In this analysis, the perspectives of Chinese learners and teachers in foreign language education were examined with a view to developing better curricula for Japanese language courses in China. Data was collected from a sample of 594 students and 70 teachers from seven different universities across China using the modified version of BALLI. It was concluded from the results that there is often a noticeable disparity between Chinese learners and teachers' attitudes towards their respective roles and responsibilities in foreign language classes. The results also indicate that there are some differences in attitudes relating to language education between groups of students in the north and south of China.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the use of learning strategies and level of competence in Japanese. 233 Korean learners of Japanese participated in a 50-question survey regarding learning strategies, and their competence was measured using SPOT (Simple Performance-Oriented Test). Subjecting the responses to factor analysis gave 8 primary factors. A relation ship was found between four of the factors -- "Using Others", "Conversation Practice", "Concentration", and "Media Use" -- and competence in Japanese. This suggests a connection between use of these strategies and an enhancement of the learning process.

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There are many conjunctive expressions used in Japanese TV news reports. In particular, "kono tame" and "shikasi" appear very frequently and play an important role for communicating information logically. A study was made to see how L1 and L2 listeners make use of the conjunctive expressions when listening to broadcast television news report. This study experimentally investigated how both native and non-native listeners make use of these conjunctions to recognize and recall content. The results indicate that L1 listeners recognize and recall these conjunctions to help them organize the information heard. However, L2 listeners ability to comprehend content making use of these conjunctions seems to vary with the level of proficiency.

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The purpose of this paper is to introduce our program which counsels learners as they participate in an intensive Japanese course. and to explore the great potential of "Learner Counseling." In our program, Japanese-South American technical trainees received counseling while they participated in a 70 day Japanese course. The analysis of the counseling records showed that "Leaner Counseling" contributed not only to the learners' acquisition of the language but also to the improvement of the course itself.

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The purpose of this study was to obtain the basic information about instructional activities for development of knowledge and information sharing system. At the first stage, we collected and classified descriptions of instructional activities for class teaching from five books of Japanese Language Teaching Methods. Major findings were as follows: 1) 294 instructional activities were classified into eight categories (level, area, skills, purpose, method, type, environment, resource) But some categories were not applicable to every instructional event. 2) Descriptions of instructional activities were classified into three types: steps of instructional procedures, concrete examples, and learners' problems. Half of instructional activities were described by means of concrete examples. 3) In the description of instructional activities, concrete examples were mainly used at basic level, but both instructional procedure and concrete examples were used at intermediate and advanced level.

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This study investigates strategies used by beginners to overcome difficulties when searching for kanji in dictionaries. Although most beginners have difficulty in using kanji dictionaries, the outcome of their search process differs according to learners. Some learners overcome incorrect search methods, while some do not. In order to clarify the reason for the difference, a successful learner's case was compared with an unsuccessful case and focus was put on their strategies to overcome difficulties. Their search process was recorded on video and follow-up interviews were video and tape-recorded. This study found that (1) a successful learner changed search methods more often than an unsuccessful learner and that (2) a successful learner used a meta-cognitive strategy to search for kanji.

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We have incorporated debate into the advanced Japanese class throughout the year. We thus would like to report syllabus contents, such as selection of the debate topic, preparation, practical activities and viewpoints of guidance. The report also includes ways for debate judgement and self-evaluation by students. The students' ability improved by an implementation of debate will be compared and examined with other lessons, such as reading comprehension. This will be further developed to consider the whole notion of debate, in terms of the outcome, significance and points to notice.

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Yasashii Kagakugijutu Dokkai Nyuumon (An Introduction to Technical Japanese Reading Comprehension) -Trial Edition- was published in March, 1999 by International Student Center at Tokyo Institute of Technology. The revised edition will be released in March, 2000. This textbook supports ASUNARO which we have developed as an Online Technical Japanese reading comprehension system equipped with a multilingual dictionary. This paper pesents the concept of this textbook and its usage with ASUNARO.

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In second language learning both in classes and in assistance systems, the indexing text database by learning items enables users to retrieve texts not only by surface expression but by language usage point of view. We have developed a system which extracts and proposes learning items comprised in the parts of texts. Starting from use of morphological information, we found it substantially improves performances to make use of modification relationship obtained by syntactic parsing.

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The second language (L2) educator, who recorded data that twenty L2 learners uttered, evaluated its likelihood of Japanese by the pronunciation. An individual record was given to each L2 learner with an interview and a tape recorded. It was useful for the L2 learners to realize their problems in pronunciation in this process.

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An action research was conducted on portfolio video assessment in which learners' progress in Japanese language competence is recorded periodically by utilizing oral interview with their teacher. Their feedback obtained from a questionnaire revealed that important factors of portfolio assessment were not fulfilled, and therefore it should be revised in various manners. This reflection lead to another action research cycle.

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"Confirmation acts" play an essential role in successful conversational interactions, especially in contact situation discourse (i.e., discourse between NSs and NNSs). Previous studies analyzing contact situations have focused mainly on the question of the NNS's comprehension of the NS's utterances. However, we assert that it is necessary to analyze discourse in contact situations from the following two points of view: 1) the roles of both the NNS and the NS, and 2) the roles of both comprehension and production. In this study, we propose a descriptive framework for "confirmation acts" in contact situations. This framework has three categories: 1) the holder of "the floor," 2) the addresser/addressee of the confirmation act, and 3) the place where the act takes place. Based on our descriptive framework, utterances comprising "confirmation acts" are classified into eight types.

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This paper introduces a teaching program on Japanese sentence intonation for Japanese language learners that has actually been put in practice. The first aim of this program is to raise the student's ability to recognize different intonation patterns, and the second one is to raise the student's ability to use a proper intonation pattern in speech. This program builds these learner's skills through acting and narrating using video materials. After 6 months of the program, good effect became apparent, not only increasing learner's consciousness of intonation and motivation to learn about it, but raising the ability to evaluate the speech of other learners.

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The purpose of this paper is to describe 1) what students' interests, preferences, and requests for Japanese classes are; 2) where students find the difficulty in studying Japanese; 3) how students have been changing under influences of the removal of a ban on the Japanese pop culture, which was taken place about a year ago; and 4) how the opinions toward Japan have been changed among the younger generation students. Owing to this questionnaire, the following results were obtained: Lifting the ban on the J-pop culture has been one of the major motivations for studying Japanese; students are interested just in the J-pop culture, not in the customs long standing in Japan; The younger students are more matter-of-fact about historical problems, and they do not favor to mention them particularly; students consider that it is waste of time to listen to the long explanations of words, grammar, and expressions that are similar to Korean language.

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We had the survey for the purpose of knowing what international students need and the potentiality of the support using computer for Japanese language learning by themselves. In result, computer is hopeful tool for support their study because the most students use computer everyday and they want it. It is expected to provide the multimedia materials, which utilize computer and the Internet, suited for their needs and the support network to links between international students and Japanese supporters. In addition, it is necessary to present a student various use of computer for language learning to develop these materials and support system

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For foreign learners of Japanese, the sudden increase of Kanji compound words at intermediate level tends to become an obstacle for achieving effective vocabulary-building. In this paper, the author categorizes many usage errors of Kanji compound words made by both learners with and without Kanji background into three types; errors of grammatical cohesion, errors of semantic collocation, and errors of stylistic appropriateness. The author then examines the distribution of those errors and their causes for some improvement of teaching method.

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This paper states the goal of conversational training for the intermediate-advanced learners, and provides a new idea of activity for helping the leaner to communicate without misunderstanding or mis-conveyance of information when he/she talks with native Japanese speakers. The sequential patterns for these series of activities are introduced: the leaners are required to obtain the message from one partner and to convey it to another partner in the appropriate way. The result of these activities show that learners simply repeated what he/she had heard due to the fact that they didn't catch the essential meaning of messages.

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This paper reports on the development and uses of a dictionary-linked system, the Japanese Language Semantic Features Dictionary. The Semantic Features Dictionary automatically analyzes the input text and divides it into words, showing the reading of each word and its concepts. Although a regular monolingual Japanese dictionary is very useful for advanced level learners, it is useful only if the learner can read the kanji he/she wishes to look up. The dictionary developed here enables the learner to search for a word automatically by pasting Japanese reading material in a text box and letting the computer search the dictionary. This allows learners to use Internet sources for study purposes. It is available to the public over the Internet at http://language.tiu.ac.jp.

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This report describes an intermediate listening class in which the students presented topics from television news broadcasts. Using a textbook that focuses on listening to news reports, the students were first given basic instruction, and then each student was given the task of watching and presenting a news story taken directly from a television broadcast. This task was designed for the purpose of encouraging the students to participate in the class actively, and to promote independent learning by listening to news broadcasts. The students managed to grasp the main point of how to listen to the news in Japanese effectively, and came to have confidence in their ability to understand news broadcasts. Moreover, through a questionnaire, the effectiveness of this approach was demonstrated for listening comprehension and learning vocabulary.

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