Language：Japanese  

CiNii Books

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Other Link： http://hdl.handle.net/10236/00025458

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Language：Japanese  

This study examines the business communication competence requirements for corporate researchers in R & D departments, focusing on a pharmaceutical company. Forty-one participants including 27 corporate researchers were given a questionnaire and interviewed about their international business communication in terms of forms, frequency, attitude, and perceived problems. The major findings are as follows. First, corporate researchers are frequently engaged in international business communication (i.e., giving presentations, attending meetings, and preparing documents). Second, they are not well aware of the dynamic nature of international business communication competence. Third, they feel difficulty in adjusting themselves to the business context, interacting with each other, and finding learning materials about international business communication appropriate to them. Thus, this study suggests that in order for corporate researchers to succeed in international business communication, they need to be aware of the importance of its dynamic nature, and that R & D is yet an unresearched area for international business communication.

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This study examines the relation between word difficulty and word frequency, focusing on university student’s lexical knowledge at low-frequency levels. Close to 300 freshmen and sophomores were given a multiple-choice vocabulary test, which included 200 target words sampled from two dictionaries. The major findings are as follows: first, university students correctly answered 59.7% of the target words on a vocabulary test, which ranges from 1,000 to 14,000 word levels. Second, the percentage of correct answers is linearly related to word frequency only at high-frequency levels. Third, word difficulty loses its linear relation to word frequency at the 8,000 word level. The nonlinear relation, it is claimed in this study, is ascribable to hardly discernible differences in frequency of two adjacent words at low-frequency levels. Thus, it is suggested that a vocabulary of 8,000 word families may serve as a reasonable goal of vocabulary teaching in general courses in English.

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This study examined how the number of unfamiliar words university students encounter in the TIME magazine and Cambridge CPE would affect their self-assessed reading comprehension level. It yielded the following three results: first, students’ self-assessed comprehension level was in strong inverse proportion to the occurrence ratio of their unknown words. Second, with a vocabulary of approximately 6,000 words, they managed to attain only 54% of comprehension. Third, the occurrence ratio of those words whose meanings students were able to guess to some extent averaged approximately 1% across all the comprehension levels, and was not related to their self-assessed level of comprehension. Thus, the study suggests that in order to read current English without much difficulty, students need a much larger vocabulary, and that their insufficient vocabulary can perhaps be augmented by a well-developed guessing strategy, a problem which has yet to be researched.

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This paper aims to see how university students’ English lexical ability changes over time by examining three lexical dimensions of breadth, depth, and retrievability. The research spanned half a year, yielding the following three results: first, students’ average receptive vocabulary contained 5,895 words, whereas the words beyond the 2,000 level they produced accounted for only 19.8% of their total production. Second, their performance was poorest on the collocation test. Third, their lexical knowledge suffered marked attrition in all three dimensions, with 25% attrition in the receptive vocabulary, 41% in the collocational knowledge, and 15% in retrievability. This study raises some questions concerning language curriculum development.

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This paper aims to present two problems facing required English classes at universities, and address them by suggesting the motivating and facilitating roles of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), specifically Business English, in required English classes. One of the problems presented is the university students’ de-motivation to study English, and another is their English language attrition. The present study proposes that two different dimensions of Business English play different roles: English for General Academic Business Purposes (EGABP) should motivate freshmen and sophomores in terms of the novelty, communicativeness, and simulative experiences it can provide; English for Specific Academic Business Purposes (ESABP) should facilitate junior and senior business majors’ relearning of English in terms of the firm conceptual schema underlying it. Draft plans of lesson were also presented based on the ideas stated above.

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