When disasters happen, problems that exist in ordinary times can suddenly become more acute. This study focuses on communication in times of disaster, and clarifies issues raised by regional dialects in comparison with Standard Japanese. It introduces some concrete examples of dialect speech that are difficult to understand for non-native speakers who are learning Standard Japanese. It further examines recent trends in dialect research and how they relate to Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language, and suggests possibilites for cooperation between these fields.

This study investigates Japanese learners' language use in speaking and writing tasks on a particular theme, using the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS). The purpose of this analysis is to quantitatively compare language production between the two tasks by the same participants through text-mining. The results show that: 1) a comparison of the word token counts reveals that fewer words are elicited in the writing task than in the speaking task; 2) a comparison of word type counts reveals that the higher a participant's proficiency level, the greater the variety of words used in the writing task, and 3) a comparison of characteristic words reveals that the higher a participant's proficiency level, the more similar are the language forms observed between the writing and speaking tasks. This study focuses on Japanese learners' language form use and quantitatively explores its linguistic characteristics in more than 600 participants' written and spoken language data; this differs from the qualitative research methods used for such studies in the past.

In this paper the use of sentence-final particle wa was examined using Meidai Kaiwa Corpus. The data from six age groups show the following points. First, 94 percent of women of age 60 and over used wa and its compound particles, wa, wa ne and wa yo all being frequently used. About 70 to 80 percent of women of ages 10 to under 60 used wa and its compound particles, but the frequency of their use was not as high as the first group. Among wa and its compound particles, women in this group used wa most frequently and wa ne next most often, while wa yo and wa yo ne were hardly used. About 67 percent of men in their 20s used wa and its compound particles, and the frequency of their use was slightly higher than for women in their 20s. It was observed that this younger generation used wa not only for expressing feelings, thoughts and facts, but also used wa in various situations such as stating opposing opinions, sympathizing, and speaking playfully and humorously.

This study aims to visualize the career formation process of Japanese language teachers who left their previous jobs and took up a teaching position. Using a survey method based on the Trajectory Equifinality Approach, we targeted four teachers for visualizing the process from admission into the training course to the end of its second year. First, we prepared TEM diagrams of the four individually, by means of which life paths, obligatory passage points, bifurcation points, and environmental factors that support or hinder the path selection were examined. Next, these diagrams were integrated to find out their common paths and different paths depending on degree of similarity. This study indicates that at the end of the training course, the four were unhesitatingly following common paths to start working as Japanese language teachers, encouraged by assistance in finding employment and changes in personal sense of values. After that, however, their paths bifurcated due to differences in their situations among the schools where they were employed, which greatly affected environmental factors that support or hinder their path selection. Although the four were on diverse paths by the end of the second year, each of them followed a path towards a future career perspective as a Japanese language teacher.

This study focuses on one of the functions of imperfective aspect marker -te i (ru), the expression of temporal relations between events (taxis-function), and investigates when it becomes possible for L2 learners to use it. Within the framework of Processability Theory, Mine (2015) hypothesizes that L2 learners are able to use the taxis-function of -te i (ru) once they reach the developmental stage where they can process information between clauses/sentences; she analyzes only L2 learners' errors, however. This study aims to confirm the Japanese developmental stage Mine (2015) hypothesized by examining learners' appropriate use of the taxis-function of -te i- (ru) and B-type conjunctions, which are also hypothesized to belong to the same stage. It explores learners' data (N=234) in a spoken Japanese learners' language corpus, elicited through storytelling, which has contexts for using the taxis-function of -te i (ru) and B-type conjunctions. A distributional analysis of these two features was conducted and tested by implicational scaling. The result does not show any valid scalability between these two, thereby supporting the hypothesis that both of them belong to the same stage where learners can process information between clauses/sentences.

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, published by the Council of Europe in 2001, has in recent years gained acceptance in foreign language education. Many approaches have focused on the common reference levels, but it is still not well understood what kind of ability is considered importantat each of the common reference levels. In this paper, I quantitatively analyzed the Can Do descriptors in the visual receptive activities to clarify what kind of ability is considered important in these activities from the co-occurrence relations of words for each level. The results show that the emphasis from level A1 to level B1 is on the type of texts and how they are read, whereas the degree of understanding of the text content is emphasized from level B2 onwards.