Case Study of a Pre-Advanced Japanese Oral Expression

Long Distance Class Organized by Universities Partnership in Japan

FUJIMORI Hiroko

KEYWORDS: Japanese-language education, oral expression class, interactive distance learning,

                            inter-university partnerships

Just as smartphones, computers, and other forms of IT technology have become a part of our daily lives, so too is ICT (information communication technology) being utilized in university-level education in the form of e-learning and long-distance education.  Through an inter-university partnership, Osaka University and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) worked together to create a long-distance class with the participation of overseas students in a pre-advanced Japanese Oral Expressions class, with such topics as food culture, recommended tourist sites, festivals introduced by the participants.  In this study, video-recordings of the course, and the results of questionnaires given to the participants, were analyzed in order to consider the significance of the class.  The results of this analysis demonstrated that the Osaka University students' presentations utilized Japanese which was at once more sophisticated but also simpler to understand, that their slides were more concise, and that overall they put more successful effort into making their presentations easy for the listeners to understand.  On the other hand, the TUFS students, who in contrast with the Osaka University students were involved for the first time in this type of course, tended to pack too much information into their slides, repeat information they obtained on the internet verbatim, among other problems.  In their reports, participants made a significant number of comments regarding the new things they learned from the presentations, as opposed to general information about Osaka.  It was clear that introducing realia into courses involving interaction is quite valuable, and the potential for further growth is significant.