that analyze the persuasive appeals, and lastly, examines results in the studies of a textural structure. Especially regarding textual structure, the paper looks at the existing studies in three categories: paragraph ‘bundan', the position of the assertion, and sentence ordering.

Based on the review of existing studies and extracting the topics yet to be explored, the paper suggests four directions in contrastive rhetoric studies; qualitative studies of persuasive writing, compound studies on stylistic and content features of persuasive writing, studies on the acquisition process of points for persuasion and the correlation between points for persuasion and school education, and studies on persuasive writing by bilingual individuals.

This research note presents the findings of a survey of literary expressions included in literary materials in authorized high school textbooks for English Communication I, II, and III. Contrary to the general image of these materials, this survey gives evidence that they include a wide variety of literary expressions: repetitive expressions, contrastive expressions, symbolic expressions, detailed descriptions of the fictional world and characters' appearances and actions, expressions which can be read in two ways, expressions hued with a specific character's point of view, a variety of metaphorical expressions, marked textual structures, phonetic manipulations, graphological manipulations, energetic narratives, to name major examples elicited in this survey. Citing relevant expressions and passages, this paper argues that literary materials in authorized textbooks are rich in literary expressions. This paper calls for future studies for raising teachers' awareness about these expressions and the development of teaching methodologies and procedures for dealing with them effectively in class.

This paper reviews previous research on formulaic language in English and Japanese and discusses results and issues based on the adopted approaches to investigate the development possibility in Japanese research. According to the results of the previous studies, the research in Japanese is carried out by methods of descriptive research and corpus-based approach. The researcher's intuitive judgment plays a vital role in the former, while in the latter not only the intuitive judgment but also statistical methods based on frequency is adopted, so is more objective since it is based on analysis of a large amount of data. In the recent English research, on the other hand, the triangulation approach is adopted, where corpus-driven approach and psycholinguistic approach merges gradually, and the research tends to diversify. In this approach, the advantages and disadvantages of the corpus and the experiment become complementary, and it is possible to study formulaic language from multiple viewpoints. However, there are very few triangulation approach studies in Japanese. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the formulaic language frequently used by native speakers using the corpus-driven approach to analyze grammatical and pragmatic characteristics. Also, studies on formulaic language using psycholinguistic approach are needed to clarify the mental lexicon of native speakers and learners.