During lessons of listening comprehension and oral expression intended for Japanese language beginners, we carried out the following activities: 1) Learners wrote their familiar questions about Japan in their notebooks, 2) shared them in a group, and 3) speculated on the possible reasons. Although these classes tend to deal with functional conversation, we thought that it was also necessary to enhance self-expression activities. Therefore, these activities were carried out throughout the semester. In this paper, we describe the significance of these activities using a survey analysis and notebook review, and consider improvements for future classes.
