Undergraduate international students studying the sciences at universities need to gain a command of fundamental specialized terms equivalent to the high school graduate level. This study identified a list of vocabulary that should be learned. The study drew on indexes of terms from 30 junior and senior high school textbooks in three chemistry-related subjects, and identified 774 target terms listed in 50% or more of the indexes for each individual subject. When terms appearing in multiple subjects are omitted, those appearing in high school-level Chemistry I made up just under 70% of the terms with 529 terms.

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Our upper-intermediate university Japanese pronunciation course aims to develop learner autonomy to enable self-initiated life-long pronunciation development. To this purpose, the learners engage in daily conversation and speeches while learning pronunciation. At the course conclusion, they transcribe a self-selected news-clip or drama scene, practice it, and present it orally. As an individual learning tool, 'Suzuki-kun' is used. This tool displays phrasal intonation patterns and nuclear accent positions of contextualized words and is part of the Online Japanese Accent Dictionary (OJAD). This study analyzes learner pronunciation portfolio reflections and discusses achievement of the course aim, and the effectiveness of OJAD.

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The paper reports on the practices of writing classes, which was comprised of teachers' feedback and peer response, for students aiming to become autonomous writers in intermediate-level writing classes. Teachers' feedback includes 1) indication errors by highlighting, 2) indication errors and suggestions for improvement by comments, 3) advice about the assignment as a whole, and 4) evaluation by rubric. Peer response, which is mentioned in this paper, is based on a comprehension quiz. By comparison between a first draft and a second draft, a follow-up interview, and answers from a comprehension quiz, we will discuss the effectiveness of this practice.

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This research discusses the use of an auxiliary verb "shiteshimau" in discourse by Japanese native speakers, focusing on in which contexts and for what events and situations how it appears, and what the communicative functions of "shiteshimau" are. Results show that "shiteshimau" is used by Japanese native speakers when the events are directly related to themselves, unlike the events of others. Furthermore, "shiteshimau" conveys the sense of "evaluation", which agents think the results of their actions or events "undesirable".

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For raising oral expressive power, training in discussion as the place where communicative competence is shown generally is effective, and I practiced "The Autonomy Type Talks Program". The characteristic of the program is that it consists of the technique of participation experience type learning including four elements; experience, indication, analysis, and conceptualization and that it has two axes of learning about the theme, content, of the discussion and the learning about how to lead (skill). In this report, first I will show a summary of the practice, and report the results that show how a learner increased the skill of argument through the practice. Furthermore, I will speak about the effectiveness of the participation experience type learning program.

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In Nakahara et al. (2013) and Kawachi et al. (2013), we observed and reported learners' interactions and the process of their learning during conversation practice in pairs, based on sample dialogues with learning points. This process suggested that the discourse structure and the learning points of the sample dialogues influence the achievement of each pair as well as class activity. In this study, we examine the factors of sample dialogues that affect successful learning, using the recorded data of the learner pair. In addition, we consider the requirement of appropriate sample dialogues.

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