This study examined students' difficulties of explanation activity in university lecture class. Study 1 examined the students' impression to the explanation activities, and the result showed that most of the students thought the activity positive manner. However, the result also suggested that many students felt anxious of the activity because they were not sure how to explain. In Study 2, to reduce their anxiety, students were instructed to give examples for topics hard to understand and to check listeners' understanding. The results showed that although students' confidence to their explanation rose after the instruction, most of their examples just mimicked what on the texts, and some contained inappropriate examples. Based on these results, we discussed the way of effective instruction for explanation activity.

This paper seeks to elucidate the perspectives observed within the works of Shimbo Iwaji. To that aim, the paper first analyzes his career, his theoretical documents on literary language, and his textbooks on Japanese literature and literary history for junior high-schools. The paper argues that Shimbo sought to disseminate a literary language during the Meiji Era. At that time, the classics, which mixed kanji, logographic Chinese characters, and kana, syllabic Japanese scripts, were regarded as a linguistic model. Sentences from classical scholars of the Edo Period, which combined kanji and kana, were selected by Shimbo and presented in his textbooks as models. Similarly, given that mixed kanji-kana sentences from medieval periods were also regarded as exemplary, Shimbo also edited such sentences from Genpei Jōsuiki and Jinnō Shōtōki.

This study investigates the effectiveness of cognitive counseling as an instructional method for teaching logical thinking based on the learner's thinking processes within the language arts. Cognitive counseling is a psychological approach to support learning, where a teacher investigates the causes of cognitive problems within individual learners through personal interviews and aids them in addressing the problems. In this study, cognitive counseling was implemented at a school in Higashi-Hiroshima City, where the researcher volunteered to teach students how to read explanatory texts. Four fifth-graders participated in the study, within the area of language arts, where the cognitive counseling was implemented through the reading of explanatory texts. Of the four children, two boys, ‘I’ and ‘S’, are the prime focus of the present study. During the cognitive counseling, the boys initially found it difficult to grasp the logical relations within the text. However, after the teacher investigated the causes of their cognitive problems and provided them with impromptu instructions on how to solve their respective problems, the boys were able to correctly analyse the logical relations within the text. The present results indicate that cognitive counseling can be an effective method of providing individual guidance when teaching logical thinking based on the learner's thinking processes. One area for possible future research would be to develop of a method of cognitive counseling to use for the instruction of language arts classes.