A Research on a Communicative Japanese CALL System

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In 1995 and 1996, the advanced Japanese (Japanese 5) students at The University of Melbourne have had e-mail communication with students majoring in Teaching Japanese as a foreign language at Tohoku University.The Japanese e-mail exchange was designed as a part of the core unit of the course in Melbourne. After the participants read the same Japanese article on the week's topic, Australian students sent their comments via e-mail to Tohoku students who responded to them.The 1995 learners had high proficiency in all aspects of Japanese, while 1996 learners showed a wide diversity in their background and language proficiency. Since 6 courses were offered in 1996, the majority of students in Japanese 5 were in the higher intermediate level. So the e-mail communication tasks successful in 1995 needed revision. The calss size was 7 or 8 times larger than the previous year and it became impossible to carry out the most favored tele-conferencing sessions due to time and equipment shortage.The effects of the project has been examined by questionnaires, interviews and by e-mail text analysis. The results on 1995 students show that the students have become to write more and to use more correct and complicated sentences in more sophisticated ways. The 1996 students, however, show different tendencies. Although they regarded themselves to have improved in vocabulary, reading and writing skills, the students who wrote more were rare. The project 1996 seemed to have no effect in motivating them to have real communication with the native Japanese.For the higher intermediate learners, writing a lot in Japanese is very demanding. It is definitely necessary for them to have enjoyable activities to keep their motivation to write. In 1997 we will examine how the video letter exchange works for it.