One particle has various meanings. Therefore, to use suitable and right particles, it is necessery to consider meanings. And characters of noun just before the particle, verbs that have an effect on particles. And what a speaker wants to say with special emphasis in a context in any case, it is difficult for learners to tell what is a most suitable meaning. So we classified what fixes the meaning of particle through typical examples. And we tried to lake a network of particles meaning.

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In Kobayashi (1996) kanji learning activities are classified but analysis of each activities is not enough. This paper aim to analyze kanji writing activities because the role of writing activities has not been discussed. The writeing activities are classified in to recall task and cued recall task. The recall task requires to recall kanji form perfectly. The cued recall task require to read the target kanjis and copy the form. These two kinds activities have different roles. The cued recall task make the learner not only recall the kanji form but also do other information processing, and may contribute to reading skill.

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Appropriateness is a composite of diverse factors. Different types of speaking require different factors to be stressed and a single factor can be materialized through various features. Learners must be conscious of this diversity if they are to develop a well-balanced speaking skill. We discuss some techniques 1) to enhance beginners' consciousness of well-timed responses in different situations, and 2) to promote accuracy. The use of the learners' excellent performance as models instead of the native speaker's performance and time-saving feedback techniques are proposed.

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The multimedia computer courseware package 'Kantaro II & III'; has been developed by Japanese Studies, Macquarie University in corporation with Fujitsu Aus. Ltd. to facilitate Kanji acquisition for intermediate level learners. 500 Kanji are introduced in various units of "Kanji families" to help learners become aware of common key concepts of Kanji. The Kanji knowledge acquired is reinforced by several kinds of practice games. The 'Grammar Module' and 'Story Teller' enable the learner to shift from the individual Kanji and single word level to the use of Kanji in context. With its multimedia capabilities, Kantaro provides a combination of visual images and aural presentations to support all aspects the Kanji learning process.

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Our new supporting system for Japanese language learning is now available on WWW. At present, supporting tools for reading technical documents can be used. They are (a) dictionary for both technical terms and general terms, (b) dictionary for Kanji and (c) tool for counting number of Kanji in a text. The tools have been actually used in the class of intensive course. The course students were given an assignment to search Kanji characters and terms in the technical documents which were written by their professors. The students were strongly motivated by the documents of their own fields.

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This April we began new services which enabled the students of the International Student Center to use e-mail and web browsers. In the beginning, half of the students did not know how to use a computer. Accordingly, we offered some instruction to familiarize them with computers and e-mail. Now they use e-mail and the Internet frequently, but only in English. It is necessary to develop methodology which will help them learn Japanese through the use of the Internet and e-mail.

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The point of this paper is how to teach "tte" form which has intricate structures. "tte" we use in our daily life has great colloquial features. Therefore, it may also contains difficult problems when we explain it grammatically. First, I classified all the "tte" forms according to functions. "tte" has two different functions. One is to emphasize nouns and other words. The other is as a mark in dialogue sentences. Besides, these two also have various forms respectively. And I thought about the teaching order of "tte" form above. I hope this is better way for Japanese learners to understand "tte"

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When some form is used in the utterance, the function of the form is different according on the environment. And in some cases, an utterance, depending on the properties of the utterance, itself is not appropreate for some environments. So it is important that teachers present the environment and the way how to prompt the utterance as the target, when they present the form. From this point of view, this paper, based on considerations and analysis about the properties and functions of the utterance, provides an approach how to present a form to learners. As an example : I pick up "tai-form", which is one of the items in the beginners' class.

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We have a course for Japanese people so they can realize how their own mother tongue works. Some participants might be interested in Japanese language as a mode of communication, others might someday teach Japanese to foreigners. This paper introduces some parts of this course. In addition, we will report how the participants reacted and how their perceptions have been changed.

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We have been developing Japanese conversation materials for beginners class. We pick up and classify the items of various expressions for communication which are needed for a natural conversarion. As one of the classification bases, we thought it important how long it takes to teach these items in class. Under the same teaching plan, we gave lessons in two classes and examined its result. The result shows that it takes a long time to teach a) Grammer related items mainly because of its oral practice, b) items, the usage of which must be changed according to the situation.

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This study focuses on the question of how Japanese learners create an open syllable to adapt English words into Japanese loanwords. A test consisted of 48 English words required them to spell out in katakana, and it was conducted on 17 non-English native speakers who enrolled an elementary Japanese class. From the findings, it is concluded that the rules considered "marked" from a phonological point of view can be also treated as "marked" from an acquisition point of view. It is also suggested that the variation among the subjects of this study reflects a longitudinal process of the acquisition of Japanese.

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Advanced learners of Japanese, who are already free from troubles in daily conversation or negotiation in Japanese, want to get natural pronunciation and intonation, and to acquire words and expressions for abstract ideas and emotions. Especially in class, they would like to use words and expressions they know to show their ideas or feelings. And then, they expect to be amended in ore naturally or rightly. So we should make effective activities to meet their needs. At first it needs that the learners can try to use many Japanese expressions. And then everyone would like to join positively in the class. Consequently, they could realize they have actually made progress in their Japanese ability by themselves. This report shows an example of such total activities.Advanced learners of Japanese, who are already free from troubles in daily conversation or negotiation in Japanese, want to get natural pronunciation and intonation, and to acquire words and expressions for abstract ideas and emotions. Especially in class, they would like to use words and expressions they know to show their ideas or feelings. And then, they expect to be amended in ore naturally or rightly. So we should make effective activities to meet their needs. At first it needs that the learners can try to use many Japanese expressions. And then everyone would like to join positively in the class. Consequently, they could realize they have actually made progress in their Japanese ability by themselves. This report shows an example of such total activities.

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What should we teach in the elementary writing class? The purpose of this paper is to propose the syllabus of elementary writing class aimed on discourse structure. In this paper, I mention the following points: 1) the topic in each paragraph and omittable words, 2) how to combine two sentences into one, 3) discourse markers, 4) pronouns used in a context, 5) writer's point of view, 6) the order of description, and 7) a topic and a closing sentence in the paragraph. The elementary writing class taken account of above points was very effective for paragraph writing.

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The International Student Center of the University of Tsukuba has been developing and applying Japanese reading materials for beginners since September 1996. These materials have the following aims; 1) to develop the reading skills necessary to extract relevant information from authentic materials, 2) to develop basic reading skills. In this paper, the authors will review the revision process based on feedback from students in the 1996 fall-term and examine the major findings and problems from student questionnaires conducted in August 1997.

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Learners at the beginning stage had difficulty interacting meaningfully with Japanese. This paper describes how students in the intensive Japanese program and junior high school students cooperated in the production of video programs and discusses the importance and possibilities of the interactive training activities for beginning language learners.

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Japanese language teaching in the Micronesian secondary schools is facing some major problems. The students are under disadvantageous language learning conditions, the teaching system is not well developed, and noticeably the students have low self-esteem and a low image of their country, so the conditions need to be taken into consideration in course design. I suggest that the approach to Japanese language teaching in the Micronesian secondary schools should use an awareness of their own language and culture to encourage an in-cerase in the students' self-esteem and image of thier country.

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"Writing Workshop" offers a series of academic writing activities for L2 beginners of Japanese. It introduces fundamental skills using specific formats academic readers expect Thus, it helps learners to become aware of the characteristics of written language in Japanese and to develop their writing strategies from the beginning level. The materials provide a set of text structure to help learners' produce appropriate and coherent written discourse. Discussion with peers and teachers in the writing process facilitates the generation of topics and contents suitable to the structure of a text.

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In all aspects of second language acquisition research, teaching methodology and development of teaching material, the amount of study pertaining to Japanese phonetics and phonology falls behind compared to other areas in Japanese language education. This paper is a review of the Japanese pronunciation practise materials developed at the International Student Center of the University of Tsukuba. The purpose and structure of the material and a brief summary of the activities in the classroom will be presented. The effects caused by the introduction of this syllabus will also be reported. Finally, disussions will be made for further consideration.

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The language institute of Fukuoka Nihongo Center has been conducting 'Nihon-jijou' classes as ordinal lessons one or two periods a week since starting the institute (February 1989). We have been developing original 'Nihon-jijou' textbook as beginners material with revising for eight years. In 1997 "Let's speak and think on Japan" was published based on the material. This report describes the purpose, structure and contents of the textbook, and further how it is utilized in the actual classrooms, students' reponse and future developments.

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The present study relates to development of prosodic symbols for supporting phonetic material. Prosodigraph has been established as supplemental visual symbols for teaching phonetics. However, problem remains that students and/or teachers cannot understand them very easily. The present study aims to develop prosodic symbols which satisfy the following conditions: 1. people who lack phonetic and prosodic knowledge will be able to read them; 2. teachers can write them, after a little understanding and practice; 3. the symbols are compact so that they can be written in dialogues used intext books, if necessary. The symbols should be easily adopted by inexperienced teachers in phonetics and in overseas Japanese classes.

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This study conducted the longitudinal study of the Japanese pronunciation development, using the OPI data which were gathered as pre- and post-tests. As a result, it was found that ・the accent errors don't necessarily decrease, ・the over-phrasing errors decrease.

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Giving instruction based on the syllabus of International Studies is an effective way to teach Japanese to foreign students majoring in liberal arts; especially to promote their motivations to study vocabulary and academic skills. In this way they can study the relations between their own countries and Japan of various issues and problems. Based on this idea, we have edited a new Japanese textbook consisting of 9 chapters. Within these chapters are 23 units, which cover a diversity of topics, including Intercultural Communication, International Politics and International Law, Ethnicity and Nationalism, World Economy, Information Technology and Society, Ecology and Life, Japanology, Family and Lifestyle, and other subjects of contemporary concern. Each unit consists of reading materials, notes, and various kinds of tasks and a vocabulary list. We also provide instruction in the retrieval, drafting, and presentation of reports, using newspaper articles and TV programs with the textbook.

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In this study, we report the result of a questionnaire survey of advanced students who are in our graduate school on the shitsutsuaru form acquisition. It was found that they made more errors of that form than the sbiteiru form and couldn't understand the criteria of choice between these two forms in the expression of progressive action. The significant correlation between the errors of the shitsutsuaru form and the length of their stay in Japan wasn't found in an examination with the F-test. From all of these pieces of evidence, we need to establish how to teach the shitsutsuaru form effectively in Japanese language classrooms.

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Six beginners performed three speaking tasks in which different features are required to acheive appropriateness. The learners endeavored to maintain communication, but they were generally indifferent to those features that are that learners should be given opportunities to find out that different features are important in different speaking situations.

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In this paper an experiment of the response test which was put into practice in the beginner's Japanese class in Kwangju Women's University is described. As a result of modifying our evaluation methods, we have found that our new methods were better able to evaluate our response test.

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This paper is aimed at identifying the discourse structure of scientific and technical papers, for use as a database for an on-line Technical Japanese learning system. We focused on sentence predicates in analyzing papers relating to engineering fields, so as to observe the textual means used by authors to portray attitudes towards objects, and describe the technical methodology used and the results of observations. We classify predicates into (1) those used to state author observations, (ex.aru) (2) those used to convey the procedural actions of the authors (ex.sekibunsuru), (3) and those used to describe the thoughts or attitudes of authors to the results of their method (ex.kangaeru, juuyoodearu). Finally, we present important predicates for learners to be able to comprehend the discourse structure of scientific papers.

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This paper describes an introduction of the Kanji Compound CAI system into the Japanese class as a preparation or a review. In order to utilize the kanji of Japanese textbook at CAI, it is to be desired that teachers should personalize the system functions. We have developed a teachers' customizable CAI system to support foreigners in kanji compound learning, called JUGAME II which succeeds to an original concept of JUGAME.

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This paper is a progress report of the cross-cultural training program which has been carried out at the International Student Center of Tsukuba University since fall, 1995. The program is based on the idea of cross-cultural training methods which enables Japanese elementary language learners 1) to understand cross-cultural processes, 2) to use language effectively based on their understanding of Japanese culture and ideas. This paper will examine students' comments which were written at the end of each class.

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