Abstract
As Japanese undergraduate classes are mainly conducted as lectures, foreign students studying in Japan must have adequate Japanese language skills in order to participate, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students in particular need to be able to understand mathematics lectures. However, very few foreign students are accustomed to hearing mathematics lectures conducted in Japanese prior to their enrollment. The author of this study researched problems that foreign STEM students encounter when listening to video lectures on mathematics. Participants encountered problems in four main areas (1) inability to understand mathematical expressions and formulas (2) inability to understand lecturer's pronunciation (3) difference in the characters used for mathematical notation between Japanese and Chinese (4) Inability to understand technical collocations.
