Paper short abstract:

This study examines "interactive classes" with Japanese and Non-Japanese students, analyzing how they build conversations in terms of conversation management. Differences by proficiency level between basic and intermediate levels were examined, focusing on "being able to advance short conversations"

Paper long abstract:

Conversations follow two patterns; there is either a goal or there is no goal. "Functional conversations," such as requests, refusals and promises all have goals, but light interactive conversations between friends generally lack clear goals. In Japanese conversation classes, students usually talk about familiar issues or personal experiences, and have simple discussions. These conversations lack clear goals; however, this does not mean that such conversations are unnecessary. These interactions are important for learners to build interpersonal relationships.

Satsuno and Tsujimura (2006) reported that foreign students studying at universities required three abilities in Japanese; 1) the ability to use Japanese for basic everyday life, 2) the ability to employ Japanese to enrich interpersonal relationships, and 3) the specific ability to fulfill the student commitments of Japanese university students. 2) is a necessary requirement for building a human network in the university environment, so conversation education is important to this end. Nevertheless, Japanese language education syllabuses have not given this much import.

Therefore, this study is based on "interactive classes" in which Japanese native speaker students (NS) voluntarily took part in lessons with Japanese non-native speaker students (NNS). I analyzed how the NS and NNS groups built their conversations from the standpoint of conversation adjustment and management using classroom transcription data. During the study, I also compared and contrasted the basic level class with the intermediate level class, on the same topics, and examined how the conversation construction process differed by proficiency level, along with what accounted for the differences.

As a result, it was discovered that many basic level learners used adjacency pair conversions with simple "questions and answers." On the other hand, many of the intermediate learners used a variety of conversation strategies. For example, it was observed that upon coming across an incomprehensible item, more than one NNS took a turn interacting with an NS and steering the conversation so that the whole group could understand. The preliminary research results in this paper and the very idea of teaching basic and intermediate students strategies for "being able to advance short conversations" were both derived from these observations.