Literacy in the Foreign Language Curriculum: A Supplementary Grammar Course for Intermediate Japanese Instruction

要旨

Literacy in foreign language education has been gaining increased attention in recent years. To facilitate literacy, and in accordance with this trend, in the 2005–06 academic year we established a supplementary grammar course to accompany the intermediate (second-year) level of our Japanese language curriculum. This paper reports on this project. The organization is as follows. In the balance of this section, we first describe our language curriculum and then present our experiment on vocabulary and grammar that led us to conclude that a carefully designed grammar course was essential for improving literacy. In §2, we provide a brief history of foreign language pedagogy and then discuss the theoretical foundations for the design of our supplementary grammar course. §3 narrates the development of our course design. §4 presents several sample exercises that we have created. Conclusions follow in §5. The Japanese Language Program at the University of California, Berkeley offers five years (10 semesters) of language instruction. The first three years consist of 5-unit courses, meeting five hours a week (150 hours of instruction per year); the fourth and fifth years have 4-unit courses, meeting three hours a week (90 hours per year). Accompanying these core courses are 1-unit supplementary courses. So far, we have established kanji and listening courses for first-year students, and kanji and grammar courses for second-year students. The latter constitutes the topic of this paper. We plan to develop additional supplementary courses in the near future. We now explain why we decided to create and implement a supplementary grammar course with the main goal of facilitating efficient reading. The acquisition of both vocabulary and grammar is well known to be

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