The purpose of this small report is to compare the 2008 International Conference on Japanese Language Education to the past conferences: to report on how the presentations have changed over the years, to explore tendencies seen in the presentations from the 2008 conference, and finally, summing up the contents of this conference, to consider future directions.

In comparison with the 2000 and 2004 conferences, the numbers of presentations and of participating countries of the 2008 meeting dramatically increased. The research areas represented also increased greatly in number, with papers on manga, bilingual speakers and pidgin language, research methods, the use of publically available corpora, as well as on the methods of neurolinguistic research. While this diversity in research areas is welcome, it was sometimes difficult to ascertain the significance of the contributions due to the lack of depth in the short presentations given at the conference. Furthermore, very little integration was seen among different approaches proposed. Thus, increasing the depth and better integration of our research efforts are two major challenges for the future meetings.

This descriptive study examines the aspects of responses of two groups of corrective feedback: recasts and feedback to elicit repairs. These groups of feedback were provided for inappropriate utterances of Japanese benefactives, –te kureru, —te morau, and their accompanying particles. The participants consisted of ten upper intermediate and advanced-level students learning Japanese as a second language. In a dyadic task-based interaction with a researcher, five students received recasts and the other five received various types of feedback: supplying clarification requests, pointing out errors by repeating them, and/or offering hints that were intended to elicit repairs, for the inappropriate use of the target forms.

Findings reveal that the responses tended to be different depending on whether the errors in the utterances were on the benefactive verbs or on the particles. When the benefactive verbs were lacking, feedback to elicit repairs often failed to achieve its purpose. When the errors were on the particles, the feedback to elicit repairs succeeded one hundred percent, while recasts were not found to be effective because the students didn' t repeat the correct particles provided in the recasts.

The findings indicate that the place of the error, either in the middle or at the end of a sentence, could be a factor that determines the effects of recasts; while feedback to elicit repairs proved to be effective when the errors affect the meaning of the sentence in question.

The purpose of this paper is the development of lesson design theory for JSL students, who are confronted with two problems when they study in social studies classes: a linguistic problem and a cultural one. Therefore, it has been suggested that teachers apply the theory of Second Language Acquisition (Pappamibiel et, al. 2005), or correlate the learning contents and students' cultural backgrounds (Weisman & Hansen 2007). However, the learning content also requires understanding of their mother culture.

This paper is outlined below. First, I propose Bicultural Integrative Learning, in which JSL students comprehend the social meanings in terms of both their mother culture and their second culture. Therefore I suggested this tentative theory focusing on a learning process partially based on the Common Underlying Proficiency Model (Cummins 1984), utilizing materials which have common social meanings between their mother culture and second culture, and various resources which help advance the comprehension of JSL students. Secondly, I implemented a lesson unit of "Ideas in Neighborhood Stores", and analyzed the discourse of one Chinese student through the lesson.

The result indicates that the tentative theory was effective with a JSL student, at least in this case.