Language reflects how people think and behave in their culture. To have successful conversations, both language use and cultural awareness should be taken into consideration. Undeniably, Japanese grammar is different from Thai making it even harder for Thai learners to have fluent and appropriate conversations in the Japanese language. In the…

Japanese EFL international students may experience high levels of apprehension when communicating in English due to their culture, educational background, attitudes towards the role of English in their society, and lack of opportunities to practice speaking in English. Although the students in this study had studied English before joining the…

Language immersion programs, which are a form of bilingual education, are shaped by multiple factors, including the specific characteristics of the region, the language, the community and the learners, as well as national and regional policies on language education. While the underdeveloped production skills of immersion students have been…

This study compares the frequency and distribution of different types of corrective feedback (CF) (recasts, prompts and explicit correction) and learner uptake in 43 hours of classroom interaction at the 4th-5th grade level across three instructional settings: (1) two content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms in Spain with English…

This volume is a collection of selected refereed papers presented at the Association of Teachers of Japanese Annual Spring Conference held at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in March of 2011. It not only covers several important topics on teaching and learning spoken and written Japanese and culture in and beyond classroom settings, but also…

This study presents an insight into content and language integrated learning (CLIL) practices in the Australian state of Queensland. The article comprises four main sections. The first section outlines the context of CLIL in Australia and Queensland; there follows a brief review of the literature on stakeholders in CLIL programmes, such as…

This paper explores Malaysian students' problems within their science and engineering tertiary courses in Japanese through their diary entries and semi-structured interviews. The study analyses how students implement management strategies to overcome their problems. Although many studies are available regarding students' academic activities in a…

This study is an investigation of the development of vocabulary knowledge during study abroad (SA), intensive domestic immersion (IM) and academic-year formal classroom (AY) learning. Its focus was the growth of vocabulary knowledge in Japanese--a language where little SA research has been conducted to date. Unlike most studies addressing…

Language teachers are called upon to understand both the nature of students' intercultural competence and their own role in its development. Limited research attention has been paid to the relationship between the types of behaviour that language teachers model and the intercultural competence their students acquire. This article reports on a case…

In Australian two-way immersion programs approximately 20-40% of instruction takes place in the target language. While much has been written about such programs targeting French and German, little has been written about Japanese immersion programs. The aim of this research is to provide a better understanding of children's second language…

The Language and Culture Initial Teacher Education: Primary (LACITEP) program in Australia, a preservice teacher education program designed to train elementary school teachers as specialists in Japanese language teaching, is described. In the partial immersion format, at least half the courses are taught in Japanese. Courses in the first year…

Reports a study of Japanese students learning English in Japan. Supports the notion that the necessity to communicate forces learners to notice linguistic problems, and that noticing a problem can push learners to modify their original input. Through this cognitive process, learners acquire second languages, especially the ability to produce oral…

Discusses the Queensland Languages and Cultures Initial Teacher Education Program (LACITEP), in which 50% to 80% of the subjects taken are delivered through Japanese immersion. Notes that the promotion of second-language learning is a common aim of all immersion classrooms and provides insight into how the LACITEP Health and Physical Education…

Examines the use of e-mail to facilitate second language acquisition in an immersion education setting, with particular focus on an e-mail exchange between college students of Japanese as a second language in Australia and native speakers in Japan. Suggests that e-mail is a potentially valuable medium in language learning and could be useful in…

International Grammar School was founded twenty years ago on the belief in the benefits of immersion language learning for children. It offers immersion second language learning in German, Italian, French, and Japanese which continues through kindergarten into the high school years. With language as the medium and not the object of learning,…