This paper discusses the issue of students' cooperative learning through exchanging their logs, reading writings of classmates' and responding to them, without disclosing their real names. Students (freshmen, college) are asked to keep a log in English at home during the semester, and twice, bring their logs that have numbers given by the teacher on the cover instead of their names to class in order to exchange them with others. When responding to the classmates' logs, they write their opinions inside the⁴⁰ log but just sign their given number in the matrix on the cover of the log.
First, I present the outline and the underlying philosophy of the nature of such an exchange; students themselves produce the material for the study, and are not given the material from their teacher. Also, I present some related articles to this study. Secondly, I introduce some of the patterns of writing shown in this study with excerpts of students' writings. Finally, I suggest some other arrangement by using the basics of this activity, which could be used for further, future study of this kind.

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This paper explores what kinds of expressions are saliently used in medical articles. To examine this, 40 medical articles are chosen from four major medical journals that were published in the US and the UK in 1997.
The result of my study is roughly as follows. In each of the following pairs of words or items, the former is in more frequent use than the latter: although and though, because and since, compared with and as compared with, despite and in spite of, that (rel. pron.) and which, whether and if, and the passive and the active. In the protasis of the conditionals, if is used in almost all cases and subject-verb inversion seldom occurs in the protasis. Data is followed by a plural verb in almost all cases. Of the epistemic use of the modals, may is used most often. Of the personal pronouns, he or she seems to be used more frequently. The subjunctive is less frequently used than the indicative.

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Testing Language Skills reveal a very important tool to assess fairly students' foreign language skills. This paper analyzes how to assess students' foreign language skills. In the Japanese educational system, objective tests like multiplechoice items, matching items, true and false items, and short answer items have been the major test procedures. Generally speaking, as a foreign language teacher has forty to fifty students in a class, he/she cannot afford to offer a rather time-consuming writing essay test. However, there has not been a methodology how to assess students' foreign language skills through objective tests. Thus, constructing items fairly in an objective test is essential.
For this research, the author chose eleven Japanese students from Northern Arizona University as examinees. The content included INTRODUCTION, PREPARATION OF TEST, SCORING PROCEDURES, RESULTS, and DISCUSSION.
This paper will be useful for ESL (EFL) teachers and professors to produce objective-test items fairly in assessing students' foreign language skills.

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The role of the Internet has become more and more important for both educators and students of English to obtain useful information quickly and easily. With the help of various search engines, one can find required information relatively easily. However, one may wonder which search engine should be used. The purpose of this paper is to examine which search engine is recommended to conduct searches on the Internet. A query is selected, single keyword searches and Implied Boolean searches were conducted, and retrieval matches, accuracy, access time, and ease-of use of seven search engines were compared. As a result, Alta Vista search engine indicated the largest number of hits in three single keyword searches, the second largest number of hits in the Implied Boolean search, and the largest relevancy rate (100%) in the Implied Boolean search. According to the result, Alta Vista is the best search engine among Web-based search engines. Also, Alta Vista was compared with the DIALOG, one of charged online search services. According to the comparison result, Alta Vista still needs to be improved in terms of proximity operators and truncation operators.

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