When accepting foreign students for study in Japan, in addition to the aim of helping individual students to achieve their academic goals and fulfill their plans for the future, there are expectations on the part of the Japanese society which welcomes them, including 1) sharing Japan's intellectual resources with the world; 2) invigorating higher education; 3) training professionals sympathetic towards Japan; and 4) securing a productive-age population for the future. Under the present plans, the first of these goals entails a preference for students with a good command of English, but the last of these requires universities who accept international students to assume the responsibility of providing students with sufficient training in the Japanese language so that by the time they graduate they will be able to play an active part in Japanese society.

One point of departure for studying in Japan is a test such as the Examination for Japanese University Admission for International Students, whereby the qualifications for studying in Japan may be obtained, and universities that accept these students must decide how to make use of the results of such large-scale tests. These tests have many limitations, however, and there is as yet no consensus on their appropriate role and characteristics. On the contrary, the variety of expectations directed towards international students influences the use of these tests in very complicated ways. In addition to improvements in the tests themselves, there is a need for a wide-ranging discussion on the role of international students in higher education and in Japanese society.

There is also a need for a long-term, comprehensive policy on international education, which will come to grips with the reality of international students finding their place and playing an indispensable role in Japanese society after graduation. This will require coordination between industry, government and the academic world, and the involvement of local communities in further discussions towards a plan of action.

The acquisition of Japanese language skills useful in daily life is essential for people who come to Japan to make it their home, whether for work or for marriage. Accordingly, a test that can measure Japanese language ability for daily life should function as a guidepost and incentive for Japanese language acquisition adapted to the learner's stage of life, and should provide an appropriate explanation of Japanese language ability. The current officially recognized tests, however, are designed for learners whose goals are study or business, and are unable to measure Japanese language ability for daily life.

But one large-scale test, the Dutch Civic Integration Examination, combining performance evaluation of language competence with a portfolio evaluation, aims to measure language ability for use in actual life, as well as to promote the use of Dutch in society. In this paper I refer to the Dutch test in a consideration of the possibilities and problems of measuring Japanese language ability for daily life.

In addition to the function of screening examinees, the use of writing questions in large-scale tests has the aspects of diagnostic evaluation, and of positive and negative washback. Seen from these aspects, this paper considers new possibilities for writing questions in Japanese as a Second Language, and their ramifications for academic writing and writing in daily life. I also attempt to foresee how writing questions will develop in the future, given the development of technology for automated grading and other changes in the technology and practice of writing in recent years, which affect native Japanese speakers as well as Japanese learners.

One recent trend in testing is the development of adaptive testing, in which questions are displayed on a computer screen, and the examinee's responses are instantaneously used to select succeeding questions. In order to make such tests practical an "item bank" is necessary: a database in which groups of statistically categorized questions are prepared beforehand. An item bank incorporates such functions as: 1) storage of newly composed items in the database; 2) retrieval of items according to the goals and domain of the testing; 3) recombination of question sentences and answer options to adjust item difficulty and discrimination; and 4) composition, editing, elaboration and deletion of test items in accordance with the abilities to be measured. This paper explains the testing theory concepts involved in the production of item banks, gives an overview of the development of an actual item bank, and examines how this will affect the production of tests in the future.

If you look at the feasibility of conducting an extensive, large-scale Japanese test, Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) can be expected to make a large contribution. The development of computer adaptive tests in Japan seems to have just begun. This paper will first review the principles of Computer Adaptive Testing and Item Response Theory. Next it will address the fundamental issues of how we can develop a large-scale Japanese test, which could be widely employed, using the Computer Adaptive Test framework. As commonly raised issues, the paper will examine the components of language ability, setting the learning goal, setting the cut-scores and/or standards, and the construction of the item bank. Later, from the point of view of technical issues, it will look at the portability and accessibility of Japanese specific characters, multimedia testing, and the development of item banking and software for a comprehensive CAT system.

This paper examines the utility of corpora in the composition of questions for large-scale tests. After explaining the present situation of corpus use in the field of language testing, I explain some of the advantages of using corpora in the process of composing questions. Next, in the context of reading comprehension questions, I perform a discriminant analysis of corpus data according the levels of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, using the reading comprehension texts from the Japanese Language Proficiency Test as learning data, and data from the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Japanese as evaluation data. Based on this analysis I identify the levels to which the Balanced Corpus data corresponds, and the extent to which such data can be used in the composition of test questions. In conclusion, I also indicate the importance of taking a qualitative approach to analysis that examines concrete examples, in addition to the quantitative approach described above.

This paper examines properties and functions of the Japanese complex verb itte kuru. The research question is why the following two sentences exhibit a sharp contrast in their naturalness even though both of them have the same structure -ga [quotation] to itte kuru. There has been no previous study focusing on the usage of itte kuru.

(1) a. Sensei ga "Chotto tetsudatte kurenai?" to itte kita.

  teacher Nom a little help can't that say-cont-come-Past

  ‘The teacher said to me "Can you help me ?".'

  b. Sensei ga "Fujisan wa nihon de ichiban takai" to itte kita.

  teacher Nom Mt. Fuji Top Japan in most high that say-cont-come-Past

  ‘The teacher said to me "Mt. Fuji is the highest in Japan.".'

I will explore what kind of semantic/pragmatic conditions make the use of itte kuru natural, and suggest that the use of itte kuru has a unique property called sakudōei (literally ‘guile'), although many previous studies of quoting expressions have argued that iu does not represent illocutionary acts but only locutionary acts. Sakudosei is a pragmatic property of reported utterances by which the speaker of sentences in (1) reports that s/he felt mentally affected by the utterer of the quotation. And I will also show that sakudōsei is the speaker's expressive intention.

In studies of Japanese tense, the functions of Historical Present (hereafter HP), which expresses past events and situations with a present tense form, have been examined mainly based on written data such as novels, and they have been considered to be different from those of English HP. Recent study, analyzing Japanese oral data, suggests a point-of-view hypothesis in which the past tense form expresses the narrator's point of view in the storytelling world and HP expresses a character's point of view in the storyworld. However, such binary understanding of point-of-view can explain neither why narrators shift the point of view nor the multiplicity of the functions of HP.

Thus, this study qualitatively and quantitatively analyzes 44 Japanese experiential narratives using a Labovian model for oral narrative analysis. As a result, it turns out that: 1) Japanese HP in experiential narratives appears in background clauses as well as narrative clauses that form the storyline of narratives; 2) HP shows a point of view in the storyworld, but does not specify whose point of view it is; and 3) the use of HP is triggered by a character's uncontrollable perceptual experience or a character's actual movement, by which it has different functions such as evaluative function and text organizing function.

The purpose of present study is to investigate the effects of directionality and viewpoint on L2 learners' comprehension of Japanese giving-receiving verbs. Sixty-two Chinese-speaking beginning and intermediate learners of Japanese were divided into two proficiency groups and given a picture-sentence matching task involving sentences with Japanese giving-receiving verbs. The stimulus sentences reflect one of the four conditions: (1) correct viewpoint and directionality, (2) correct viewpoint and incorrect directionality, (3) incorrect viewpoint and correct directionality, (4) incorrect viewpoint and directionality.

The results showed that the Chinese learners were successful in making negative judgments when directionality was incorrect, but they were unable to make correct judgments when directionality was correct but viewpoint was not. In addition, even higher proficiency learners had difficulty making correct judgments when viewpoint was incorrect. The results suggest that Chinese learners of Japanese rely heavily on directionality, but not so much on viewpoint in making truth value judgments.