A comma is an important marker in distinguishing whether a participle or an adjective phrase is a so-called participial construction or not. However, a certain participle or adjective phrase cannot be called a participial construction simply because these phrases are followed by commas. This paper analyzes participle and adjective phrases that are likely to be confused with participial constructions because of the commas, though this may be self-evident to some people. The modern tendency is to use fewer commas (Copperud 1980: 78), and when they are used, they are used with certain objectives in mind.

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The successful medical writing in English depends upon the adoption of the genre scheme. This paper discusses the cultural variations which were found in the contrastive schematic analysis of medical research articles from intranational journals published in Japan and international journals published in U.K. and U.S.A.. My analysis was targeted at the starting (Introduction) and the finishing (the last paragraph of Discussion) sections, because they seem to reflect the author even when he hardly deviates from the rather rigid formats of Methods and Results. The variations include (1) a succinct introduction (2) diluted motivation (3) weak advertizing and (4) satisfied results. My findings support the preceding intercultural hypotheses: high-context vs. low-context, linear vs. gyre, writer-responsible vs. reader-responsible, or form-oriented vs. content-oriented dichotomies. A keen awareness of these intercultural variations relevant to the genre scheme, it is claimed, is likely to be of benefit for medical article writing in English by Japanese.

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In recent years, personal computers have been coming into use in many aspects of life in the world. Today we are said to be in the multimedia age. But I think we have been bringing the new technology of multimedia into education without clarifying the notion of multimedia. Moreover, we have been confusing the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of multimedia itself with those of the means of multimedia, for example the Internet. This paper discusses the difference between them and how we should adopt the notion of multimedia to language education, especially to ESP.

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