In order to reconstruct the contours of Japanese language education, this paper attempts to expand the conventional view by applying the “extension and intension” scheme.

　In the second section, I categorize various activities related to Japanese language education along the three axes of educational activities, social activities, and research activities, and attempt to expand the existing image of the contours of Japanese language education in order to reconstruct it. In the third section, by a thought-experiment analysis, I examine the internal structure of language acquisition, which is considered to be part of the intensive matter of Japanese language education. I extract through this examination the fields and issues related to the development and strengthening of social activities, cultural understanding, and the formation of the ego and the subjectivity that support those activities, in addition to the fields and issues related to the development and strengthening of language use, in order to expand and transform the existing image of the contours of Japanese language education, and I try to present a new perspective for reconstruction.

　In the process, I have made some reference, though insufficient, to the contours of academic discipline of Japanese Language Education and to the philosophical mission and future vision of The Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language.

　This paper discusses educational practice in Japanese Language Teaching for students and adults in Japan, as well as research in this field. It begins by clarifying the scope of the discussion, and in the second section goes on to examine an example of an elementary Japanese class in order to explore the present state and issues of the field. Next, broadening the scope to cover professionalism of teachers, organizations and institutions, it identifies four issues that must be addressed: 1） data-driven self-evaluation and practical research by instructors; 2） third-party classroom evaluations; 3） establishing instructorsʼ professionalism; and 4） establishing self-evaluation organizations and institutions. The third section examines how practice and practical research has been transformed from the 1960ʼs until 2020 in response to societal changes, and on this basis the fourth section considers future prospects for this field. Likely future developments in the field include evaluation systems in educational practice, integration of ICT into educational practice, and the utilization of ICT in educational research.

　In June 2019 the Law for the Promotion of Japanese Language Education was promulgated, clarifying the responsibility of national and local governments to provide the educational opportunity. This paper reports on an effort by one local government, Toyota City, to establish a system for Japanese language education that preceded this national law. Toyota City adopted a policy according to which it was the responsibility of the local public entity to ensure access to Japanese language education to achieve a minimum level of proficiency in the Japanese language, as well as to provide introductory education in basic knowledge about Japan. Based on this policy, the Toyota City Council for the Promotion of Internationalization was formed, resulting in the construction and management of the Japanese Learning Support System for Toyota City, and work also began to construct a system for the introductory education about Japan. After an examination of this project, this paper stresses the importance, when constructing and managing Japanese language education system, of surveying current local conditions, and of fostering sustained dialogue that will give a concrete form to the ideals on which the project is founded.

　In Europe, the practice of Japanese Language Teaching is adapted to each countryʼs language teaching policies. Consequently, in order to obtain a systematic overview of the accomplishments of Japanese Language Teaching, it is necessary to find a common element that is shared by all countries. This paper accordingly takes the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages（CEFR） promulgated in 2001 as a common point of reference. First, I summarize the basic idea of CEFR and the way it views language teaching. Second, I explain how CEFR was received and incorporated into Japanese Language Teaching practice, both at public institutions and in the practice of individual instructors. Finally, I consider the significance imparted to Japanese Language Teaching by incorporation of CEFR and consider possible future developments in conjunction with the CEFR Companion Volume published in 2020.

　Since 2000, reflecting developments in Chinese society as well as global trends, there have been major transformations in Japanese language education in China, including such areas as scale of instruction, the ideals and practice of instruction, educational goals, standards of evaluation, educational research, and instructor training. Currently there are numerous tasks, such as adjusting scale, reducing disparities, improving the learning environment, revising goals, renewing ideals, coordinating practice, effectively applying new standards, and continuing development of educational research and instructor training. The desirable direction for forthcoming reconstruction consists of multifaceted cooperation among all educational levels（primary, secondary, university major and non-major, and graduate studies）, and balanced development. To achieve this, sustained exchanges and collaboration are essential, internationally and in particular between China and Japan.

　There have been several important surveys on the history of Japanese language education and its research, but most of them have focused on qualitatively describing the classification of research areas and the direction of efforts, and quantitative knowledge in this field has been insufficient. In addition, the mutual relationships and influences between studies or researchers are rarely clarified. In this study, we try to grasp the outline of the research community regarding Japanese language education. Using the journal Japanese Language Education Nos. 1 to 175 of The Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language, published between 1962-2020, we analyzed the longitudinal changes in citation behavior and the network structure of 1,803 published papers, 16,205 cited documents and their authors. As a result, we clarified some important facts regarding the formation of a common intellectual foundation within the research community, changes in research trends, and the relationship with global language and educational research. In addition, we discussed the background and suggestions of our findings compared to previous research.

　In Japanese conditional sentences, the condition clause ends with a conjunctive particle that marks it as a condition, but that clause may also begin with the adverb moshi. The use of moshi is not essential, but when it is used it clearly indicates a hypothetical conditional. In that case, it has to be put before the conjunction. In this paper, I aim to clarify the effect of moshi’s presence and position on the sentence processing of hypothetical conditionals in Japanese. To do so, I conducted a self-paced reading experiment with both Japanese native speakers and learners of Japanese having four different first languages. My results show that the usage of moshi had no effect on Japanese native speakers. However, for the learners, moshi can facilitate the processing of a text, shortening the reading time and facilitating correct answering regardless of the learnersʼ first languages. These results might contribute not only to the comprehension study of Second Language Acquisition but also to the development of “Easy Japanese”, which can be useful for supporting the development of multicultural understanding within Japanese society.

　The Japanese verbs iru/aru express existence. However, V-te iru is also frequently used to convey existence. Although the two forms are used differently in some instances, the actual circumstances of their proper usage have not been made clear.

　This paper will initially show an overview of V-te iru expressing the existence of animate objects. It will then consider instances in which V-te iru expresses a change in the position of the subject. The difference of usage between V-te iru and iru emerges in such cases.

　This paper will explain the rules for the proper usage of iru and V-te iru, clarifying through the analysis of examples that the intention of the subject of existence causes the difference between V-te iru and iru. At the same time, this paper will demonstrate that multiple factors, including intention, interact with each other when a choice is made between V-te iru and iru.

　In this paper, I examined the use of private speech in the classroom by beginner-level learners of Japanese. The functions of private speech were classified into seven categories: vicarious response, manipulation of target language, mediation of thought, selective attention, monitoring, commenting, and wordplay, but for some instances of private speech, the functions could not be identified. The characteristics of classroom activities that increase the occurrence of private speech are: higher linguistic difficulty, the need for reading or writing, the need for understanding and production for all learners, and the fact that the classroom is not too quiet. The use of private speech differed among learners. One learner rarely used private speech, another used private speech for hypothesis testing and analysis, another used private speech for metacognition and to reduce psychological burden, and another used private speech for fun. By using private speech, learners create their own learning space tailored to their needs. In addition, the way in which private speech appears and the language used revealed the continuity between private speech and social speech.

　In this study, a Kanji Conversion Test（KCT） was developed and implemented together with the Vocabulary Size Test for Reading Japanese（VSTRJ-50K）（Tajima et al., 2015; Sato et al., 2017） for university students who learn Japanese as a second language（JSL）. Among JSL students at three universities in Japan, the estimated vocabulary size of Chinese-background students was 30,000 or more on average, while that of non-Kanji-background students was less than 20,000. Although the correlation between the two tests was high, the unidimensionality of VSTRJ-50K was low in the Rasch analysis. Accordingly, when DIF analysis was performed for each L1 group, the goodness of fit to the model increased within each group, and there were many words with different difficulty levels depending on L1. In particular, the differences depending on word origin were remarkable. Examining the average learning time per word/kanji revealed that it declined as learners progressed from beginner to intermediate and advanced, and then increased from advanced to highly advanced. Therefore, a comprehensive consideration of L1/L2 learnersʼ vocabulary and kanji knowledge is necessary for curriculum development.

　Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment Companion Volume with New Descriptors（CEFR-CV） was published by the Council of Europe in 2018. It presents the concept of mediation from a broader perspective than the CEFR in 2001, expanding the scope of activities and adding new grids along with it. In this paper, we first identified mediation as an activity that bridges learning and society by linking perceptive, productive, and interactive activities, based on previous research on “mediation” in the CEFR-CV. Secondly, we conducted a morphological analysis of the CEFR-CVʼs illustrative descriptors of mediation in order to depict the image of the mediator at the A1 to C2 level respectively. Finally, this research argues that the “Mediation” represented by the CEFR-CV contributes to both the creation of affordances according to each learning phase and the promotion of collaborative activities in the practice of Japanese language education.

　This paper aims to explore the future research trend in studies on cognition of non-native Japanese teachers based on existing studies on this topic. A total of 81 research papers published from 1991 to 2020 in three online academic literature databases were analyzed from three aspects: when and where the research was done, and what the research topic was. This examination found that with the development of social diversity and with increasing attention paid to teachersʼ research ability and development, the number of research papers on non-native Japanese teachersʼ cognition has increased significantly since 2010. In addition, before 2010 much research was focused on non-native Japanese teachers from countries in East Asia. However, the number of research papers on non-native Japanese teachers from Southeast Asian countries has increased rapidly since 2011. Also, the research topics of the 81 research papers were given a statistical text analysis, and it was found that with the increasing variety in Japanese language educational contexts and increasing attention paid to the psychological conflicts of non-native Japanese teachers in a society characterized by cultural diversity, the development process of non-native Japanese teachersʼ cognition has attracted more attention.

　In order to investigate how the similarity between Chinese Kanji and Japanese Kanji has influenced the acquisition of Japanese-origin Kanji vocabulary by Chinese learners of Japanese（ CLJs） basing on Chinese language knowledge, this study classifies Japanese-origin Kanji vocabulary with single kanji into synonymous isomorphic and synonymous anisomorphic types, and then makes a comparison of CLJs and Indonesian learners of Japanese（ ILJs） on their comprehension and production. First, the overall results not only show positive language transfer in both comprehension and production of the synonymous isomorphic type, but also demonstrate that acquisition can benefit from the similarity of orthography. Second, the comprehension results indicate that the performance of the CLJs is marginally better than that of ILJs due to the script familiarity effect brought by the orthography. However, the production results indicate no difference between the CLJs and the ILJs, as there are no orthography differences between Chinese and Japanese vocabulary that have the same meaning. Based on these results, it is recommended that CLJs need to strengthen the production on synonymous anisomorphic type of Japanese-origin Kanji vocabulary.

　This paper reports on disaster preparedness learning activities aimed at improving self-help skills, which were conducted in a beginner-level Japanese language course for graduate students at a university in Tokyo. It describes what international students experienced and what they gained based on records of the activities and reflections from both participating students and the instructor. The GLI model (Mitsuhara, 2018), which proposes a method to overcome challenges in conventional disaster preparedness learning, was applied to the learning activities conducted in the course. The implementation consisted of 1) watching a documentary film about the Great East Japan Earthquake, 2) reading activities about natural disasters in Japan, 3) experiential learning at a life safety learning center, 4) fieldwork on campus, 5) fieldwork off campus, and 6） dissemination of information about disaster preparedness. The following three benefits were obtained from these activities: 1) students learned basic and practical information about natural disasters in a realistic way, 2) students were provided with a place to learn Japanese language related to natural disasters effectively, and 3) students raised their awareness of the need to protect themselves from natural disasters.

　This paper reports on practice of project work in a training program for Japanese language teachers in Japan which strives to enhance competence in intercultural understanding. First, this paper refers to the relationship between deep culture and competence in intercultural understanding and the role of teachers, and then gives an overview of previous practical reports on project work.

　Based on teachersʼ Japanese proficiency and the issues pointed out in previous practical reports, the procedure and progress of project work are described by means of a phased approach focusing on three points: 1） Creating an environment where collaborative activities are likely to occur, 2） broadening their perspectives for observing culture through discussion, and 3） language support. An analysis of questionnaire responses, self-evaluations of competence in intercultural understanding, and presentation products reveals that teachers evaluate the project work highly and that there were changes in self-evaluation. Awareness of intercultural understanding was especially observed through the presentation. Thus, it can be concluded that the design of project work based on a staged approach worked effectively.