This study presents part of the knowledge acquired through fieldwork at a nursing care facility in Japan. This paper focuses on the practical issues of Indonesian care worker candidates admitted under the Economic Partnership Agreement framework, from the view point of the Japanese care workers. The purpose of this research is to clarify the practical issues of candidates with regard to Japanese language ability and use, based on the views of actual staff members who work with them at the care facility.

The analysis in this paper highlights the language-related issues that Japanese care workers perceive in relation to the Indonesian candidates, who spend a few months at the facility after arrival in Japan. These issues may be grouped into three categories: specialized terminology, rephrasing into other words and practical use during care-giving. Concerning these results, the paper suggests and discusses practical ways of supporting candidates and the care site from the Japanese language teaching site.

In this paper, we suggest that difficulty in the acquisition of focus particle mo is not caused by its meaning, which many studies and textbooks have focused on, but by the construction in which this particle is used. In other words, interference of mother language is a result of the construction. To demonstrate the hypothesis, three types of experiments involving JFL students in China were conducted.

A Grammatical Judgment Test revealed no difference in understanding among the three types of constructions. However, a Translating Test and a Writing Test revealed that learners who can perfectly use a single mo have difficulties in producing the "A mo B mo P" and "A mo P, B mo P" constructions. These results suggest that mother language interference exists. Therefore, it is important to consider the learner's native language as well as Japanese grammar itself. Moreover, further research on JFL learner acquisition is essential.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether Chinese speakers' overgeneralization of purpose clauses with tame ni is due to first language transfer, through the replication of Inagaki (2009). If the overgeneralization of tame ni (為に) stems from its formal similarity to the corresponding Chinese expression wèile (為了), the phenomenon should be unique to Chinese learners of Japanese. This study tested this prediction by comparing the performance of Chinese learners of Japanese (n=11), learners of Japanese with first languages other than Chinese (n=11), and native speakers of Japanese (n=11) . Results showed that both learner groups overgeneralized tame ni to a similar extent. However, the two groups differed in terms of how the overgeneralization manifested itself: Chinese speakers tended to accept only tame ni when only yō ni was possible, whereas non-Chinese speakers tended to accept both tame ni and yō ni in the same context. Thus, this study confirmed first language influence in this domain and provided new insights into how it surfaces in second language performance.

In this paper, I summarize how Japanese Language Education is discussed in contemporary China, focusing on what kind of people were involved, and on what kind of points they made and how. The corpus used for analysis was the Journal of Japanese Language Study and Research (1979-2012) . As a result, I came to the following conclusions: 1) The argument concerning Japanese language education became very active at the beginning of the 1990s; 2) more than half of the authors are teachers affiliated with universities located in Beijing, Jilin and various cities on the coast; 3) more than 60% of the papers focus on Japanese language education at university level; 4) approximately half of the studies pertain to fields like "language acquisition/teaching methods" and "language and language use"; 5) until now, points have been made on such topics as the importance of literature, cultural understanding, the cultivation of communication skills, state-building, the particular style of Japanese language education in China, learner-centered instruction, the development of human resources dedicated to research, answering social needs, the importance of general education, students' initiative, complex human resources, and business Japanese.