Abstract
Lecturers give concrete examples to facilitate understanding of the subjects of lectures, terminology, and concepts. Learners of Japanese language (“learners”) understand concrete examples but have difficulty in understanding the relations between such examples and the overall structure of a lecture. Do they fail to utilize concrete examples to understand the lecture? To support learners in understanding lectures, this paper examines how they actually understand concrete examples. To this end, learners and native speakers of Japanese (“native speakers”) were asked to take notes on a lecture, with the note-writing process recorded, and were interviewed regarding the note-writing process. Noted concrete examples and relevant interview comments indicate that (1) both learners and native speakers utilize those examples for evoking images on the subject and for facilitating understanding of the terminology; (2) learners are restricted in understanding when the relation between examples and terminology is not explicit or when examples are presented before the terminology; and (3) those examples are sometimes noted down by learners for study of Japanese. On that basis, it was suggested that the degree of understanding of the learner differs depending on how the lecturer presents examples, so the teaching method should be devised considering the learner's listening skill.
