Hong Kong is characterized by a grade-oriented, highly competitive educational culture and a direct link between academic credentials and social status. Schools in Hong Kong have an enormous impact on adolescents’ lives, and those who cannot claim supremacy over their peers are subjected to powerful pressure and a sense of inferiority. This ethnographic study thus analyzes adolescent learners of Japanese in relation to Hong Kong's sociocultural contexts. It is shown that learning Japanese functions as pedagogical safe houses in which adolescent learners can take shelter from the pressure of their school lives. Japanese is an elective subject in the university entrance examination and has attained the status of a prestigious language in Hong Kong. Consequently, Japanese allows those adolescent learners to adopt subversive identities to escape from pressure. Even so, learning Japanese is not unrelated to Hong Kong's mainstream competitive educational culture. Through SNSs, adolescent learners of Japanese tend to vie with each other for language proficiency, cultural knowledge, and speed of obtaining new information.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the cognitive factors for acquisition of Japanese lexical accent. In this study, 70 Korean advanced learners were given 5 tasks which were supposed to relate to Japanese accent production: word reading (as Production), non-word reading with pitch direction (as Pitch Control), monitoring of word/ non-word reading tasks (as Monitoring), accent pattern discrimination (as Perception), and accent judgment (as Knowledge). The results of correlation analysis revealed that the accent knowledge score was most strongly related to the production score. In addition, a stepwise regression analysis was employed to investigate the relationship between the production and other factors. The results showed that only the knowledge score could predict the production score.

The present study investigates the use of Japanese noun-verb collocations by Chinese advanced learners of Japanese (advanced CJL), focusing on the differences with Japanese native speakers (JNS) and the influence of Chinese mother tongue. The influence of mother tongue is not only investigated by Chinese native speakers’ intuitive judgments, but also verified by the data of Korean learners of Japanese (KJL). Data obtained from “YNU written language corpus” were analyzed and the comparison between advanced CJL and JNS revealed that: 1) there is a significant difference in the number of tokens, but not in the number of types; 2) the advanced CJL are found to over-use high-frequency collocations and under-use strongly associated ones; 3) in the 30 most frequently used collocations, nearly half of them are used by both advanced CJL and JNS, but advanced CJL are inclined to use less restricted collocates. Moreover, 25% of errors (30 items) in collocations by advanced CJL are attributed to Chinese influence by Chinese native speakers, but 3 of these items are also found in KJL, suggesting that the judgments of mother tongue influence cannot be definitively made solely by the intuition of the mother tongue native speakers.

In this study, students were divided into two groups in order to test the hypothesis that the proportion of students who experience demotivation in their Japanese language study is less for those who voluntarily chose that study, versus those who had the study imposed on them, and to indentify the demotivation factors of these two groups. The first group is comprised of students who applied to learn Japanese language. The other group is made up of students who were transferred into Japanese by their university. After a questionnaire survey, the hypothesis is not supported. For each group, five different demotivation factors were found. The students who wanted to learn Japanese show such factors as not attaining their desired level of competence, and a loss confidence or of interest in learning Japanese. Thus, it is also possible for them, and not only those students forced to take Japanese, to have demotivation problems. Students who were uninterested in learning Japanese from the start tend to depend heavily on their teachers; although they wish to make an effort to study Japanese, their lack of preparation for language learning often fails them, and they make efforts without encouraging results.

Aiming at future redesign of interactive conversation activities, this paper analyzes and discusses how conversations are generated and structured in the activities practiced in the author's Japanese language class at a university. Two main objectives are mentioned by international students at the time the class starts every year: to improve Japanese communication skills and to achieve their individual purpose using Japanese (a desire to become an effective member of a laboratory). The author accordingly has designed and practiced interactive conversation activities in the class focusing on the latter objective of the students. The harmonious movement among the participants towards the goal of a conversation (fluctuation) was measured from the viewpoints of “listening, connecting and backtracking” based on data consisting of taped conversations and reflection sheets filled in by the participants after each activity. The measured values were used to create a time axis graph to visualize the change in the movement of the conversations; the graph was then used for analysis and discussion. The result showed that there are three elements largely involved in generating and structuring conversations: how group activities are carried out, attitudes and style of participation in conversations, and the necessity of providing support and good environment for conversations.

This paper focuses on ‘generating questions’ as a method to promote learners’ critical thinking in content-based Japanese language instruction in history. It studies through design experiment: 1) the learning environment in which learners' thoughts could be stimulated; and 2) the way to elicit deeper questions. The research so far has been conducted on the hypothesis that making learners conscious of generating questions after the lecture would cause changes in their studying attitudes and improve the quality of their questions (Koyama 2014, 2015, 2017). However, the mean value of self-estimates regarding studying attitude, as well as the rate of deeper questions being asked, were lower than the author's expectation. In this paper, by noticing that generating questions is an elaboration strategy, the instructional design was changed regarding (1) and (2) based on the expertise of learning strategy study (i.e. Shinogaya 2012, Yuzawa 2009). As a result, the mean values of self-estimates were raised in all questions at post-inquiry and the deepest questions (‘applied questions’) were produced for the first time. Besides, the mean length of questions was extended to over five times that of past research.

In response to the trend of globalization in recent years, which has seen an increasing number of students seeking employment overseas, San Jose State University has been implementing a Japanese culture course which incorporates a new educational approach called Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) , in which students internationally collaborate to learn Japanese culture using an online connection between two classrooms in the United States and Japan for 70 minutes per week. First, this paper introduces the new approach to teaching and learning with COIL, and then explains the theoretical frameworks to which we referred in formulating the course contents and class activities: the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (Benette 2004) , a profile study of interculturally effective persons (Vulpe et al. 2001), and critical thinking (Willingham 2007). Finally, this paper reports on the collaborative class activities and research projects we have done to foster in our students an awareness of cultural differences, the habit of critical thinking, the development of a relative point of view and a change in worldview.