Teaching a class with students of a different cultural background : A case study of teaching Japanese with re-written materials

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This study is an attempt at pursuing the possibility of introducing Japanese as school subject to students of non-native Japanese at earlier stages than normally expected. We introduced the re-written version of an original text to non-native students of Japanese when they had been taught how to read "katakana" for one month. The objective was to help them acquire the ability to "learn how to learn in Japanese." It turned out that six months later, the students were able to actively participate in normal Japanese classes of their grade and to perform classroom activities relevant to their cognitive developmental process.