Eri Kazuno

This paper proposes meaningfulness of continued improvement of the Japanese subjects through developmental evaluation. Out of Academic Japanese subjects for foreign students enrolled in degree programs in their first year, presentation skills class was evaluated to have achieved the overall purpose. Hence, we decided to introduce group presentation in the class to develop collaboration skills. Reevaluation of the subject based on survey confirmed that the students had exercised various approaches to tackle the challenge of online group presentation and that they had collaborated and deepened understanding during the preparation process.

To develop the first-ever evaluation criteria for Japanese narrative writing, this research aims to clarify points considered important by Japanese as a second language (JSL) teachers upon evaluation to explore “good writing” in narrative writing. Based on their own criteria, twenty JSL teachers evaluated ten essays by JSL learners on“Unforgettable Incident”, then answered how they decided priorities and what they considered important upon evaluation. As a result, it is suggested that “achieving goal”, “clarity of main points” and “consistency” are minimum requirements and “interestingness”, “the right amount of description”, “sequence”, and “accuracy” are also considered important in good writing.

This paper reports a practice in a writing class to improve Japanese language learners' academic writing skills, and particularly analyzes papers written by a Chinese exchange student who had never learned quotations. While in the beginning of the semester, the student did not understand what type of paper was required in the course thus just reported the facts she found in the documents, in the second half of the semester she incorporated several quotations to support her claims. However, there were cases where she failed to accomplish the purpose of the quotation due to lack of accurate understanding and summarization of the material.

This paper reports a practice on a content-based seminar to deepen Japanese intermediate-low learners' understanding about Japanese novels, and shows the change of learners' confidence and motivation by questionnaire. Students read various short novels, from graded readers to authentic materials, and discussed the contents and shared feedback with classmates. Also, at the end of the semester, they did Extensive Reading of graded readers and had a "Biblio-Battle". The result of the survey shows that these activities have helped leaners gain confidence in reading Japanese and motivation to learn Japanese.