Abstract

This study presents three methods of helping pupils of an elementary school acquire literacy skills and examines how they responded to the methods. The three methods were an international exchange program, a learning-through-movie program, and a play method. To analyze the pupils' answers to open questions, text mining software was used. For the first open question, "Write the reason why you think writing and reading practice is useful," the most frequently used word was "writing" followed by "learn" and "enter one's mind". The word "writing" was used most commonly with "enter one's mind". For the second open question, "Write your impression of foreign language activities," the most frequently used word was "fun" followed by "a foreign language (English)," "Toy Story (a movie)," and "Peach Boy (an English play)." Few students mentioned literacy learning for this question; however, considering that most students regarded the activities as fun, these approaches are thought to be meaningful in helping pupils learn writing skills.