Development of Japanese elementary curriculum that emphasises spoken-ness

This paper discusses the curriculum development which aims to enhance the spoken-ness or naturalness of two-way spoken conversation in Japanese. There are many special features in Japanese spoken conversation, such as particle omission, sentence-final particles, response tokens, fillers, repeat/repair and inversion. Being special characteristics of spoken Japanese, these features are indispensable to 'natural' Japanese, and should be included in Japanese learning process if the goal of the Japanese education is to acquire natural Japanese. Despite their significance, these features have not sufficiently and systematically been taught in the current Japanese education. This is due to the fact that these features have not been recognised as formal learning objectives by Japanese teachers. However, there is no theoretical or empirical evidence that these features are too difficult for beginners and should not be taught at the elementary level. The study will discuss the curriculum development in the elementary courses of Japanese program at the Australian National University (ANU), which systematically adopts these features at the early stage of learning process. It will detail the development background, curriculum contents, and assessment of the special features. Since the curriculum was first implemented in the Japanese elementary courses at the ANU five years ago, no students or teachers have provided negative comments about learning/teaching these features. It is crucial that teachers first recognise those features as formal learning objectives and include in their Japanese courses.