【研究ノート】 日本の大学生のための「文章力養成講座」

抄録

By introducing various admission policies and procedures, many colleges in Japan have started to accept students with low levels of basic academic skills. As a result, it is reported that many Japanese college students today do not even read their textbooks, let alone newspapers. Keeping in mind that this might be the case resulting from the students’ poor language skills, which are to serve as the foundation for higher education, we, the authors of this paper, started to work on a project for the enhancement of our students’ overall Japanese language proficiency. In Spring 2017, we began an extra-curricular program, called Bunsyoryoku Yosei Koza. The present paper discusses the possible effects of the program. We compared the average scores of pretest and posttest of 21 students on a standardized Japanese proficiency test. The pretest was given at the 1st week of the program, and the posttest at the 15th week as a final. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test shows that the difference between the average scores on the pretest and posttest is statistically significant, Z = 2.69, p<.01, r = .59. Further, the program participants’ results of the 20th Nihongo Kentei are reported. Our study suggests that even one-semester program could benefit students. We argue that to provide this type of program, possibly called Japanese 101, is a responsibility of colleges today.