Japanese Language Teaching in the Nineties

The growth in demand for Japanese in the English-speaking world as a whole, but especially in the United States, Australia and Britain has led to rapid developments in Japanese language teaching and the need for more and improved resources. This collection of papers examines these developments and their implications for the future in a series of case studies by experts from both Europe and Japan. For example the system evolved in Nagoya for accurate aptitude testing is detailed here as is the work/study programme for students at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies designed to gain the most from a period in Japan. The current issues and problems involved in teaching and learning Japanese are discussed: how to deal with the large number of kanji that must be learnt, how to overcome the scarcity of authentic materials outside Japan, the different cultural contexts, and the growing diversity of students requirements. The syllabus of Britain's new GCSE examination in Japanese is included with an outline of the Department of Trade and Industry's Diploma programme and details of other examinations such as the Japan Foundation's Proficiency Test. Ongoing developments in computer-assisted learning such as the Tokyo CASTEL/J project, designed to revolutionise the teaching and learning of Japanese, and suggestions for an effective bi-lingual dictionary (with examples) are included. The papers also draw on current theory in language teaching such as autonomous learning and random aquisition versus structured learning.