The objectives of this study are to investigate the background behind the use of “Ongi wo Shiritaru Tumibito” within the Ministry of Education's 1888 “Koto Shogaku Tokuhon” Japanese language textbook for higher primary education and to reexamine its significance within the history of Japanese language education.

The first method employed within this study is to interpret the views of Tousaku Tanaka, the editor-in-chief for “Koto Shogaku Tokuhon”, regarding moral education and teaching materials based on his statements from the period. The second method is to compare the original text to the version included within the textbook to elucidate the intentions underlying his editing of the text.

The results indicate a strong possibility that “Ongi wo Shiritaru Tumibito” and the other works used as teaching materials within “Koto Shogaku Tokuhon” were selected by taking into consideration children's interests and abilities. That was contrary to the traditional Confucian method of rote teaching and emerged from a desire to pursue modern educational methods that sought to cultivate children's minds from the inside by eliciting their interests. “Ongi wo Shiritaru Tumibito” is an excellent historical example of modern education's utilization of a literary text as a teaching material over almost a decade from 1887 to 1896 (Meiji 20-29).

This study seeks to identify whether the purpose of reading effects student writing; where the purpose for one group is to create a new story based on the Japanese story of Urashima Taro while the objective for another group is to both broaden and deepen their interpretations of Urashima Taro. The two groups both consisted of students attending a public school and students attending a school affiliated with a national university, and were, thus, the same apart from having different purposes and writing activities. Text mining analyses identified three key differences. The group assigned to create a new story (1) used a greater number of descriptive words, (2) exhibited greater overall variation in their word choices, and (3) used more words that were not present within the textbook containing the original story. These findings indicate that the group assigned with creating a new story tended to provide better quality responses than the group assigned to broaden and deepen their interpretations of Urashima Taro. Accordingly, it is possible to conclude that the students responded differently to the reading objectives and that had a significant impact on their writing.

The present study investigates the effects of reading aloud with appropriate emotions on the reader's feelings. The participants in our series of experiments were university students. Two positive stories were selected through a pilot study. In order to identify the characteristics of reading aloud with appropriate emotions, the participants rated their impressions of reading with and without appropriate emotions in Experiment 1. The results indicated that reading aloud with appropriate emotions has the following four features: appropriate intonation, appropriate stress, use of voice tones that match the feelings of the story protagonists, and clear vocalization. In contrast, reading aloud without appropriate emotions only has the feature of clear vocalization. In Experiment 2, we hypothesized that only reading with appropriate emotions would elicit within the reader similar feelings to those portrayed in the story. This is because a reader needs to deeply understand the story content and protagonists' feelings in order to read aloud with appropriate emotions. We had participants read a positive story in two ways, either reading aloud with or without appropriate emotions, and rate their emotional states both before and after reading in each condition. The results of a 2 x 2 (manner of reading x period of test) within-subjects ANOVA revealed that participants only felt better after read a positive story aloud with appropriate emotions. We argue that this is because the manner of reading aloud with appropriate emotions functions as a kind of trigger for emotionally engaging a reader with a story and its protagonists.

The present study examines the effects of taking a position on the generation of reasons and reason evaluations within confrontational themes. Japanese university and college students (N=342) generated reasons that support both my-side and other-side positions under three different conditions. Students either (1) adopted a position before the reason generation task (prior condition), (2) adopted a position and wrote a supporting reason before the task (prior+condition), or (3) adopted a position after completing the task (after condition). Students in the after condition generated more counterarguments that pointed out weaknesses in their supported position than students in the other two conditions. Moreover, the students in the after condition made more flexible comparisons of reasons in determining the most important reason.