Learning Japanese as a Foreign Language through Email Exchange

Abstract

This study investigated how college students learn Japanese as a foreign language through email exchanges with learners in foreign countries. This study specifically addresses the way in which their messages change and how they mutually interact. Results showed that they gradually developed reader awareness and came to state personal opinions about others' messages and to require others' responses. Furthermore, their texts increasingly included more bases for claims and fewer grammatical errors over time. Results also showed that, through exchange with other learners, they organized their own ideas inductively or deductively in their messages, interweaving them with others' ideas, texts, and organizations, thereby forming a basis to create socially constructive learning of foreign languages.