Paper short abstract:

This search tool provides academic kanji words and expressions for all the kanji in the textbook GENKI. Examples are extracted from the Science and Engineering Spoken Japanese Corpus. The purpose of the tool is to help the learners for their academic kanji learning and their autonomous learning.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation introduces a search tool for kanji words and their example usage based on the kanji from the textbook "Genki". The purpose of the tool is to help the learners from basic level for their autonomous kanji learning.

Shiratori et.al (2014) examined how the kanji in the textbook "Genki" is used in the academic field and created specific kanji learning materials using the Science and Engineering Spoken Japanese Corpus. This study (Shiratori et.al, 2014) also suggested its pedagogical implication. Based on this study by Shiratori et.al (2014), the above referenced search tool was developed. The purpose of this tool is for the learners from basic level to study and learn academic kanji words and expressions on their own.

This search tool has a list of 317 individual kanji from the textbook "Genki." As a learner clicks a kanji, s/he can find its kanji words and expressions in the academic usage, the related reading, the meaning in English, Chinese, and Korean, and the level of the former JLPT. The words and expressions are modified to be short and clear for learners.

The current issues for learners to learn kanji in a Japanese university, especially science fields, are 1) limited classroom time for learning kanji, 2) mix level students class with learners of kanji background and non-kanji background, and 3) lack of academic kanji words and expressions in a basic level textbook. These situations cause learners to decrease their motivation.

In order to solve these problems, this search tool was developed. This tool can meet student's individual needs by allowing the students to learn kanji outside of the classroom. The tool provides academic kanji words and expressions for all the kanji listed in the textbook "Genki", thus the learners from basic level can learn and be aware of academic usage of kanji words and expressions. This search tool helps learners to develop their kanji learning and meet their individual goals.

Paper short abstract:

The authors have developed a corpus analysis system enabling teachers and researchers to utilize their original data. Through the presentation, the authors will introduce the basics of the system and demonstrate its practical in Japanese language education, using real student writing as data.

Paper long abstract:

The authors have developed a corpus analysis system enabling teachers and researchers to utilize their original data. The system has been open to the public. With this system, teachers and researchers can import their collected data of their students' writing or conversation scripts into the system. The system allows analysis of this data through useful functions such as keywords search, collocation analysis, and frequency comparisons. However, the use of raw data, which include errors or spoken languages, sometimes yields mistaken results. This can be dealt with through taking advantage of tags.

Through the presentation, the authors will introduce the basics of the system and demonstrate its practical in Japanese language education, using real student writing as data. The presenters imported 12 essays written by three students and analyzed them utilizing the system. The results indicated a wide range of mistakes, which differed greatly depending on the student. Through the use of this system, however, the habitual errors of each student can be known. As a result, individualized correction and personalized instruction can be given to answer student needs. Traditional teaching required teachers to abstractly understand these tendencies through reading student work. However, it is difficult to objectively analyze the kinds of mistakes students are more likely to make. By using this system, teachers can know these tendencies and provide more effective teaching for students. This system is accessible to the world and thus any Japanese language teacher may have access to it. It can be applied not only to writing but also to spoken language such as conversation between Japanese learners and Japanese native speakers in many different situations. In terms of multilingualism and multiculturalism, it is necessary to incorporate best teaching methods which match student needs in order to aid in the development of humans capable of interacting on a global scale.

Paper short abstract:

We showed that the degree of awareness of a grammatical item affects created sentences in autonomous data-driven learning. We propose to show information about the context of the reading materials and to add the learners' corpus examples to the web tool for a better understanding of the usage.

Paper long abstract:

In the present study, we showed that the degree of awareness of a grammatical item affects created sentences in autonomous data-driven learning (DDL). To do so, we used a web tool as a preparation for an intermediate reading class.

DDL is a method of language learning that involves discovering the feature of the target language through consulting corpora for example sentences. Studies have shown the effects of DDL as discovery learning, whereas other studies have indicated that learners in the lower-level class face difficulty in using the corpus effectively.

Therefore, in this study I ask the learners to consult the web tool HAGOROMO— a web tool for function words in Japanese—which provides information on Japanese words as regards their meaning, explanation of usage, examples from learner corpus and so forth, instead of a concordancer. The students were asked to define the meaning of three grammatical items per unit of the textbook, create three sentences per item using HAGOROMO, and upload to the on-campus learning management system before each lesson.

The findings from Hori (2019) indicate that if learners created incorrect or incomplete sentences, their post-mortem grammar judgment test performed poorly. Some sentences were copied and pasted from HAGOROMO's examples, but it was unclear why students did this.

In this study, I conducted a questionnaire to ask learners how well they knew and understood the grammatical items before preparing for the class.

The findings revealed the following: a) if the learners had not known the grammatical items before the preparation, there was a tendency to copy and paste or partly rewrite the examples from the web tool and b) if the learners had known the grammatical items, most of the sentences produced were original.

In summary, a degree of awareness of grammatical items affects sentence creation, thus it is not enough for students to merely engage in autonomous DDL before lessons. We propose countermeasures such as showing information about the context of the reading materials and adding the learners' corpus examples to HAGOROMO so that they can better understand the usage of the items.