Paper short abstract:

Present study is to report what we examined to identify specific "language use situations" and "Hiroshima Tourism Can-do List," focusing on activities in Hiroshima, a popular tourist destination in Japan during the course of developing the teaching materials.

Paper long abstract:

As the number of inbound tourists to Japan increases in recent years and Tokyo is hosting the 2020 Olympics, some measures have been taken to accommodate the inbound tourists with little or no Japanese skills, such as creating multilingual and universal public signs and developing convenient applications both for guests and hosts. However, they will still have some contact with Japanese people or with the Japanese language.

Therefore, focusing on the situations where inbound tourists encounter Japanese hosts, we are creating "a tool to assist Japanese language learning." With it, even ultrashort-term tourists "can" learn Japanese language while gaining deeper multicultural understanding through the bilateral communication.

The presentation focuses on 2 aspects of the tool development process: identification of "language use situations" and creation of "Hiroshima Tourism Can-do List." Data collection and research were conducted in Hiroshima, which is one of the most famous tourist destinations in Japan.

First, specific situations were identified where even ultrashort-term inbound tourists have may opportunities to communicate in Japanese in Hiroshima. To identify those, various brochures, guide books and websites were analyzed.

Next, a prototype of "Hiroshima Tourism Can-do List" was attempted created with statements describing what inbound tourists can accomplish with their language skills in above-mentioned situations. In the process of creating it, we refereed to the CEFR, JF Standard, CEFR-J and so on.

Although majority of inbound tourists to Japan are at "Pre-A1 level" of the CEFR-J etc., they still can accomplish some tasks. One of the aims of creating the list is to make the users of these materials be aware of "what they actually could do" by providing them with these "things even Pre-A1 can do" as Can-do List, reflecting them in the content.

For the future project, Tourism Can-do will be evaluated further to verify whether it is practical as actual language activities for foreign students in Japan and Japanese language learners visiting Japan. In addition, after researching and collecting data at tourist spots and analyzing it, we will examine the structure and the substance of the teaching materials including its content.