尾本康裕（カリフォルニア大学、バークレー校）
Yasuhiro Omoto (The University of California, Berkeley)
キーワード：自習用ホームページ、ITリテラシイ、日本語環境、グループプロジェクト、教室活動、評価
The introduction of the three different Japanese scripts, Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, can be very time-consuming. Since memorizing the characters can be difficult for students who do not have any previous experience studying any other Asian languages, it is best if one can learn them at home. I have gif animated the characters to show their stroke order, and the students can learn these three different scripts by accessing the educational website. They can also listen to the pronunciation of the character if they want to. I have also set up a vocabulary exercise page where students can test their knowledge of vocabulary. However, just mentioning the existence of the practice page to the students is not sufficient enough to motivate students. We have to take them to the computer lab and familiarize them with the practice page. It sounds very contradictory that an online practice page should be accessed and used when students want and need it, and that we should not use class time to use the practice page. However, my survey showed that students would not use it actively unless they knew how to navigate the practice page, although it can be very effective in improving their Japanese.
I usually take students to the language lab to teach them how to use Japanese word processing applications and how to use the search engine on the Internet in Japanese. I also teach them how to use power point for presentations in Japanese on an online practice page. I have realized it may be a good idea to introduce the online practice page to the students at the beginning of the semester. In figure 1, 40 first year Japanese students answered my survey and to my surprise, 27 students never used the online practice page.
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| Figure 1 |
I asked 40 first year students to see if the online practice page helped them at the end of summer session in 2001. I mentioned the online practice page almost everyday, but I never took them to the language lab to familiarize them with the online practice page. After this, I decided to take students to the lab to familiarize them with online practice pages that we have created or the practice pages already supplied by other Japanese educators. For example, I asked third year Japanese students to use professor Kawamuraﾕs reading tutor in order to prepare for vocabulary quizzes. They have to supply definitions or explanations of vocabulary items in short Japanese sentences, and the reading tutor has the very useful function of paraphrasing or defining Japanese words in Japanese. The third year students were actively using Professor Kawamuraﾕs reading tutor and some students even used it in order to supply other students with unfamiliar vocabulary items in their presentations. So it may be a good idea to familiarize students with an online practice page even if it is easy to use.
Although the Internet can be very influential and is an effective learning tool for language learners, it is still a bit difficult to make self-study pages since language educators do not have enough time to learn about computers and make websites. So it may be a good idea to integrate the Internet with project work in the classroom. In addition, if classroom instruction is closely connected to a classroom project, students must utilize the Internet, and therefore educators do not have to worry about students not utilizing the Internet.
We can ask students to review their favorite Japanese web page and make a presentation based on their discovery of that site. Also, we can ask students to introduce a good Japanese language-learning page or Japanese culture page. In this way, language educators do not have to build web pages on their own. Students will explore, learn about Japanese culture, make presentations from what they have learned and exchange ideas and opinions.
The E-mail exchange project between Japanese and English speakers is well known and considered to be effective. Through this project, students will exchange ideas and opinions, thereby enhancing their Japanese outside of class. Also, students will prepare a comparative survey that asks perceptive questions of Japanese speakers and their fellow English-speaking students. They can make presentations based on the results.
Before tackling any of the classroom projects mentioned above, we may first want to know if students know enough about Japanese computing in order to fully take advantage of the effectiveness of the Internet. At the University of California, Berkeley, we did an E-mail exchange project with Keio University. Students asked various questions of the students at Keio University and their fellow Berkeley students, then compared the results and made a presentation based on these results. Although E-mail exchange seems simple enough, E-mail exchange in Japanese can be very problematic. (Uehara, Schneider and Omoto 2001) Therefore, I surveyed the students before starting this project. The survey was done in the fall semester, 2001. Since E-mail projects involve the constant exchange of E-mail between students, I wanted to know if they had a computer and what operating system they used. Since the difficulty of using Japanese depends on the operating system (Omoto, Fukai and Schneider 2002), I wanted to see what the students were using. The results are shown in figure 2.
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| Figure 2 | Figure 3 |
In figure 3, whether students can read Japanese is shown. Since we introduce how to use a word processor in Japanese in second year Japanese, most of the students in class were familiar with how to make their computers Japanese enabled. However, there were some in-coming students who did not take Japanese at the University of California, Berkeley. Furthermore, we asked students if they can write Japanese and the result are shown in figure 4.
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| Figure 4 | Figure 5 |
Since it was an E-mail exchange project, I wanted to know what E-mail programs the students use daily. 38 students were using webmail, such as hotmail, yahoo and so on. Some webmail services do not allow one to input Japanese, so when I took the students to the computer lab, I made sure to use webmail services that allow users to input Japanese correctly. As can be seen, knowing the studentsﾕ computer needs before going to the computer lab saves class time. Also, the teachers can guide students in the right direction and handle problems more efficiently.
Creating newspapers in Japanese can be a very effective classroom project, and it can help students achieve goals described in the national standards guideline. In addition, this project was tested at several different institutions to see if it could help students improve their Japanese skills. (Ishida and Omoto 2002) In the spring semester of 2002, I asked students to create an online newspaper and then conducted a small survey in the beginning of the semester. Since I needed to know their computing needs, I asked them about their computing situation. Although I had asked similar questions in the fall semester, some students were new and I needed to know if they knew how to make a webpage. There were 62 students in the class and 57 of them replied. Only 5 students could not read Japanese on their computer and 4 students could not input Japanese. 53 students had access to the Internet from home, but 5 students did not. Since some of the students could not access from home, we directed them to both the Macintosh lab and the PC lab.
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| Figure 6 |
As shown in figure 6, most of the students did not know how to make a webpage, so I decided to hold a workshop dedicated to webpage making, based on this small survey. Since making a homepage in Japanese requires different skills, a workshop was useful even for those who already knew how to make a webpage in English.
I have realized that motivation is the most important factor in order for this newspaper project to be successful. When I started this project, it was not necessarily related to what was taught in the classroom, and the weight of this project in the actual grade was very low. Over the years I have increased its weight in the percentage of the grade and made this project as closely linked to what I am teaching in class as possible. (Ishida and Omoto 2002) In a small survey, I asked the students at the end of the semester in spring of 2002 if the project was rewarding and motivating. 52 students replied. As shown in figure 7, 26 students felt it was rewarding, and 21 students felt it improved their Japanese, as shown in figure 8.
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| Figure 7 | Figure 8 |
However, as shown in figure 9, 20 students thought 18% of the final grade for this project was high. Since this project was strongly tied in to classroom instruction involving reading Japanese newspapers and speed-reading, and it was connected not only with making newspapers by collaborating with the fellow students and publishing them online, but also with making a presentation based on the newspaper, 16 students thought 18% was not high. Additionally, as shown in figure 10, the students did not think this project was particularly difficult. If it is closely connected to classroom teaching and if we can take care of the studentsﾕ computing needs early on, students can manage to create a newspaper and publish it online without any difficulties.
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| Figure 9 | Figure 10 |
Ishida, Mayumi and Omoto, Yasuhiro. 日本語教育に於ける学習者主体のオンライン新聞 インターネットを視座とした教室活動の一例 in Chikuma ed. Proceedings of The Seventeenth Annual Conference of SEATJ, Charleston, SC. in print 2002.
National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project. Standards for foreign language learning: Preparing for the 21st century. Lawrence, KS: Allen Press. 1996
Omoto, Yasuhiro. インターネット上の教材開発方法とその教育効果, in Kikuchi ed. Proceedings of The Fifteenth Annual Conference of SEATJ, 2000. http://www.iac.gatech.edu/modlangs/Programs/Japanese/SEATJ/2000/proceedings/ Read from the web on May 30th, 2002.
Omoto, Yasuhiro, Fukai, Miyuki, and Schneider, Keiko. Survey on the use of computer and the Internet in Japanese classes in Northern California in Chikuma ed. Proceedings of The Seventeenth Annual Conference of SEATJ, Charleston, SC. in print 2002.
Uehara, Satoshi, Schneider, Keiko, and Omoto Yasuhiro. インターネット上での日本語教材〜北米でのオンライン教材を視座として〜 The 7th Annual Conference of the Association for Natural Language Proceedings, Tokyo University, 480-483
copyright 2002 Yasuhiro Omoto