A Proposal to Improve the Japanese Language Teaching Method

In Japanese Language Teaching, the communicative approach is increasingly adopted. This paper showed some examples of this adoption. In all of the examples, only communicative drills were used in the traditional structural syllabus. I don't think it's a good way. If a teacher wants to give communicative competence to his students, he should change the syllabus from the structural one to the functional one. Until now, there havn't been enough discussions about the Japanese language teaching method. Most teachers were therefore apt to use only some typical communicative drills without changing the syllabus or the text. And they thought it was the best way, because both grammatical and communicative skill could be taught. But there are some basic differences between the structural syllabus and the functional syllabus. So adopting only communicative drills, is not an efficient way to give communicative competence. Since the types of the students will be diversified in future, a course design will be much more important. In the process of a course design, deciding a syllabus is the most important thing. A syllabus should correspond to the method. According to my opinion, the traditional structural syllabus doesn't correspond to the communicative approach. If one wants to teach effectively by the communicative approach, he has to make the Japanese functional syllabus first of all. And this type of syllabus is the most expected syllabus in Japanese Language Teaching now. In order to find the best method for a course, all the teachers have to study not only Japanese grammar, but also various kind of theaching method