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Paper short abstract:

A unique reading comprehension material has been developed based on the ARCS Model (motivation theory) by John M. Keller. Each of the three subcategories is specifically applied when creating stories. The students have used and well-received it for the past five years.

Paper long abstract:

Finding an appropriate reading comprehension textbook as the course material is rather difficult because the students’ learning objectives, motivation, interests, and even personalities always change. Theoretically, grammar points, sentence structures, vocabulary, kanji, as well as cultural aspects should ideally be integrated into the texts of each chapter along with comprehension questions. Practically, however, how to stimulate and arouse students’ interests and motivation should also be considered. The new reading material consists of the following: An ordinary text (unlearned kanji with reading on top), a text with only learned kanji, comprehension questions focusing on learned sentence structure and grammar as well as cultural aspects, and English translation. What is unique to the new reading material is that 1) seasonal and cultural topics are introduced in the story so that the students can find it interesting, 2) the new kanji to be learned in the following kanji class are used in the story so that the students recognize them later (metacognitive method), and last but not least, 3) each one of the students' names is used as the main character of each story so that they can engage themselves subjectively in the story. These are based on the ARCS (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction) theory of motivation by John M. Keller (Keller，1983，1984，1987, Keller＆ Kopp, 1987, Keller＆Suzuki，1988). In the presentation, a few chapters of actual reading material and an evaluation by the students will be introduced. Due to the fact that the main character in the story changes every year, it seems almost impossible to publish this reading material as a paper textbook. An alternative way of publishing such as on-demand printing has been under consideration.