Reflecting on your own language: A case study of an advanced Japanese course at the Australian National University

This reports on a student research project carried out in an advanced Japanese language course at the Australian National University in 2012. The aim of the project was for the students to present an academic analysis of a particular social or cultural issue confronting contemporary Japan. The task discussed in this study is one part of the staged preparation in the research project, where students were required to prepare and conduct interviews with a Japanese native speaker as a means of gathering data. The aim was to promote students' awareness of the gap between the target Japanese and their own current stage of Japanese. They transcribed their interaction with the native speaker interviewee, and then analysed the linguistic and socio-pragmatic features of their own Japanese language usage. The pedagogical framework for the project draws on the second language acquisition research of Swain's (1993) 'comprehensible output hypothesis' and Long's (1996) 'interaction hypothesis'. Swain and Long both argue that input alone is not enough, and that output, especially when it promotes the negotiation of meaning, is important to language acquisition. The student evaluation revealed that 85% of the students felt that the task helped their learning of Japanese, and 81% thought that critical analysis of their own linguistic errors helped their learning of Japanese