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In the age of the Internet, more and more practitioners design reading activities using the World Wide Web as a means of introducing learning materials in their second language instruction. Researchers emphasize the effectiveness of Web-based reading, especially accessing authentic language materials through the activities, but those studies rarely look into the actual behaviors individual learners engage when they read Web pages. Considering these situations in the research field of reading instructions in ESL classrooms, the research in this paper tries to investigate what kinds of strategies ESL learners use when they read through the authentic Web pages on the Internet. By empirically probing into the strategy use for reading hypertext, this research will provide more objective and reliable data to support better instruction of reading in the second language with hypertext as its material. The key words of this research are intertextual reading, development of cognitively flexible approaches to reading hypertext and control of the cognitive load from reading hypertext in the second language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peptide vaccine treatment has attracted attention in recent years as a new therapy option for chemotherapy‑resistant, advanced, unresectable cancer. The safety of peptide vaccination with HLA-A*2402-restricted URLC10-A24-177 and VEGFR1-A12-9 1084 epitope peptides (fixed 2-mg dose) was investigated in a phase I clinical trial of patients with advanced gastric cancer who were refractory to chemotherapy. We determined the HLA genotype of the subjects after enrollment, results of which were held by the evaluation committee and kept from both patients and investigators until completion of the study. The primary end‑point was safety of the peptide vaccination. The secondary end‑points were immunological responses and clinical outcome, which were compared between the HLA-A*2402-positive and HLA-A*2402-negative groups. The peptides were subcutaneously administered on day 1, 8, 15 and 22 within a 28-day treatment cycle. A total of 14 patients was enrolled in this study; 12 of the 14 patients received 4 or more vaccinations (at least 1 course). No patient had a severe treatment-related adverse event. Findings from evaluation of clinical responses after a single course showed that 4 cases had stable disease and 8 cases had progressive disease. The median overall survival time (MST) for the 12 patients was 3.9 months. The MSTs in the HLA-A*2402‑positive and HLA-A*2402‑negative groups were, 4.2 and 3.6 months (p=0.9164), respectively. The results of this study showed that vaccination with URLC10 and VEGFR1 peptides was a safe treatment for advanced gastric cancer. This trial was registered with University Hospital Medical Information Network (UMIN, no. 000002409).