A research group was established to develop teaching materials for a Japanese language preparatory course at Gunma University. The author attended general education courses and collected materials containing significant hints for specialized Japanese instruction. If students could explain the content after utilizing handouts and viewing a lecture video, they were assumed to have understood the lectures. An experiment was carried out to discover how much was actually understood using handouts and videos. The kind of assistance necessary for students to understand lectures was examined. This presentation reports on the results of this experiment and considerations regarding the utilization of these results.

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Japanese has an extensive set of 'mimetic' words usually called 'onomatopoeia'. Although they are essential to express our emotions and to describe various things vividly, they seem not to have been taught often in Japanese classes. The author argues what kinds of Japanese 'onomatopoeia' appear in textbooks and teaching materials now widely used. She also presents her idea as to how she has chosen "30 'Basic Onomatopoeia in Japanese" based on the result of the above- mentioned argument and a little survey on basic Japanese vocabularies. The author finally tries to show a list of co-occurence of 'onomatopoeia' and basic verbs and claims how certain kinds of sentence structures, under which those co-occurences are realized, can enable students to understand the usages of 'onomatopoeic' expressions.

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I argued in Tsunoda (2001) that, regarding combinations of non-finite and main clauses, there are restrictions. These restrictions concern the modality of the main clauses, the relevant portions of which are the following three levels: level of a mere description of situations, that of judgements, and that of what may be termed hortation. In the present paper, I argue that the same restrictions apply to combinations of adverbial phrases and main/finite clauses.

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This paper examines the development of a multimedia learning aid for foreign students of Japanese university Business Administration courses. With a simple click of the cursor, the student can find the readings and meanings of Kanji and key words translated into English, correct pronunciation and alternative uses. Pronunciation and reading of short passages can also be heard, as well as short video presentations. This is still in the developmental stage, but will be put in use, on an experimental basis, from the second term of 2002.

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The aim in this paper is to develop a tool which extracts expressions belonging to the closed category such as 'niyotte,' 'kamoshirenai.' First, we describe the problem of NLP tools when they are applied to the Japanese language education field. Then, we discuss how to extract functional morphemes. Such methods as using simple matching and morphological analysis are examined. Finally, we make a tool which post-processes the results of the morphological analysis considering environmental conditions. The tool is designed for general purposes and can be used with ease.

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Basic technical terms such as "Koteibuai" (official discount rate) are important elements of technical courses in universities, but are not taught in ordinary Japanese language courses. In this research, we developed self-study materials for foreign students specializing in economy, to help them use these basic technical terms. Technical terms were selected by surveying general university textbooks and newspaper articles and shown in the form of technical collocations (collocations of words indicating technical concepts), such as "to raise the official discount rate". We prepared sample sentences and exercises for them.

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Learning is a process of creating meaningful representations of knowledge through internally mediated processes including self-awareness, self-questioning, self-monitoring and self-regulation. This paper aims to show the importance of 'metacoginition' study for Kanji learning and teaching. 'Metacognition' is cognition of one's own cognition and consists of two parts, knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. Much researches have shown that metacognition promotes learning but there are few 'metacognitive' studies in Japanese leaning / teaching, especially Kanji. 'Metacognition' provides new viewpoints to this area of research. To develop 'metacognitive' Kanji learning / teaching study, some research aspects are needed; what are learners' and teachers' metacognitive processes, how to improve learners' metacognition skills and how to combine between basic psychological study and Kanji learning / teaching study.

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Although report writing has been used as an important test of the knowledge and skills that students have learned in a course, little research has been undertaken on its role in the process of learning Japanese. In this study, I report on four courses in which I incorporated report projects, 1) Japanese writing and 2) Japanese culture for foreign students, and 3)Japanese rhetoric and 4)Japanese sociolinguistics for Japanese undergraduate students. Results showed that ways of choosing topics and data for the reports, publication on the Web site or as a collection of reports, and in-class discussion of the expressions and contents of each report were crucial for the effectiveness of the course.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the significance of the "mid-term project progress report" given orally prior to an oral academic presentation, in terms of teaching discourse structures and patterns of academic speech. The "mid-term project progress report" was designed in order to provide the students with a chance to realize one's problems in discourse management, as well as to develop the materials for teaching discourse structures and patterns necessary for their speech. From the discourse analyses of the mid-term and the final presentations, the study concluded that the "mid-term project progress report" leads to the appropriate instructions, which in turn improves the discourse of the final presentations.

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This study aims to compare the effect of vocabulary assistance in helping students understand lectures. In particular, it looks at the effect of giving students time to learn vocabulary, compared to the current practice of handing out vocabulary lists just before a lecture. In the study, one group was given a vocabulary list just before the lecture. Another group was given the same vocabulary list with translation one week before and took a dictation test just before the lecture. The latter group on average scored higher in comprehension tests of the lecture.

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This paper aims to construct a database of Lexical Phrases, in order to enable Japanese language learners to acquire adequate and natural expression. This work constitutes a preparatory step regarding our building an Internet-based language learning system of natural conversational expressions. There are quite a lot of intermediate-level learners that, departing from a beginners-level base, often have difficulties while trying to master natural expressions. Intermediate level textbooks are usually consist of prepared lexical phrases aimed at building the learner's language frameworks. However, we have noticed that is this approach is not effective enough for learners who want to communicate naturally and freely in various contexts, due to the fact that syllabus in the intermediate level of current textbooks lacks sufficient and useful lexical phrases. Hence we propose a Lexical Phrase database aimed at intermediate learners based phrases from various current intermediate textbooks, including sentence pattern lists of the Nihongo Noryoku Shutudai Kijun and others.

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To help foreign students at our universities, the authors developed IT Bulletin Board named Plaza, to encourage Japanese language learning via discussions. At the end of the semester, a questionnaire was administered to study the following problems, unique to IT Bulletin Boards: How do the degree of computer literacy and the choice of discussion topics influence their participation in this activity and evaluation of this IT Bulletin Board. The findings were as follows: 1) Especially the low degree of computer literacy hinder them from participation, 2) The learners preferred the discussion topics with the two features, satisfaction of curiosity and needs, and interests in others.

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Rakugo which is the art of Classical Comic Story has formed at the time from the middle of Edo and during the Meiji periods, and subsequently, colorfully reflects mostly the social background typical to that epoch. Therefore, nowadays it is hard to say that its amusement is conveyed to everyone. Due to the diversification of entertainment and some other reasons, Rakugo is now considered to be a sort of an ancient art hardly familiar, especially to the younger age groups. In this research, I decided to analyze the lexical aspect of Rakugo a factor in its obscurity to the common people. Having taken Rakugo as the object of the research, I go forward with the inquiry of lexical units, concerned difficulty by the young, and try to analyze some common tendency, basing upon the acquired results.

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NHK TV program "Otona no Shiken (adult's examination)" was used at the advanced Japanese language class. The program is (a) very attractive for students; (b) easy to prepare for the class; (c) suitable for technical Japanese education. The program is also a good material to introduce Japanese culture to international students. In the class, writing tasks were given after watching the program in order to improve the ability to write "method", "result" and "discussion" in technical reports. Most of the students seemed to have comprehended the contents of the program, but showed a tendency that they lack in the ability of writing sentences logically. Much effective method for improving technical writing ability is expected by utilizing the program.

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