The goal of this study is to examine the relationship between classroom contexts and students’ uptake and what can facilitate students’ uptake. To examine classroom contexts, a corpus was constructed from recorded classes by the author to compare the differences between the classroom contexts among classes. The results showed that students’ uptake influences their study and that it will lead to learning. Also, using the L2 in class can promote students’ vocabulary and sentence uptake, while both the L1 and the L2 have a role in grammar uptake. As for the three activities compared in this study (Language-learning task, Translation, and Drill) Language-learning tasks contributed to students’ uptake the most. The study shows the possibility of using a corpus approach to gaining knowledge of what language teachers should do to help students effectively learn languages.

Amid the ever-increasing importance of written communication accelerated by the robust spread of the Internet, this study, based on the assumption that the syntactic competence serves as a secure footing for writing performance, conducted syntactic training with 55 Japanese university students over a single semester. Use of newspapers as grammar learning materials was also of much significance regarding cultivation of media literacy. Students were also assigned to write on news of their interest before and after the syntactic training, which was analyzed in the aspects of complexity, accuracy, fluency, and criticalness. Results showed a rise in students’ syntactic competence after the syntactic training. Meanwhile, their writing performance showed improvement in general, but not in accuracy, the reason of which was analyzed from the author’s viewpoints, with an aim to pursue a more desirable method of equipping university students with better English writing performance to survive in a global society.

News articles are always influenced by the ideologies of journalists and publishers (Van Dijk, 2008). Also, newspaper headlines are created to give an impact for readers to decide whether or not they would like to read the articles (Ifantidou, 2009). These would influence readers’ impressions and understanding towards culturalbackgrounds of newspaper articles. Therefore, this article has investigated the Japanese news written in the British weekly newspaper The Guardian Weekly published throughout the year 2014, in order to see to what extent the British media understandJapan and Japanese culture.The results showed that Japanese articles in The Guardian Weekly illustrated current issues of Japan including difficult relationships with neighboring countries, Japanesepolitics and economics, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, whale and dolphin hunting, and Japanese subcultures. When reporting the Japanese news, editors sometimes used both negative and ironical messages, and the news reflected difficulties of understanding other cultures.

Website is a kind of new format of genres, which contains a mixture of various genres of text. In this paper, two texts of different genres are extrac ted from the website of Australian G overnment Department of Immigration and Boarder Security ( DIBP ) and are analyzed by CDA. Through the representation analysis, it is brought to light that the two texts have distinct features as to what is ‘selected’ in their representations. Despite the fact that the two texts are of different genres it turns out that they are produced for the same purposes; both aim at ‘activity exchange’ in the disguise of ‘knowledge exchange’.