There are two types of affirmative feedback a teacher gives when learners' production in a classroom is correct: acknowledging a correct answer and praise. This study is a case study which attempts to investigate how learners' diversity (their grade within their classroom and their learning styles) influences their reactions toward affirmative feedback from their teacher. It became clear that while learners' grade does not influence their reactions, their learning styles do: Accommodators, who solve problems in an intuitive trial and error manner relying on other people for information rather than on their own analytic ability, tend to seek for teacher's acknowledging a correct answer but do not prefer being 'praised' compared to learners of other categories.

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A belief survey was conducted on 30 Chinese and 30 German university students who learn Japanese language. Little difference was found between the Chinese and the German groups regarding their beliefs about aptitude, motivation, and culture-language learning relationship, whereas there proved to be a certain difference in their beliefs about classroom activity and in their learning strategy preferences.

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For the acquisition of Kanji and Foreign loan Words, we administered tests in the beginners class. These tests were intended to lighten the student's burden, make the questions and answers clear before practice and reduce the various handicaps of the students.

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This paper describes Japanese Affairs by omnibus lectures using World Wide Web. There are some problems in the past Japanese Affairs classes as following. 1) Each lecturer hardly knows the students' information of the number, nationalities, faculties and Japanese performances before the class. 2) Students hardly know the contents of the lecture, when they are absent. 3) Japanese teacher as a coordinator hardly knows students' understanding of the lecture. I have made the web pages on Japanese Affairs to solve the problems. I propose the class design for Japanese Affairs by omnibus lectures using WWW among lecturers, students and a coordinator.

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The Level Checker is a computer software program developed to estimate the level of difficulty of Japanese reading material. At this stage the program consists of three components: a level checker each for vocabulary, kanji, and grammatical structures. This paper will discuss only the Vocabulary Level Checker (VLC), its development, and some practical uses. The VLC automatically compares all the words in a text with the words in the lists taken from the four levels in The Japanese Language Proficiency Test and shows the percentage for each level. It also makes a list of the actual words found at each level and gives the number of occurrences. This program will be made available to the public free of charge through the Internet.

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I investigated problems in acquisition of case markers O and NI for advanced learners of JSL. I take the position that the case particle is the form of case indicating the relation to the verb, so, is governed by the verb. I picked out the "Mental Verbs" as the object of my study. The noun co-occurring to the mental verb takes O or NI, and at the same time, two of them belong to the objective in a broad sense. I predicted that the confusion caused by this fact should make it difficult for learners to acquire the use of case markers. Through the quiz, I obtained the following results: 1)Comparing O and NI co-occurring to the mental verbs with those to the physical verbs or the social verbs, former is lower percentage of right answers. 2)Fewer subjects chose the right answers to NI than those to O. 3)NI is frequently mixed up with O, and O with GA.

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How should teachers design "composition" classes for intermediate to advanced learners? Recently many models, methods and materials have been proposed for them. However it is not very clear how the teacher should choose them depending on the learners' condition. According to psychological models of writing, division of learners' attention is important. Through composition classes, learners learn to control dividing their limited attention resource to their weak points in the writing process. Teachers should consciously design classwork to assist them to resolve this problem. Learners' experience of writing papers in their first language and their knowledge about sentence-paragraph writing may be the points of teacher's decision making.

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The access logfile from the Japanese language learning system server has been analyzed. The number of successful requests for pages for this year has been increased compared to that for last year. It has been confirmed that the actual operation of the system in Japanese classes greatly contribute to the increase of the number. The analysis for the hours showed that the system was used frequently even in the evening. This result is considered to be verifying the advantage of the computer networked supporting system which can be used "anytime".

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For intermediate level students difficulties in Kanji are not only new Kanji, but new vocabulary of Kanji they already learnt. However, learners tend to assume they can guess the meanings of those words and fail to understand the context. In this paper, to make the readings of articles in 'Nihon Keizai Shinbun' smooth, vocabulary in 'White Paper' is searched and analysed. The result of analysis shows the wider meanings of letters and usages of vocabulary could be the difficulties.

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For the purpose of identifying the level of general and technical difficulty in vocabulary, I analyzed the nouns most frequently appearing in a reading support system "SHINSHO LIBRARY" from the following three aspects: (1) classification according to "The Basic 6,000 Words for Japanese Language Education," (2) contextual meanings and (3) construction of compound nouns. Through these analyses, the vocabulary of two texts out of the eight employed in the system appears to be highly abstract and technical, which indicates that those texts in particular require some explanatory notes for better understanding.

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Active-vs-passive opposition is generally understood to concern verbal morphology involving -rareru. There are, however, two other ways to express this opposition. They employ verbal categories such as tense and aspect, and they are most clearly seen in adnominal clauses. They are typically used for verbs and adjectives of emotion.

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This study investigated the difference of Japanese teachers' and ordinary Japanese speakers' evaluation on Japanese learners' pronunciation. As a result, strong similarities were found in their evaluation but Japanese teachers evaluated the pronunciation lower than ordinary Japanese speakers.

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Our previous study "Unnatural expression employed by Japanese learner - An observation focused on their viewpoint" (1994) showed that a speaking ability of Japanese leaners would be close to a level of native speaker if they correctly understand a viewpoint and improve guessing ability. On the basis of this idea, we have created the game to train learners to enable more appropriate expression for giving-receiving and respect, on which they often make a mistake. We expect that Japanese leaners can get a correct viewpoint as they play this game and eliminate unnatural expressions leaning closer to a level of native speakers.

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Koike et al.(1998) pointed out that, what developing syllabuses and materials for elementary conversation class, it is necessary to ask ordinary Japanese people what they think are important features of conversation. In this follow-up study we report results from interviews in which we asked two advanced learners to comment on elementary learners' performance during role-play tasks.

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SHINSHO LIBRARY is a CAI system developed for advanced Japanese reading. In this study 15 participants were required to read in their own pace 8 kinds of authentic texts using this system during a period of three weeks. From the results of the pre- and post tests and the data of their learning process, questionaires and an interview, the following results were observed. 1)Most of the participants showed only little progress in reading comprehension. 2)The participants who scored low on the vocabulary section of the pre-test tend to make progress in vocabulary. 3)More than 50% of the participants improved their reading speed, particularly in the longer texts. On the other hand, the participants who made progress in vocabulary, tended to become slower readers.

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This paper describes the co-occurrence of verb and particle in verb-sentences in two elementary Japanese textbooks. The frequent particles and categories of verb and noun which precedes particle are surveyed to extract terms for developing a computer drill. It is examined statistically that particle selection is made easier by referring both preceded noun and following verb to particle. The learning effectiveness is also evaluated on a computer based drill system which provides an "icon" in according to the relation of noun and verb.

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We have created opportunities for people speaking Japanese as a mother tongue so that they can realize how their own mother tongue works. We have held 4 workshops focusing on the Japanese language. We will discuss one of the workshops and how the participants reacted. In addition, the results of the questionares answered by the participants will be presented.

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The purpose of this study is to 1)obserbe how learning strategies have explored through the projectwork, 2)examine what kinds of factors cause exploring, 3)refer to changes of learners' beliefs. One of the leading educational goals of the research on learning strategies is an autonomous language learner. The projectwork is useful for this goal. Because strategies is are problem oriented, so the projectwork raise learners' awareness which is important to develop strategies and beliefs.

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Kanji represent units of both sound and meaning. Therefore, it is often claimed that learners should be able to guess the meaning of kanji compounds easily using knowledge of the core meaning of the individual kanji which make up the words. For foreign learners of Japanese, however, not only the meaning of the words but also information about parts of speech of the words are very important in order to be able to use them in making sentences. In this paper, the author will examine the effectiveness of teaching about parts of speech and word formation of some basic kanji for beginners by comparing parts of speech of kanji and their compounds.

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The Kyusyu University International House holds beginner's Japanese classes for the families of the foreign students. In the textbook written for foreign students, many of the scenes are laid on campus and they are not directly related to their families. In order to use the textbook more practically in our cases, I made handouts for preparations and reviews with the material which relates to or interests the families of the foreign students. I would like to report how to make and use handouts for preparations and reviews.

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International students majoring in technology at are required to join and discuss with Japanese students at the seminar when they finished beginners' course ad go on a specialized. But, international students are apt to have some trouble to read ad understand technical papers before the seminar. Therefore, it is important to teach effective and survival means to understand technical papers. In this study I show one strategy for students who just finished beginners' course to presume the contents of papers.

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This research proposes the genesis of a new syllabus format for a Technical Japanese Course. The new syllabus will be based on a textbook currently being developed by the authors of this paper. There is a lack of suitable Technical Japanese Textbooks published for beginners of the Japanese Language. The main reason is that those textbooks often have to cover a large number of specialist words, while also covering language for a wide spectrum of fields. But beginners can manege only a little vocabulary and grammar. Therefore a textbook is required that will cover a reasonable range of basic vocabulary for specialists learning Japanese at a beginner level. This paper describes the background research required for the development of this project, which includes analysis and discussion of a survey of scientific and technical textbooks. This analysis covers Kanji, vocabulary and sentence patterns at an ability equivalent to the third and fourth levels of the Japanese Prociency Language Test organized by the Association of International Education of Japan.

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