Empirical Research into the Lesson Development in the Japanese Language Focusing on the Way of Presentation

This paper is the second research report following the one in the Bulletin of Nara University of Education, Vol.46, No. 1. The research findings in the previous paper are as follows. 1. Students seem to work out the given problem voluntarily by responding to the questions of the teacher. However, these problems are prepared by the teacher in advance, not the ones constructed by students themselves. 2. Students tend to stick to the fragment of the passage for the purpose of inferencing the behaviors and feelings of the characters in the narrative. Therefore, they are rather weak at interpreting using top-down techniques. This is due to the fact that the teaching plan requires intensive reading. This teaching plan should be reviewed as well as the overall teaching plan of the whole unit. In this paper, the authors tried to take up the above mentioned issues by introducing the technique, 'presentation in students' classroom activities. Students were always required to be aware of the preparatory activities for the presentation as an outcome of the learning activities. We could confirm the following research findings. 1. Each student was able to articulate his or her understanding about narratives reading tasks and continually throughout the lesson. 2. Introducing the technique, 'presentation' helps students comprehend the characters in the narrative in time order, and consequently, they could relate the parts to the whole passages of the narrative. 3. Introducing the technique, 'presentation' encouraged and facilitated students' active discussion in the class and the discussion resulted in the sense of achievement and contribution which students could enjoy respectively through participating in talking to each other