(C.) Linguistic Research and Japanese Language Education

A Comparison of the Pusan 2008 Conference with Seoul 2000 and Tokyo 2004

Abstract

The purpose of this small report is to compare the 2008 International Conference on Japanese Language Education to the past conferences: to report on how the presentations have changed over the years, to explore tendencies seen in the presentations from the 2008 conference, and finally, summing up the contents of this conference, to consider future directions.

In comparison with the 2000 and 2004 conferences, the numbers of presentations and of participating countries of the 2008 meeting dramatically increased. The research areas represented also increased greatly in number, with papers on manga, bilingual speakers and pidgin language, research methods, the use of publically available corpora, as well as on the methods of neurolinguistic research. While this diversity in research areas is welcome, it was sometimes difficult to ascertain the significance of the contributions due to the lack of depth in the short presentations given at the conference. Furthermore, very little integration was seen among different approaches proposed. Thus, increasing the depth and better integration of our research efforts are two major challenges for the future meetings.