An elementary Japanese textbook for the purpose of teaching authentic Japaneses

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Textbooks in Japanese as a foreign/second language persist in introducing learners to Micky Mouse Japanese, funny Japanese which may be grammatically "correct" but is not sociolinguistically and pragmatically real. We claim that the most fundamental cause of this problem is in the teachers' prescriptive attitude towards the language and language teaching ; the prevailing idea that spoken Japanese is inferior to written Japanese and should not be taught to foreign learners.We argue that foreign/second language teaching should be based on a descriptive, and not prescriptive, vies of the language if the aim is to help learners acquire communicative competence in the language. The elementary Japanese textbook which we propose is designed to :1. introduce authentic but limited register of Japanese ; the JApanese (Tokyo dialect) that is actually used in everyday conversation among educated adults, and2. provide information not only about the grammatical properties of the linguistic forms but also the sociolinguistic and pragmatic principles that govern their use.