This study critically examines the treatment of cutting tools in elementary school Arts and Crafts education by analyzing textbooks and the course of study from pre-, during-, and post-war periods. The national textbook “Shōgakkō Kyōshiyō Shukō Kyōkasho” (Elementary School Teacher’s Manual for Handicrafts, 1904) largely established the foundation for Crafts education. Subsequently, the wartime national textbooks “Enohon” (Book of Pictures, 1941) and “Shotōka Kōsaku” (Elementary Crafts, 1942-3) significantly influenced post-war Crafts education. The current grade-specific introduction of cutting tools—scissors in first grade, knives and saws in middle grades, and coping saws in upper grades—was implemented approximately 80 years ago during wartime. This structure has persisted to the present day without sufficient consideration.

　　 This study examines the speech act of complaining in L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English) by Japanese university students with an elementary level of English in academic settings. Previous studies have shown that in academic settings, L2 learners with low-proficiency levels tend to realize more direct speech acts than learners with higher levels of proficiency and native speakers, and often choose to opt out due to their limited language ability. Therefore, they may face a situation where they might unintentionally offend others by complaining too directly, or they may opt out of complaining. Despite these potential challenges, very few studies have investigated how Japanese university students with an elementary level of English realize complaining. Additionally, these studies have not looked at complaints in L1 (Japanese). Thus, this study compares and analyzes Japanese students’ complaints in English and Japanese, focusing on opt-out choices and complaint strategies. Participants were 136 Japanese undergraduate students with English proficiency at the elementary level. A questionnaire concerning opting out was conducted and an online written discourse completion test (WDCT) performed, which was composed of four academic settings according to social power and distance by Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory. The opt-out data was first calculated using polychoric correlation and chi-squared test to examine the consistency and differences in choices. We also conducted decision tree analysis to identify factors affecting participants’ opt-out choices. The data collected from WDCT was first categorized using the complaint strategies and analyzed in terms of the frequency of strategy use in L1 and L2. Results regarding opting out show a correlation between L1 and L2 in Situations 2 and 3 that was statistically significant at .01 level. Moreover, the results from decision tree analysis indicated that social distance had the most influence on opt-out choices. The results on strategy use show that participants gravitate to “two constitutive elements communicated on-record/explicitly” strategy for situations with social power and “one constitutive element communicated on-record/explicitly” strategy for situations without social power. These findings suggest that since students are not affected by their limited language ability when complaining, pragmatic instruction could potentially contribute to improving language expression in both Japanese and English students.

　　 Music plays an important role in English language education, especially in elementary schools. In recent years, a great amount of research has been conducted in fields such as neuroscience, music psychology, and cognitive psychology, attempting to elucidate the relationship between music and other cognitive activities, including foreign language learning. This study explores the relationship between musical background and auditory discrimination ability of phonetically similar English words, reporting the results of a small-scale investigation conducted with Japanese learners of English. Musical background was defined as the “fondness” of the school music education learners had received in schools and as the “amount” of musical activities they had conducted outside of school. Also, a performance test was conducted to assess the auditory discrimination ability of English-similar sounds. Data analysis revealed that approximately 36% of the variance in auditory discrimination performance for phonetically similar English words may be accounted for by the “fondness” of school music education at the elementary school level and the “degree” of out-ofschool music activities at the university level. Such a relationship is examined from the perspective of learning transfer.

　　 The purpose of this study is to examine research on how to improve the quality of teacher talk of elementary school teachers. To enable many teachers to share and reproduce training content, we developed training digital content such as class videos, rubrics, and manuals based on the MERRIER Approach. We conducted three training sessions, administered a questionnaire survey, performed discourse analyses, and analyzed the participants’ reflections.

　　 As a result, it was found that the participants’ self-efficacy regarding teacher talk increased. In particular, there was a tendency for the self-efficacy of teachers with fewer years of teaching experience to increase. In the discourse analysis, among the seven items in the MERRIER Approach, “Example”, “Redundancy”, and “Expansion” appeared less frequently. From the analysis of the participants’ reflections, it was observed that the teachers approached teacher talk more analytically and made efforts to improve it. From the data collected, it was clarified that the content developed by the authors for the training had a significant positive effect on participants’ self-reflection and self-correction in the process of mastering teacher talk.

　　 This paper examines approaches to science education in the U.S. that promote reading literacy as a foundation for scientific inquiry, with particular attention to the theory and practice of ML-PBL, which focuses on project-based learning. First, the need for science education that promotes reading literacy in the U.S. and the issues surrounding the development of reading literacy in language arts education will be reviewed. Next, we examine ML-PBL, with a particular focus on its theoretical underpinnings of “Guided Inquiry Supported Multiple Literacies” and “Project-Based Science”. Finally, the practice of ML-PBL will be reviewed and discussed in the context of the previous discussion points. This section will focus on the third-grade unit “How can we design a fun moving toy that any child can build?”

　　 This document introduces a mathematics teacher’s learning from T. Watanabe’s book, Critical Citizenship in School: Curriculum, Achievement, and Teachers. In this document, the author presents an illustrative example of a mathematics lesson for introducing negative numbers to Japanese seventh-grade students and argues that education for critical citizenship in Watanabe’s sense is achievable in mathematics lessons. Through analyzing the mathematics lesson, the author also argues that he realizes (1) the social construction of mathematical essence and (2) lesson design, which balances a conservative attitude toward the value of academic mathematics and a reformist attitude toward “mathematics” in society. As an implication from this document for education for critical citizenship, the author suggests that the concept of education for critical citizenship should be further elaborated, or researchers should reconsider the domain-specific contribution of social studies education to education for critical citizenship.