Papers written in Japanese by international students in undergraduate courses frequently include repetitions of words and expressions, thereby making the papers appear poorly written. These redundancies may be avoided by training students to become more aware of unnecessary repetitions in writing. However, our research indicates that students have difficulty avoiding such repetitions as this topic is not actively addressed in many Japanese language writing textbooks and lectures. Therefore, we devised a study to support efforts to heighten student awareness of repetitive writing. In this study, cases of repetition from papers written by international students were identified by several Japanese native speakers. Next, we classified these redundancies into four types based on the perspectives of prominence, cohesion, logicality, and coherence to analyze the papers at both the sentence-level and discourse-level. Lastly, we compared these with sentences that were evaluated to be non-repetitive.

Various factors affect the writing development of young children acquiring literacy in multilingual contexts. The following four major factors have prominent impact: age, length of residence, age of arrival and the level of first language/mother tongue development. This study examines the writing ability of 82 Japanese-English bilingual students from grade 6 to 9, studying in an English-speaking environment. A special focus on the relationship between pre-writing strategies and writing organisation was investigated in two ways: firstly, how introductions and conclusions were presented, and secondly, the ratio of simple sentences. The cross-lingual relationships of the writing, as well as the way the students translanguaged, a feature known to be unique to bilingual writers, was also investigated. The students were subdivided into three groups; recent comers, long-term residents, and intermediate, based on their lengths of residence and age of arrival. The findings from this study indicate the importance of taking the aforementioned factors into account when investigating the linguistic abilities of young learners who migrate across borders. It also indicates ways in which both learning experiences and instructional approach can be improved to accommodate the varying needs of diverse learners.

This study focuses on phonetics in Japanese language teaching during the late Qing dynasty. Through an examination of the Japanese textbooks and reference books, it was concluded that the phonetic side of the instruction was most likely neglected, since the characters and their pronunciation were taught separately in the most widely used teaching method, the so-called hewen handu-fa, which was primarily devised to help learners read and translate written Japanese. Secondly, with the arrival of native Japanese teachers, learners began to realize that their pronunciation was largely influenced by dialects of Chinese, a situation which could be attributed to the widespread use of fanqie-fa (the system of indicating the pronuncation of one character as a combination of parts of the pronunciation of two other characters) and direct representation of pronunciation in the phonetic instruction.

This paper reveals a constraint on the use of -te shimatta. We will focus on -te shimatta, i.e., the past tense form of -te shimau, following the main verb relating what happened in the real world.

The past form -te shimatta has a modal implication that what happened was different from what was expected. This implication results in the constraint that the speaker who uses -te shimatta should give information which helps the hearer to understand how exactly what happened was different from what was expected. This paper bases these claims on three investigations: (1) analyses of the contexts of -te shimatta in a conversational corpus, (2) interviews with Japanese native speakers as to the naturalness of relevant sentences in different contexts, (3) instructions for native speakers to make up conversational sentences with -te shimatta.

A car navigation system never says Mokutekichi ni tōchaku shite shimaimashita ‘We have [unexpectedly] reached the destination', because the announcement violates the above mentioned constraint in two respects. First, the system is not concerned with whether or not what happened was different from what was expected. Second, because of its function, reaching the destination has nothing to do with unexpectedness.

The aim of this study is to compare the linguistic behavior of Chinese Native Speakers (CNS) and Japanese Native Speakers (JNS) with a focus on the Re-invitation linguistic behavior in Invitation discourse. A role play situation "Inviting friends to go cherry picking" was used to elicit data. Findings showed that: 1) the occurrence of Re-invitation was significantly higher in CNS; 2) the initial semantic formulas used in Re-invitation for CNS included significantly more instances of "Requests for willingness", and for JNS included significantly more instances of "Acceptance". Moreover, as for the overall frequency of the semantic formulas used to construct the Re-invitation, "Acceptance", "Utterances of consideration" and "Expressing agreement" were significantly higher in JNS, whereas "Suggesting alternatives", "Utterances of inducement", "Requests for willingness", "Asking for reasons", "Reducing burden" and "Blaming the partner" were significantly higher in CNS. From the above, it is suggested that the CNS are more assertive and task-completion-oriented, whereas the JNS take a non-insistent interpersonal consideration approach.

This paper clarifies changes in and varieties of learners' anxieties about performing out-of class interview tasks with native speakers. The subjects were 144 students who were taking intermediate Japanese language courses at a university in Japan. The results of comparing learners' anxiety before and after an interview showed that it significantly fell for six items. From the results of a factor analysis, the single factor "anxiety in interviews" was extracted, and it was seen that the amount of anxiety for this factor differed based on the subject's gender and the amount of time that they spent speaking Japanese outside of the classroom. Furthermore, the following were examined as factors influencing how anxiety changes: (1) native speaker's language use, (2) the existence of helpful native speakers, (3) the experience of failing in activities and the awareness of failures, (4) a change in the attitude towards failure, (5) successful experiences, (6) a positive perception of one's own Japanese ability, (7) recognition of the difficulty of a task, and (8) an awareness of effective task completion methods. Additionally, five positive changes could be seen in the awareness of the learners after the interviews, and we considered the possibility that those changes could lead to favorable results in future interactions.

This study investigated the effects of task-based instruction for Japanese business communication. The participants in the experimental group were 20 graduate students majoring in Japanese language, who were instructed to write business e-mails and documents 15 times (one class meeting per week), using highly authentic materials. Performance data in the e-mail writing tasks were collected from three different sessions (the first, eighth and fifteenth class meetings), and analyzed in terms of global evaluation, appropriateness of e-mail forms, sociolinguistic appropriateness, pragmatic accuracy, and grammatical accuracy of language use. The performances of the experimental group were compared over the course of the instruction, and the data gathered from the 15th session were compared to those of a comparison group instructed with different materials. The results demonstrated that: 1) the experimental group improved their performances significantly, and outperformed the comparison group on the global evaluation, appropriateness of e-mail forms, as well as sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects of language use; 2) the experimental group did not show any improvements in grammatical accuracy, nor make any difference compared with the comparison group. These results indicate that instruction with highly authentic tasks can improve learners' ability to write business e-mails, but that learners' attention needs additional focus on linguistic forms in order to improve the grammatical accuracy of language use.

This study aimed to design and evaluate an e-learning program to help people who have studied Japanese previously to maintain their Japanese pronunciation. The subjects of this study were a group of Taiwanese nationals who had received previous education in Japanese.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the program, we had a native Japanese speaker listen to the subjects' pronunciation before and after going through this e-learning program. The program uses the Moodle system as a platform and consists of Perception Training and Repetition Training. Subjects assigned to the A Course practiced Perception Training before Repeat Training, and subjects assigned to the B Course practiced Repeat Training before Perception Training. The perceptual results from the Japanese evaluator showed that 1) the pronunciation of both groups improved significantly, and 2) the program was effective even with only fifty minutes of training. Additionally, it appears that the instant feedback provided in the Perception Training enhanced the subjects' learning motivation.

This paper examines a number of advanced learners of Japanese who plan on attending undergraduate and graduate programs of Japanese universities in the future. By adding more exercises to a traditional flip class of grammar instruction (Practice 1: September 2014 to January 2015), this study attempted to introduce the flip classroom practice by shortening the teacher's instruction time and providing the learners a greater opportunity to experience oral production and feedback (Practice 2: April to July 2015). The analysis was done in three ways as follows: an access log analysis, learning outcome analysis, and questionnaire survey with quasi-structured interviews. Results in the access log and learning classroom analyses show a greater impact from the flipped classroom with Practice 2 than Practice 1. Results in both the questionnaires and interviews also reveal that learners praised the lecture videos, and a majority of them expressed the opinion that the videos raised their level of understanding of grammar and made class participation easier. Thus, we conclude that the flipped classroom functioned effectively with the practice exercises done in this study. Further studies are needed, however, to explore the following: a) the validation of the flipped classroom practice and its impact on learners at the entry and intermediate levels of the Japanese language; b) the clarification of what kinds of learners like the flipped classroom and proactively participate in them; and c) the characteristics and beliefs of these learners with regard to education and learning.