Learning Materials Design for Teaching Taiwanese as a Foreign Language--Japanese Exchange Students as the Target Learners

[[abstract]]I have been teaching Taiwanese in NTU Language Center for many years. Although the current learning materials and teaching model work fairly well, they still fail to satisfy all of the learners' needs. For this reason, it is necessary to review the whole teaching process and re-examine the teaching methods, learning materials, learners' personality traits, and learners' motivation in order to improve the present situation. It has been more than 115 years since Japanese people learned Taiwanese for the first time, and nowadays more than half of the foreign Taiwanese language learners come from Japan. Therefore, I would like to make use of this chance to design new Taiwanese learning material and lesson plans for the beginners whose native language is Japanese. I hope those new learning material and lesson plans can help the Japanese exchange students who want to learn some basic Taiwanese in a short-term program in NTU Language Center. In addition, this study aims to answer the following questions: 1. What are the Japanese exchange students' motivations, advantages, and disadvantages when they join a short-term program to learn Taiwanese in Taiwan? 2. Are the current adopted materials suitable for their use? 3. How can teachers design proper Taiwanese learning material and lesson plans for Japanese exchange students in a short-term Taiwanese learning program? Utilizing the interview method, literature review method, and contrastive analysis method in this study, I can survey the advantages and disadvantages of current available learning materials and teaching methods to compare and contrast them and can understand the Japanese exchange students' special backgrounds, motivations, usage situations, advantages, and disadvantages. As a result, I am able to design new learning materials, lesson plans, and classroom/outdoor activities that are suitable for Japanese exchange students' use.