Abstract
In this paper, I report on the action research that I conducted through three courses of Japanese teaching practices. In the process of self-reflection for the first two periods, I found two major problematic topics related to my teaching; how much the learners utilized vocal Japanese during class and the teacher's feedback. Afterwards, I started to question how those elements contribute to improving learners' speaking ability. After studying earlier literature on teaching methods with emphasis on speaking skill, I came to consider "task-preceded role playing" as an effective way to improve learners' speaking skills, in which the teacher provokes learners' language errors and introduces correct expressions later on. Therefore, I set into practice task-preceded role playing as the goal for the final teaching training course and put it into action with three steps; "understanding of learners' level" , "setting of role playing tasks", and "feedback". As a result, there were some examples that I successfully induced learners' linguistic setbacks and gave them proper feedback. They also showed certain improvements in their speaking ability. However, later analysis revealed that some problems occurred in the task activity. At the end of this paper, I suggest improvements for those problems as a challenge when teaching future classes.
