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Teaching styles in science and engineering instruction were compared by analysing corpora of transcripts of lectures delivered in English and Japanese at leading universities in the United States and Japan, respectively. Our findings were compatible with cultural differences related to power distance and field dependence, which have been reported in the literature. Teaching styles seem to simultaneously result from the cultural context as well as reinforce it. Science and engineering instruction in the Japanese educational context tends to reflect and reinforce a personalised transmission of knowledge style, while instruction in the American context tends to match and reinforce learning styles characterised by impersonal, inductive thinking.

Good communication skills are essential for students majoring in engineering today. We focused on how to promote the efficient teaching of oral presentations using JECPRESE, The JapaneseEnglish Corpus of Presentations in Science and Engineering. This paper reports the lexical frequency analysis of parts of speech units found in 109 Japanese presentations given in partial fulfillment of master's degree requirements by graduate students in chemical and mechanical engineering. The presentations from both disciplines showed about the same numbers of units for most grammatical classes, suggesting that such units are basic to the language of science and technology. The exception was with verbal nouns and field-specific nouns, for which detailed lists could be prepared for each discipline. Interestingly, further examination of the lexicon revealed an influence of English usage on Japanese technical expressions. Our findings suggest that new