[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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With a view to providing international students with guides for writing articles in social science, discourses of the discussions in twenty articles including ten case studies from Journal of Business Management and ten historical document-based studies from Asian Studies were analyzed with the moves and steps included. The moves "focusing," "fact description," "quotation," "evaluative description," and "inference/interpretation" appeared in the both groups of articles. The most remarkable characteristic observed was the presence of a wide variety of evaluative comments by the authors. Although evaluative comments are often discouraged by instruction from making as being too subjective, they were found to form an essential part of academic efforts. These findings revealed that adequate skill training to express one's evaluation should be incorporated into the instructions for academic writing.

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This article, combining findings of our previous work and new observations, analyzed the results in text-evaluation and reflective comments by 16 regular participants in 15-week writing course that offered text-analyzing tasks as one of its major activities, considering the learners' academic standings, learning experiences and various cultural/environmental backgrounds to identify possible influential factors on schema formation and develop resources and activities to assist it. Thirteen learners gave a correct judgment, and 9 of them based their judgments on reasonable internalized standards on style, organization, length of sentence, size of paragraph, and clarity in expression and argumentation. The following were observed in the more successful learners: 1) they had a set of well-stated, ordered standards of good writing with a priority on organization and argumentation, 2) were aware of common features their Japanese learning had with their experiences and also of its implications on their achievements in research, and 3) have specific expectations for the process of learning. While text-analyzing tasks were useful both for the more and the less successful learners, the latter were expected to be benefited from exposure to reflections by others. Learners' comments will be usefully incorporated into resources for the teaching of academic writing.

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This study mainly focuses on the research into the self-correction abilities by Chinese learners of Japanese of 139 expository texts. Corrections were firstly classified using a system of 3 levels and 5 items. Results were then analyzed using the following methods: (A) Quantitative analysis of 1) comparison of the word counts, 2) the frequency of the correction, 3) trends in corrections to logical structure. (B) Qualitative analysis of particular examples of corrections to logical structure made by the participants. Through the above analysis, the following was observed: 1) The word count has increased. 2) "Surface Changes" are common. 3) The ratio of "adjustment of information" and "adjustment of label and array " is 7:3. 4) The "Adjustment of label and array " shows certain effects. 5) Limited awareness of the effect of correction on other contents. 6) Lack of regard for logical structure suitable to article genre. Based on the above analysis, it can be concluded that in the teaching of "logical expressions in Japanese writing", the logicality of descriptive contents and how this is integrated with expressions in the text should be included.

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With a view to gaining suggestions for assisting schema formation for academic writing, compositions and their revisions by 107 Japanese college freshmen enrolled in a writing course were compared and analyzed, and the students' judgments and comments on two samples written by others as well as their reflections over their own compositions were also analyzed with regard to the six constructs of schema. The revisions revealed a lot of improvements, but those on the more abstract constructs, i.e., clarity of argumentation and global organization/cohesion were not as remarkable as in others. Self-evaluation included a number of references to relevance/validity of arguments and to local accuracy, but only a few references were found to clarity of argumentation and global organization. However, evaluation on samples by others revealed that quite a few students appreciated merits on clarity of argumentation. Schema seemed to be formed through a 'back and forth' process, revealing itself in varying degrees depending on the constructs concerned and tasks imposed. Repeated production combined with other activities such as text-analysis and evaluation can be expected to assist schema formation by native speakers, and materials which will assist activation of sprouting schema and promote awareness of the more abstract constructs are most awaited for.

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This report talks about the business Japanese lecture, which is designed to help the foreign students who want to work in Japanese corporations to learn career awareness and career path. During this lecture, after consideration and discussion in class, the foreign students prepared questionnaires for corporation employees in Japanese, and then made a visit to employees' families to carry out the interview activities. Finally, they went back to university to analyze and conclude the data, and made a presentation report about the home-stay activity results. The home-stay activities were performed three times totally, and were applied to a variety of different families with different questionnaires each time. This trial not only made the foreign students understand job's significance and factors of employment by direct communication with Japanese employees, but could also prompt them to practice Japanese daily and get great benefit in improving their abilities of consideration of suitable language application to different levels of people and honorific expression.

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This study is a report on an approach to teaching engineering and technical Japanese language in a twinning program conducted between a Japanese university and a Vietnamese university. Since 2008, language classes have been conducted in a program led by a native Vietnamese engineering teacher (VT) with no experience in Japanese language education, and supported by native Japanese language teachers with no engineering background. At the end of the program, students and teachers were asked about the course using questionnaires or interviews. This study revealed the following: 1)The difficulty of the classes was unrelated to students' interest in the class, 2)According to the VT, heavy utilization of diagrams and pictures alone did not improve students' understanding of the subject material, 3)The supplementary use of Vietnamese technical terminology by the VT increased the students' learning effectiveness, 4)This method was useful for both the learning of Japanese language as well as increasing the students' scientific knowledge. This may represent a novel method of technical Japanese language education where engineering teachers who are native speakers of the same language as the students play a central role and are supported by Japanese native speakers.

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The purpose of this research is to recognize what micro-skills in what domains are measured in the listening section of the Examination for Japanese University Admission for International Students (EJU). Information required in order to obtain an answer from the listening text was sorted out and classified according to the listening micro-skills methodology of Richards (1985). This classification was then categorized according to the component of the language ability model of Bachman & Palmer (1996). The results (from 2002 to 2006) indicated that scenarios dealing with campus life and everyday life decreased every year while academic scenarios have increased on the listening section of the EJU. The numerous micro-skills for obtaining answers were found in grammatical, textual and functional knowledge. However, very few micro-skills found in sociolinguistic knowledge and strategic competence.

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