Difficulties in Comprehending Action Requests in School Letters to Parents: Japanese Language Support in Regional Japanese Classes

Abstract

This study investigates how to support reading comprehension in regional Japanese classes. 46 native Japanese speakers (JJ) and 31 non-native speakers (JSL) were surveyed regarding their understanding of 12 sentences depicting action requests in a school letter. The results showed that, even when furigana or translated words were included, the correct response rate of JSL was significantly lower than that of JJ. Sentences with long hiragana sections in the predicate and sentences in which the writer was the subject were perceived as difficult to read. Difficulties in reading comprehension included the inability to find word breaks in long hiragana sections, excessive attention to numbers leading to misreading of particles, lack of verb conjugation knowledge, the inability to infer the person of action in a sentence in which the subject was omitted, and failure to infer meanings from known words. JSL make full use of bottom-up reading based on knowledge of known words and learned grammar, and top-down reading based on background knowledge. Therefore, to provide greater reading comprehension support to JSL, it would be useful to provide activities that supplement knowledge of sentence form and provide Japanese school background knowledge, in addition to words and grammatical knowledge that frequently appear in action-request sentences.