Paper short abstract:

This presentation reports that teaching Japanese with the recent TV drama is effective in improving a learner's listening and vocabulary abilities in terms of the Second Language Acquisition Theory.

Paper long abstract:

The theory of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has been developing since Pit Corder's 1967 essay "The Significance of Learners' Errors" and Larry Selinker's 1972 article "Interlanguage". Afterwards, various theories and hypotheses have been proposed in the field of second-language acquisition, regarding how people learn a second language in the classroom. Among them, the theories of Stephen Krashen "the Input Hypothesis" would be the most prominent paradigm in SLA. This presentation reports that teaching Japanese with the recent TV drama is effective in improving a learner's listening and vocabulary abilities in terms of the Second Language Acquisition Theory.

Audio materials such as TV dramas, movies and animated cartoons are in great demand from language teachers in the Japanese teaching environment both within and outside Japan. However, an interview survey of teachers using audio materials shows that many teachers are not certain about the effect of using videos relative to their teaching methods hence no strong conviction. A suggested reason may be that every teacher has a different educational purpose when using video materials and they have doubts about its teaching effect, particularly where there are no beliefs based on a reliable educational theory.

This presentation reports on an intermediate Japanese language class for improvement of listening and vocabulary abilities and proposes the idea that a recent popular TV drama can be used as a way of producing a major comprehensible input for the classroom. Here, most SLA researchers agree that this is essential to second language acquisition, and it shows what teachers need to "think and do". Although it is difficult to verify the true effect of improvement, the students' survey tells us that most students acknowledge their improvements in listening and vocabulary abilities in Japanese. Japanese teaching classrooms outside of Japan, such as European educational environments, have an essential lack of a large volume of actual language source input. Audio materials may supplement the disadvantage of "little input", and would be an effective measure in foreign language teaching environments. There is little doubt that this practical report provides some useful educational suggestions to the Japanese teachers in Europe.