A Research on CALL to Develop Multi-skills in Japanese

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The research purpose is to develop a CALL system to enhance Japanese learners' proficiency multidimensionally. Multi-skills include the four skills : speaking, listening, reading and writing, with sociolinguistic competence and cross-cultural and intercultural communication skills. For overseas learners, it is very important to have authentic communication opportunities to foster those skills. To have the learners raise proper motivation to communicate in Japanese language, the research team had introduced the use of Internet into classrooms.In 1997, the research focus was on the video clip mailing. If an Australian learner of Japanese communicates with a native Japanese by sending and receiving multimedia mail through Internet, it would help him/her to acquire more authentic communication skills in the target language. The research team developed a video clip package system for the purpose, however the user interface of it was not so friendly as expected. Consequently, the focus of the research shifted towards the use of web pages instead of the video clips.In 1998, the students of the University of Melbourne studying Japanese and the students of Tohoku University majoring in Teaching of Japanese as a Foreign Language developed web pages as one of the required tasks of each class. Besides, the e-mail exchanges have conducted through the academic year of the University of Melbourne. The self-introduction web page made by Tohoku students provided the Melbourne students a clear idea of how the web pages could work on the interpersonal communication in the cross-cultural setting. It also worked as a simple sample of a web page and as a motivation driver for the web page construction. It became clear that although the web page creation in Japanese is a rather heavy task for the learners of Japanese, it works well if sufficient guidance and information have thoroughly provided step by step.