Development of Internet-optimized Self-study Materials and Learning Environment

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The aim of this study is to build a learning system for foreign students to learn Japanese making use of the latest information technology and IT environments. We also aim to create a more effective learning environment by improving the system based on the feedback from the learners' records of learning and achievements. This system offers the learners Japanese teaching materials that utilize multi-media technologies, records detailed behavior and status of the users, and combines this information with their achievements so that it could well grasp their weak points and supplement them. At the same time, we try to find a way to create effective teaching materials and page structures that ease the learning procedures. We aim to establish those system structures and teaching materials that directly affect the effectiveness of learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing that are four important factors in language learning. We have implemented our ideas on an e-learning system and evaluated it.We arranged an experimental course where Taiwanese university freshman students at a department of Japanese used our materials on our e-learning system, and we examined the effect of our system. Our evaluation consists analyses of teachers' remarks, the users' behavior logs, and questionnaires. The teachers' remarks have revealed that the students use the system differently according to their proficiency levels. Our analyses of behavior logs and questionnaires have revealed that some of the materials are learned infrequently and thus make little contribution to their learning, and some others are difficult and so avoided. The most important achievement of this study is that it enables us to evaluate language teaching materials in terms of objective access logs in addition to the conventional evaluation of the materials from the perspectives of developers and users. This study can have some impact on development of CALL materials and new ways of evaluating them.