The present study is aimed at developing a training program that enables students to repeat writing exercises by focusing on the production of rationales and to examine whether “rationale production training”improves their

reasoning skills. Two groups totaling 158 first-year high school students participated in this study.

The result showed significant training effects on the number of rationales produced for arguments and as well as perspectives from which to consider rationales,suggesting that rationale production training was effective for Japanese high school students for them to think through topics from a broad perspective. In addition, that meta-cognitive awareness to “thinking”of themselves,such as“viewpoints relied upon in producing rationales”,could be encouraged through rationale production training.

Recent studies of explanation have shown that,to achieve an effective explanation,it is necessary to consider the tutorsʼload of cognitive resources. The present study explored that,with the cognitive load which is caused by using a second language, whether the explanation can improve tutorsʼcomprehension or not. Participants (44 Chinese international university students in Japan)were asked to read a text concerning measures of statistical dispersion. Four conditions were compared:(a)reading the text written in the mother tongue(Chinese)and studying the material alone

(n＝11),(b)reading the text written in the mother tongue and explaining the material to a peer(n＝12),(c)reading the text written in the second language(Japanese)and studying the material alone(n＝11),and(d)reading the text written in the second language and explaining the material to a peer(n＝10). The results showed that explanation improved comprehension in the mother tongue condition,while decreased comprehension in the second language condition. In the second language condition,it was also found that written test obtained higher score than oral test. It was suggested that explaining in second language might result in tutorsʼcognitive overloading,so that it become difficult to understand the text at same time.

The purpose of this study is to extract an exhaustive list of words from the sentences printed in Japanese language textbooks used in elementary schools in Japan,and to investigate the number and frequency of occurrence of these words in Japanese language education. Morphological analysis software was used to extract the words. As a result,13,341

kinds of words written in hiragana, katakana, and/or kanji were extracted from the printed letters published in elementary school textbooks. We counted the number of nouns, verbs, adjectives, formal verbs, and adverbs, and reported their frequencies in each part of speech. The accuracy of our morpheme analysis was lowest in the first-grade textbook,which was written in hiragana for the most part,due to the small number of kyoiku kanji. Comparison between this research and previous research showed that the proportion of common words in verbs and adjectives was as high as 70%or more,while it was relatively low in nouns. We have also discussed the problems related to the accuracy of morpheme analysis for sentences in elementary school language textbooks,the properties of the extracted words,and the differences from the words reported in previous studies.