This paper describes the educational support provided to children with foreign backgrounds in Niigata Prefecture, a region where foreign residents are scattered over a wide area. Local governing bodies do provide support, but the problems faced by these children are serious, and it is impossible to say that they are getting adequate help. Children with foreign backgrounds face more than just the challenge of mastering the Japanese language; some are in situations in which they cannot feel comfortable either at home or at school. They may have trouble adapting to school life due to cultural differences, and at the same time experience conflict with their parents due to differing attitudes towards education. Literakoya Niigata is a volunteer organization that provides assistance to such children in the form of Japanese language instruction, supplementary study groups for academic subjects and individual counselling on preparing for entrance examinations. The study groups also serve as a place where the children may interact, thus providing mental as well as academic support. The wide area over which foreign residents are found in Niigata, however, makes it impossible for volunteer classrooms to cover all the needs, and many issues remain to be dealt with. Various types of support from administrative bodies is essential.

This study investigated the oral Japanese proficiency of Japanese children in mainland China (speakers of Japanese as a Heritage Language: JHL) and monolingual children (MC), and examined the relation between JHL's home language environment and their oral Japanese proficiency. Children's oral Japanese proficiency was measured by Oral Proficiency Assessment for Bilingual Children, which focuses on the dimensions of children's basic oral language skills, interactional skills and cognitive aspects. In addition, a parent questionnaire was used to ascertain the children's home language environment. Results revealed differences between JHL and MC in basic oral language skills such as capability of speaking with natural pronunciation, using necessary vocabulary in conversation and speaking grammatically. However, JHL did not differ from MC in interactional skills and cognitive skills such as conversational strategy and capability of telling logical stories with rich content. Correlation analyses suggested that more heritage language use is associated with higher oral heritage language proficiency. The findings indicated that more literacy activities in heritage language predicted a tendency of higher oral heritage language proficiency.

This study analyses mutual evaluation of pronunciation, in relation to the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The course is distributed worldwide to people who are involved in Japanese language education at no charge. More than 35,000 learners have registered from 170 countries and regions (as of May 17, 2018). The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the learners were able to maintain constant participation in mutual evaluation, and the characteristics of their comments.

The research findings show the following:

1) The rate of the learners' continued participation in mutual evaluation was high.

2) Those learners who maintained constant participation in mutual evaluation continually provided comments with details or specifics (by pointing out problems and correcting method). Also, those who could not provide specific comments were able to point out details through constant participation.

The results show that learners were able to continue learning pronunciation through the online course, and that mutual evaluation facilitated their learning.

This study analyses usage and error patterns of transitive-intransitive verb pairs produced by Hindi speaking learners of Japanese. Learners were divided into three groups based on the duration of learning Japanese. The results show that learners in the lower group made more errors related to predicate selection whereas errors concerning particle selection were relatively frequent in the intermediate group. Learners in the upper group not only made fewer errors, but these errors were not concentrated in any one error type; errors related to voice were almost as frequent as those related to predicate and particle selection. In other words, error patterns seem to change with time from errors concerning word selection (lower group) → errors related to particle selection (intermediate group) → errors related to creating grammatically and semantically sound sentences (upper group). This corroborates with the observations made in previous studies. However, when errors were analyzed separately for transitive and intransitive verbs, only transitive verbs displayed the above progression pattern. Errors related to intransitive verbs tended to concentrate on verb selection errors in all three groups, indicating that acquisition of vocabulary does not necessarily precede acquisition of particles. One possible cause of over-use of intransitive verbs may be attributed to mother tongue influence.

The purpose of this study is to identify the process and the factors of how four international students learning Japanese at a university in the Kansai region overcame their difficulties in learning Japanese in order to pursue learning and improve their proficiency, through the activity of creating and performing a play in the Kansai dialect together with Japanese volunteers. An analysis of interviews with the four students using TEM (Trajectory Equifinality Modeling)revealed that they followed a process with some commonalities but showing differences in timing and circumstances, and that they overcame anxiety about speaking and performing in Japanese and established new identities through several crucial actions. These actions are: 1) deciding to perform a play in spite of fear and anxiety; 2) changing their perception of being shy to one in which shyness itself is seen to be strange; and 3) going on stage in spite of trembling and sweating. Moreover, it was considered that the spotlight actually eased their tension, and that the laughter and applause from the audience made the students feel that their own behavior objective to “get a laugh from the audience” had been achieved, which also was a transformative experience.

There have been few reports on how authors of Japanese textbooks select the vocabulary to teach in their textbooks. It is considered that the words to teach in a textbook are selected based on an overall consideration of various factors such as learners' skill, practical usefulness and vocabulary in existing textbooks. However, comparative quantitative studies on vocabulary selection in textbooks have hitherto been very limited. In this study, we conducted basic analyses to delineate the process and trends of vocabulary selection in Japanese textbooks, in which we compared vocabulary in popular Japanese textbooks from each decade since the 1950s, and quantitatively measured the similarity and difference among them. In addition, we gave some explanations about the reasons for the trends in selection by referring to a newspaper database as a corpus, and to existing literature.

This study, which focuses on the use of interviews as a research method, examines the direction that interview-based research regarding the teaching of Japanese as a Foreign Language will take through an investigation of current changes and trends. Primary data is obtained through a review of research papers published in the Journal of Japanese Language Teaching from issue 1 to issue 168. Said papers were entered into a database developed for this study, and then examined and classified. This examination reveals that the first research paper regarding interview-based research was published in issue 45 (1981) of the journal. It also finds that the rate at which papers on this topic were published steadily increased from the 1980s to the 2000s, then rose sharply in the 2010s. Regarding how interviews are used in research, this examination shows that until the 2000s, interviews were primarily used in the form of follow-up interviews intended to provide a qualitative supplement to research experiments; the 2010s saw an increase in the number of studies which focused on interview data as the primary target of analysis.

This study seeks to discover the behavioral characteristics of outstanding Japanese language assistants (JA) from the standpoint of secondary school Japanese Language Teachers (JLT) in Anglosphere countries. A questionnaire, modified from past studies, was employed and obtained responses from 212 teachers. Analysis revealed four notable factors: JLT’s expertise, English ability and discipline; the basic attitude toward learners of the person engaged in teaching; cheerfulness; and diligence and role recognition. Those factors could be classified into four groups: ones which are strongly desired, ones which are less desired, ones which are held in common between both the teacher and JA, and ones which are essential characteristics of JA.

A non-parametric test was conducted in order to investigate the relationships among the four factors, and (1) the experience, or lack of it, of the JLT with language assistants, and (2) whether teachers would wish to accept JA or not. Results showed a significant difference among them related to the first factor of teacher’s expertise, English ability and discipline, and it was found that both (1) and (2) are important elements for recognizing the role distinctions between JA and JLT. Moreover, there were many applicants wishing to accept JA, but there were also many who could not clearly distinguish between the role of JA and JLT.

We believe that the results present some basic indicators useful for overseas JA.

This paper presents a refined proposal for the goals of Japanese language education provided to foreign residents in Japan. The research method was a practical study in which the author reconsiders these goals from the standpoint of an active language instructor. Specifically, I criticized the aim of the “standard proposed curriculum” through my project assisting foreign residents in Japan. This study demonstrated that self-actualization in daily life is not included in the aims of the “standard proposed curriculum,” although previous studies have clearly indicated lifelong self-actualization as an important aspect of Japanese language education for residents. Further, this study clarifies the nature of such selfactualization. In conclusion, we refine the proposal for educational goals so as to include lifelong selfactualization and self-actualization in daily life.

This paper aims to classify discourse markers in Japanese, by their function in introducing a new topic as clues for a listener to comprehend conversational discourse. The author collected the markers from 47 chats (13 hours 40 minutes total) by Japanese native speakers, contained in the Corpus of Spoken Japanese by Basic Transcription System for Japanese, and classified them into the following three categories by the types of information that a listener can understand from them: 1) Speaker’s perceptions about the coherence relations between discourses; 2) Speaker’s attitudes toward the matters of the discourse; 3) Speaker’s mental operations. Of these categories, 1 and 2 can be each divided into two subcategories: 1a) Logical relations between discourses; 1b) Reasons to introduce the following utterance (s); 2a) Attitudes toward the matters of the previous utterance (s); 2b) Attitudes toward the matters of the following utterance (s).