Development of Teaching Method of Japanese Conversation for Research Students

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The aim of this study is to develop teaching method of Japanese conversations for research students at university. They have their own special fields of research and features of using mostly English with their colleagues or friends. As learners of language, they prefer deductive-oriented learning and obtaining explicit knowledge.So, we took a kind of "cognitive approach" for teaching conversation to extend their speaking ability, and put emphasis on intentions or effects of conversational (or grammatical) expressions: what they can express or what are expressed with their verbal or non verbal behaviors to other people.We tried to make learners to be conscious to "discourse-constructing process" and to acquire various skills of constructing discourse (e. g. starting a conversation, changing a topic etc.), and to reflect meaning of some elements (e. g. modality, ending particles etc.). We also created other tasks, based on the same concept, "Minimal Conversations" for understanding "high-context nature (Hall 1977) of Japanese, "Casual Conversations" for understanding various speaking styles of Japanese, "Telephone Conversations" for getting information using communicative strategies, and "Further Practice on Grammar" as a kind of workshop of usage of grammar, which enables learners to grasp essential meanings of items and to examine how to apply them to learners real life context.