The Impact of a Study : Work Programme in Japan on Interactive Competence in Contact Situations

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  • 短期滞日語学/企業研修が接触場面における学習者のインターアクション能力に及ぼした影響について
  • impact of a study work programme in Jap

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Abstract

The fifteen subjects investigated in this study were students at a Hong Kong university. The subjects had received 460 hours of formal instruction in Japanese and passed the Level Three test of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test before participating in a nine-week study / work programme in Japan. The paper reports on an investigation on what types of interactive competence in Japanese most of the subjects succeed or fail to acquire after the programme. The main data consisting of two sets of written tests, two sets of role-playing tests and two sets of composition exercises before and after the programme were collected and analyzed. Supplementary data from interviews with the subjects after the programme and written feedback from supervisors and host families on the subjects during the programme were also collected. Although the period of the study / work programme in Japan was relatively short, its impact upon the development of students' interactive competence in Japanese was considerable. As far as linguistic competence is concerned, the most conspicuous gains were in aural comprehension, pronunciation, and intonation. Fluency improved dramatically, but vocabulary, grammar, and reading tests did not furnish comparable results. The subjects acquired confidence to produce longer written texts, but this confidence was not matched by improvements in accuracy. Sociolinguistic competence also improved, since pragmatic competence increased to include finer expressions of refusal, non-verbal features, and the use of back-channelling. In order to solve communication problems, the subjects actively used various communication strategies. They also acquired competence to correct the deficiencies in their lexicon through the use of written characters (hitsudan). The subjects also advanced to a considerable extent in their acquisition of sociocultural competence: knowledge of Japan, Japanese way of life, human relations in the work place as well as in home settings, and business customs.

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