In this study, 30 raters other than language teachers participated in an experiment where they were asked to rate the speaking level of learners of Japanese in situational tasks, in order to validate a speaking test designated as STAR (Speaking Test of Active Reaction), developed as a placement test by Beuckmann et al. (2020). From the analysis of the results, despite a possible insufficient discrimination of the intermediate levels, STAR proved to have sufficient ʻusefulnessʼ (Bachman & Palmer, 1996), since STAR shows it has good reliability, validity, and practicality. The analysis of the ratersʼ comments also found that: 1) naturalness and fluency are characteristics of the advanced level; 2) the perspectives used for content, text type, and interpersonal consideration differ between the intermediate-low and the intermediate-middle on the ratings; and 3) the perspective for grammar differs between the intermediate-middle and the intermediate-high. Furthermore, the analysis also revealed that there were many positive comments for the intermediate-low level as they seem to be compared with the elementary level, while there were many negative comments for the intermediate-middle level relative to the advanced level.

The number of foreign residents has been rapidly increasing in Japan. Consequently, various proposals promoting Yasashii Nihongo (ʻEasy Japaneseʼ), which is a linguistic adjustment, have been put forth as a way to facilitate communication with non-native speakers. However a question arises: how are these adjustments evaluated by the non-native speakers who are recipients of the information conveyed? In this paper, I examine the non-native speakersʼ evaluations of explanations given by native speakers, and analyze their evaluation perspectives and linguistic behaviors that affect the evaluation. The results indicate that "positive attitude of participation," "calm attitude," and "appropriate explanation according to the partner" were perspectives that affected the evaluation. In addition, a comparison of the verbal behaviors of high-and low-rated native speakers suggested that "active engagement in conversation," "verbal behaviors that considered the partnersʼ comprehension," and "behaviors that were based on an equal relationship" influenced the ratings. Thus, it can be concluded that native speakers are highly regarded for considering the level of non-native speakersʼ comprehension while explaining something to them.

The present study investigates the effects of input-based processing instruction (PI), in comparison to output-based instruction (OI), on the comprehension and production of two types of Japanese past-tense verb inflections. Representing the same meaning of "events or actions completed in the past," the polite-style past-tense form "-mashita" is considered morphologically simple, while the plain-style form "-ta/ita/ida/shita/tta/nda" follows more complex rules. In order to investigate the differences in effects of PI and OI on both forms, this study conducted classroom experiments: two groups of Japanese beginner learners carried out PI and OI activities using polite and plain forms of past-tense verbs. The results of pre-, post-, and delayed tests revealed that, overall, PI was more effective than OI in helping participants comprehend and produce polite-style forms, whereas OI was more effective than PI in helping them produce plain-style forms during the immediate post-test. These findings address the argument that PI activities indeed lead to a significant improvement in the acquisition of simple forms; however, output-oriented activities may be more effective when forms are more complex.

In this study, 427 monolingual children and 122 JSL (Japanese as a Second Language) children in the fourth to sixth grades completed a picture-guided paper-and-pencil test that was developed to assess their ability to produce four types of case markers: ga, o, ni, and de. The test consisted of 73 items intended to tap productive knowledge of the polysemous case markers in question. Some of the items were scrambled sentences. Quantitative analyses revealed statistically significant differences in total scores between the monolingual and JSL groups. There were two to five times as many JSL children as monolingual children in the lowest-scoring group. A close examination revealed that a prominent difference between the JSL and monolingual groups can be found with the scrambled items that included two animate nouns and the combinations of nominative ga and accusative o or nominative ga and dative ni. Although these items were challenging for both JSL and monolingual children, the JSL groupʼs performance suffered to a greater extent.

In this study, we developed a Database of Japanese Kanji Vocabulary in Contrast to Chinese (JKVC). Chinese-origin Japanese words (on-reading words) were classified into 6 types based on the semantic correspondence between Chinese cognates and their corresponding Japanese words, with reference to Agency for Cultural Affairs (1978) and Miura (1984). The result shows that, among the most frequent 20,000 words, 1) Chinese-origin words account for 50%, 2) 70% of Chinese-origin words (35% of all) are the same as their Chinese cognates in orthography (henceforth ʻisographicʼ), 3) while the other 30% of Chinese-origin words (15% of all) do not have corresponding cognates in modern Chinese, 4) 82% of the 7,074 isographic words (29% of all words, 58% of the Chinese-origin-words) are similar in both orthography and meaning, 5) while the other 18%, i.e., one out of 5 or 6 isographic words, are partially or totally different in meaning from their Chinese cognates. Learners need to be especially careful when acquiring these words. This database can be used directly for word searches. The utility of this database can also be heightened by incorporating it into a word frequency profiler such as J-LEX (Suganaga & Matsushita, 2014) to display lexical loads of texts and their readability scores depending on the userʼs first language, or to display important points for Chinese learners of Japanese using a pop-up function.

This paper reports on some pedagogical practices in my reading classes of Early-Modern written Japanese (kindai bungobun) for advanced level international students. In the classes we are mainly reading two essays, by Yukichi Fukuzawa and by Chōmin Nakae, in the original. The participants are required to have advanced level knowledge of Modern Japanese but need not have any previous knowledge of classical grammar. The goals of the classes are to become able to read original texts of modern Japanese thinkers and to deepen the participantsʼ knowledge of the Japanese language by comparing Early-Modern and Modern Japanese. For the former goal we are focusing on central topics of the essays: the concept of fundamental human rights (kenritsūgi, corresponding to kihonteki jinken in Modern Japanese) in the Fukuzawa essay, and, in the Nakae essay, on some fundamental requirements for both politicians and bureaucrats and their necessity in the present-day Japanese society. For the latter goal, we are observing, from a contrastive linguistic perspective, how Early-Modern Japanese sentences can be translated morpheme-by-morpheme into Modern Japanese, thereby deepening participantsʼ knowledge of the Modern Japanese language.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the grammatical expectations by native speakers on the sentence level, focusing on ta-form adnominal clauses. The participants in this study, 64 Japanese native speakers, were asked to complete sentences following ta-form adnominal clauses which had ga-cases in both adnominal and main clauses, presented as "adnominal clause + head noun + wa / ga". The results of this investigation show: 1) the parts following the ta-form adnominal clauses show similarities regarding predicates; and 2) semantically, the predicates that denote a change of state follow stative adnominal clauses, and the predicates that denote subsequent actions follow dynamic adnominal clauses. A similar tendency was found in stative adnominal clauses using the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ).

The present result suggests that learning adnominal clauses by focusing on forms and meanings can contribute to the improvement of learnersʼ sentence comprehension and production ability.