This paper is a practical report on a simulation activity performed at the end of an intensive Japanese course for beginners. Learners, who play a role of a travel agent, design a one-day tour visiting their hometown, make slides and brochures, and give a presentation to prospective customers played by the audience, invited from inside and outside the university. This activity has the following effects: (1) it develops learners' motivation to speak (2) it provides an opportunity for learners to increase the variation of linguistic forms they can use (3) it motivates audience to listen and brings out questions that lead to real communication.

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A definition sentence must contain the word to be defined and its semantic definition. At the sentence level, their order of presentation does not influence the grammatical correctness of the whole sentence. If so, which word order is more appropriate and should be chosen for a definition sentence at the discourse level? To answer this methodological question, I used the principle of word order (Sunakawa 2005) in teaching grammar and composition, directing my attention to the connection between discourse progression and word order. The results clearly show a more effective local discourse progression, but making the students aware of the composition's overall structure patterns still remains a necessity.

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This article aims to report on the "Multicultural Class" in Tohoku University. The nature of the name "Multicultural Class" is to overturn the arrangement that pits "foreign students" against "Japanese students", bridging its gap between the times of multicultural coexistence already becoming a reality outside the classroom. All activities are the combination of four skills and are effective measures in enhancing an understanding of the multidimensionality of the self and others. The script of the auditory data shows these practices can be accomplished even by the intermediate level learners, providing a place where language acquisition can occur in completely content-based and meaning-oriented activities.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of using bilingual lexical maps consisting of English and Japanese word pairs for specialist vocabulary learning with foreign students preparing to enter a National College of Technology (Koto Senmon Gakko). The results of the study indicate that the average number of words recalled by the map group was higher than the control group, and confirm the pedagogical effects of bilingual lexical maps.

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It has been shown that learners who can use self-generated standards those not necessarily taught by the instructor in monitoring their own performance have better pronunciation. Therefore, in pronunciation teaching, it seems that assisting learners in creating self-generated standards would lead effective learning. In this study, we monitored how 3 Korean learners of Japanese created self-generated standards through mutual discussion. The result shows that comparing to solitary activities, self-monitoring ability is more effectively nurtured through collaborative learning.

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The course material prepared this time serves as a bridge between a beginning level and an intermediate level. Its purpose is to help learners who have completed a beginning-level course abroad to smoothly advance to an intermediate level. This course material features the use of a topic syllabus and a number of interactive activities. It also reviews the areas of grammar covered toward the end of beginning-level classes so that students can practice and improve their use of grammar. In particular, the material aims to help individual learners voluntarily offer their thoughts and stimulate one another through many activities designed with emphasis on interaction. Each section basically consists of a text for speaking and reading. At the end of the ;book is "Daily Conversation." This course material helps those who have completed a beginners' course abroad to smoothly move up to an intermediate course.

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A WebBT System for Acquisition of Vocabulary for Japanese beginners has been developed under the JSPS Grant. The system has the following features: (1) it is targeted for the acquisition of Japanese vocabulary. (2) It promotes autonomous learning. (3) It promotes collaborative learning. (4) Data derived from the learners will be used in the research of vocabulary acquisition.

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Japanese language educators face the task of choosing which kanji to teach and at what level of proficiency to introduce each kanji. In this presentation, we report a survey on the ability of each kanji in the 2100 Kanji List ranked by degree of familiarity and frequency to make kanji compounds. Our analysis of 15,000 compounds shows that many of the top-ranked kanji by familiarity and frequency have a high capacity to generate kanji compounds. We suggest that it is insufficient to teach these kanji just at the primary level, and that both the compounds containing these kanji and the ways that the compounds are generated and the resulting meanings should also be explicitly taught at the intermediate and advanced levels.

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When writing academic papers in Japanese, it is often required to use the grammatical structure known as the 'inanimate passive'. This structure is believed to give an objective impression when used in academic papers. Chinese students who learn Japanese often find it very difficult to use the 'inanimate passive' when they write academic papers in Japanese. This is because in Chinese, 'inanimate passive' structure is often interpreted as an active or non-subject sentence, and hardly ever means 'passive' in Chinese. In order to help Chinese learners in academic writing, it is vital to stress the importance of using the passive structure and its different usage.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate various corpora as a pilot study for a Japanese composition system. Japanese language learners tend to produce unnatural sentences because they lack sufficient knowledge of natural collocations. In order to provide usage examples of collocations to Japanese learners, our system analyzes co-occurrences involving nouns and verbs from various corpora, such as science papers, news papers and essays, in order to identify the special features of co-occurrence words in scientific writings.

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An investigation was performed in Japanese language classes in Universities of China, which focuses on the timing of correction by teachers and how the students react to the timing of correction. 90% students said that, they should be corrected after a whole sentence is finished. But, investigation results showed that out of 186 corrections, students were being corrected in the middle of a sentence in more than 50% cases. The teachers also prefer correction after a whole sentence. But sometimes they interrupt within a sentence unwillingly. Investigation results indicated that correction which interrupts students is done mostly when "elicitation" is used and when the error is at the beginning of a sentence.

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High school second language education in Taiwan is approaching the tenth year since its institution, but a number of problematic issues remain. The difficulty of maintaining motivation among high school learners particularly of Japanese as a second language has been established in numerous papers on the subject. This paper presents the results of interviews with nine high school Japanese language teachers, which explored the reasons for motivation loss among their students, and the action teachers took to prevent it. A variety of methods used by the teachers are discussed, and a trend toward qualitative difference between those of experienced and less experienced teachers may be seen.

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The topics chosen by the native speakers at a question period after poster presentation tend toward chat, not directly related to the content of the presentation. This paper examines the hypothesis that the rich content limits the topics to the content of the presentation. As a result, the richer content leads to less chat.

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The current series of research of conversational analysis have led the educational field to notice the importance of teaching conversation-specific items such as the function of ending particles, discourse politeness and so on. However, it is very unusual for the learners to learn these items consciously from their early learning stage. This presentation shows that, by creatively using the high-context nature of Japanese, these items can be introduced to the beginning-level learners and expanded dynamically to their successive learning stages.

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Employing the framework developed by Hamada et al. (2006), this study examines the Japanese language learning environment for students enrolled (or formally enrolled) in the Intensive Japanese Language Course (henceforth, intensive students) and for international undergraduate students (henceforth, undergraduate students) at Ehime University. The results indicate that, for both groups, contact with compatriots plays an important role in their personal life. However, differences can be seen in their attitudes towards the importance of this contact with respect to learning Japanese. Many of the intensive students at the novice to intermediate-low level felt that contact with compatriots contributed to improving their Japanese, while the undergraduate students tended not to see a connection between this contact and Japanese language learning.

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People from abroad may have no experience of earthquakes and little knowledge of safety procedures in Japan. Moreover, those whose Japanese language ability is at a low level may have difficulty following disaster procedures and understanding necessary information. With this in mind, we designed and implemented a course unit on disaster survival for ALT students working in Japan. This paper will report on the results of this trial unit.

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There have been many works which treat the meaning and the usage of the modal auxiliary verb 'rasii' in comparison to those of another auxiliary verb 'yooda', which gives a similar interpretation. However, no profound discussion has been made in the field of Japanese language education concerning how to introduce, how to teach the distinction of, and how to make practice of those two auxiliaries. In this work, we will survey how they are treated in the current Japanese language education, and discuss how they should be treated as the materials in the classroom.

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The Yamagata Junior College Japanese Language Section for Foreign Students has instituted two projects aimed at improving the overall communication ability of Japanese language learners. One is an Independent Project where beginning students develop their own individual plan for an activity outside the classroom. The other is an Exercise Project where instructors assign an exercise. In this paper the particular characteristics of these and other activities are reported.

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We have had one of the policies that is a good coordination with the community of Tokushima University since "International Student Center (hereinafter referred to as "Center")" was established. Since then we have appealed three aspects to the community. Those are the enlightenment of internationalization, the measures of cross-culture communication and the symbiosis and the co-activity. We, staff of Center, had managed and organized "Nihon-go Salon", but this year the local volunteer groups started to do so instead of us. Over the past 3 years the parties at "Nihon-go Salon" had been also managed by us, and the community had joined the events, but this year the local volunteer groups started to manage and organize the parties with their own connections and know-how, and we support them. I would like to consider the nast and the future of Center

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It has been noted that distance learning (including e-learning) has difficulties where maintaining the learners' motivation and continuing studies are concerned. This paper reports on the mentoring method that uses the e-learning e-mail system for company trainees. It examines effective tasks as well as the devices of the transmission of e-mail messages.

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This report suggests that it is important for learner (speaker) to understand that the listener will have various background knowledge as well as communication aims, and to communicate to be aware of such situations even if he/she is talking about the same topic. In this "the study introduction" two kinds of listener were assumed: 1) professors with differing specializations, 2) general participants at a party. The Learner was given feedback by means of peer discussion, teacher suggestion and native's assessment. As a result, learners became aware of consideration to be made regarding generation. familiarity and the degree of information request.

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Ichikawa (1997) and Mizutani (1994) noted that Japanese learners often misuse nittote and nitaishite. This paper explores the reasoning behind the usage of nitotte and nitaishite by Japanese learners. Firstly, some Japanese learners were asked to make some sentences with no specified word and some with specified words, choose between nitotte and nitaishite and choose phrases that follow nitotte or nitaishite. After which, interviews were conducted. The results suggest that (1) nitaishite is often used instead of nitotte in descriptive sentences containing adjectives that have corresponding antonyms, (2) nitaishite has an impersonal connotation and (3) nitotte is often applied to people while nitaishite is often applied to things and events.

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This study investigates the development of Japanese collocation knowledge in learners of Japanese. A collocation production survey consisting of 70 basic Japanese nouns was administered to 67 Chinese learners (CN) and 69 native Japanese speakers (JN). Focusing on modification collocations, the results indicated a large difference in the numbers of correctly-produced collocations by the two groups: 2,234 collocations for JNs and 1,656 collocations for CNs. Collocations errors (357) produced by the CNs were classified according to seven types, with semantic collocations errors representing 42% of the total. There were also 84 syntactic errors involving na-adjectives relating to word class and 44 involving i-adjectives relating to form restrictions.

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It has been widely acknowledged that the main reason of Chinese students having difficulties with Japanese listening is that they can not recognize phonemes or words in sentences. A Current research shows that native speakers of Tokyo Japanese use their accents efficiently to recognize or understand Japanese words. However, how Chinese students learning Japanese utilize pitch accent has not been studied or discussed. Therefore, in this paper, a comprehensive experiment with 8 Chinese students in Hokkaido University was carried out, As a result, there is a tendency that these learners distinct words using accent at second morae in the same probability as native speakers of Tokyo Japanese.

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The purpose of this study is to clarify the characteristics of Japanese modal adverbs, including "Kitto", "Kanarazu", and "Zehi" in the co-occurrence with sentence-final expressions. These modal adverbs are difficult for Japanese learners to master because their nuances are difficult to translate or paraphrase in another language. This study suggests a model based on The Instrumental Model of Language developed by Karl Buhler to describe these characteristics in the co-occurence with sentence final expressions. The merit of using this model is to visualize the co-occurence with modal adverbs and patterns of sentence-final expressions. The model will be useful for the analysis of the characteristics of modal adverbs.

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Our research aim is to investigate how Japanese Language Teachers (JLT) develop their careers. In this study, we focused our research analysis on two issues. The first was about how part-time JLT start their careers as teachers. Concerning this issue, we found some similarities among interviewees and classified them in four patterns. The second issue was about how job experiences change JLT jobs, and as a result we found that JLT who began their Japanese teaching job in the private language schools changed their workplace to national/public universities where job conditions are better after 4 years and 6 months (average time).

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This study reports the purpose of looking up words in dictionaries and the problems with these dictionaries for Japanese language learners. After reporting the history of the user study for a learner's dictionary, we discuss our study method, the form of the questionnaire and the pilot study. Then we discuss the results of the pilot study and the problems mentioned by Japanese language learners.

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This presentation introduces the class aimed to be able to handle about advanced topics (on economic matters) for intermediate students by the debate activity. The analysis of debate activities and their class activities showed the difficulty of planning structure of constructive speech and making students' speech correct and rich. I suggest the detail research about intermediate students' ability for the balance between activity of students and the instruction of teacher.

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This paper shows how casual speech can be taught in the classroom for research students and reports some class activities for it. In Japanese language classrooms, polite styles have been primarily taught because Japanese language teachers as well as researchers generally believe that those styles are more useful and easy-to-learn in JSL environments. In contrast, an increasing number of learners recognize the need for acquiring casual speech in order to adapt to Japanese community quickly and smoothly. The effective way of learning casual speech is essential to enhance their Japanese language learning.

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The purpose of this research is to investigate the needs of children who have roots outside of Japan who are studying and living in Japan. Differing tendencies were established among the elementary school students and junior high school students sampled. Junior high school students in particular wanted additional educational support, including provision for the study of Japanese in their mother tongue. From their increased educational needs, it seems reasonable that the junior high school students have more serious problems than elementary students. Furthermore, junior high school students tended to express the desire for social support from friends who have similar roots and an opportunity to study their mother tongue. However, both groups expressed the desire to meet some friends who have similar roots..

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