The purpose of this study is to investigate if the implementation into the curriculum of classroom writing activities based on theoretical findings will facilitate the development of kanji writing by JFL learners. It is said that the process of writing kanji involves "mastery of the actual segments and clarification as to their proper locations/positions" and it becomes "crucially important in writing kanji" (Hatta et al., 1997, p. 415). It is also said that the motor (or kinetic) representation of the kanji can be retrieved directly without retrieving the accompanying phonetic or semantic representations (Watanabe, 1991). Naka & Naoi (1995) report that repeated writing is an effective strategy for memory, and that it facilitates memory not only for kanji but also for unfamiliar graphic designs.
It is reported that common kanji errors made by Japanese children and adults are shape-based which are caused by confusing components, such as the radical or phonetic or by homophone substitutions (Hatta et al., 1998; Yoshida et al., 1975). On the other hand, according to Hatta et al. (1997), 64.5% of kanji writing errors made by their American subjects resulted in non-existent kanji types (e.g., characters with added or omitted strokes or segments) whereas only 15% of the errors made by the native Japanese subjects were non-kanji. Such results suggest two things that JFL learners may be lacking: i.e., awareness of intrastructure of kanji characters and kinetic memory.
In order to reinforce the above two points, several activities were proposed and implemented into the advanced Japanese reading and writing course in the fall of 2001 at a large Midwestern university. Kanji writing errors will be collected from students throughout the fall semester and compared with the results from the Hatta et al. study so as to assess the effectiveness of those activities.