The issue of gendered speech styles has been well discussed in the sociolinguistics field. As previous studies showed, there are various aspects of women's speech styles different from men's speech styles in Japanese; such as, politeness, frequency of honorific use, sentence final particles, and conversation strategies (e.g., Ide, 1990, McGloin, 1990; Ohara et al. 2001, Shibamoto, 1990). At the same time, it is recently argued that actual speech of women has been masculine and vice versa (Miyazaki 2002). However, major textbooks used in Japanese as a-second-language classroom provide traditional gendered speech styles (Siegal & Okamoto, 2003). In order to acquire appropriate use of gendered speech style within context, the knowledge of men's and women's speech differences is important for students learning Japanese as a foreign language.
In this paper, the author examines the effective instructions in order for students to acquire appropriate gendered speech styles by conducting the surveys of textbooks and teacher's and students' attitudes toward gendered speech styles. First, the frequency of gendered speech in major textbooks and classroom instructions is examined. Second, students' ability of appropriate use of gendered speech is examined based on spoken and written passages created by students. In the survey, paired students who are enrolled in the intermediate Japanese course are asked to talk about a given topic in casual speech. The conversations are recorded, and decoded in order to examine the appropriateness and naturalness of gendered speech use. In addition, the students are asked to create skits, and the appropriate use of gendered speech in the written scripts is examined. Finally, a questionnaire that asks teachers' perspective of gendered speech in classrooms is conducted.
The author will conclude that students can acquire some features of traditional gendered speech styles, however; we need more authentic materials for appropriate use of gendered speech.