The purpose of this paper is to identify the usage of the words ‘big’ and ‘large’ in the speech of ‘uneducated’ and ‘educated’ individuals in linguistic environments where they concur with the same nouns or pronouns. Differences in speech between ‘big’ and ‘large’ have been described in some dictionaries and usage studies. Summarizing these descriptions, ‘big’ is more informal, colloquial, juvenile, or emotional while ‘large’ is more formal, bookish, dignified, or descriptive. However, these descriptions, except those from Hattori (1968), are too general and not concerned with the environment in which ‘big’ and ‘large’ concur with the same nouns and pronouns. Hattori gives the examples of nouns which concur with both ‘big’ and ‘large’ and shows the difference in meaning (without using the word ‘speech’) but does not identify them as ‘uneducated’ or ‘educated.’ This paper will propose and clarify the necessity of ‘uneducated’ and ‘educated’ as speech through an investigation of examples in The Color Purple, which features African-American English, American Southern dialect as well as standard English.

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The participle and marginal preposition in New Zealand English have special characteristics. The aim of this paper is to clarify three characteristics of their usage through an analysis of media English. To that end, we took the following steps. We first collected examples of participles and marginal prepositions found in newspapers and magazines issued in New Zealand. We next categorized them under the following themes: “specification of agent in the passive”, “adjectival participle clause”, “the frequency of the passive”, “the formality of expression”, “the use of brackets and dashes”, “erroneous usage” and “the use of marginal prepositions.” An analysis of the seven categories showed “clarity”, “conservatism” and “ambiguity” to be the factors most related to the effective use of participles and marginal prepositions in written New Zealand English.

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The main purpose of this research is to investigate the current English in Canada and predict the future of English there. To attain this goal, I would like to investigate and analyze the current English used in Canada by comparing the English that young people use with the English usage of older generations. Based on my findings, I would like to focus on three aspects of English in Canada (more specifically, English in Ontario): phonology, vocabulary, and spelling. This research was mainly conducted in the summer of 2006 in Toronto and Niagara Falls, which I believe are areas that have been influenced the most by American English. The research statistics are based on a questionnaire given to 102 Canadians.
As I investigated the three sections, I came to the following conclusion: there are many characteristics which do not belong to either American English or British English, but are part of Canadian English.

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Strongly believing that the teacher is the single most important educational resource in the classroom, how additional training is provided to in-service English teachers becomes a key element in improving the quality of language instruction in classrooms across Japan. This paper re-examines the past five years of Ministry of Education and Science (MEXT) sponsored English teacher training, from the former National Center for Teacher Development (based at Tsukuba) model through the current prefectural in-service programs, from the personal experiences of a teacher trainer of over 2, 500 secondary school English teachers since 2002.
After evaluating the differing sets of in-service provided skills needed by junior high school Japanese Teachers of English (JTEs) in comparison with JTE high school teachers, the complex question of Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in-service training requirements at all levels will be addressed. Finally, based on these five years of experience, I will discuss the future of MEXT in-service training for both secondary—and especially for elementary school—English teachers (both JTEs and ALTs) in Japan.

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[in Japanese]

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This paper presents an effective method of writing an economic paper abstract, appearing either in an academic paper or in an online database. The abstract of a paper needs to be concise, usually written in 100 words or fewer, but dense with information: an informative abstract contains the purpose, methodology, results and conclusions while an indicative abstract contains the purpose and scope of the paper. In an abstract of an economic paper, active voice and simple present tense are preferred and the third person subject or the first person plural subject “we” should be used.

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