Linking research and practice is one of the missions that researchers and teachers of Japanese in the twenty-first century are assigned to accomplish in order to advance Japanese language education. Believing the importance of researchers to think seriously about instruction and teachers to incorporate research insights in their instructional innovations and interventions, this panel is organized.
There will be three presenters who will discuss their research studies and finings followed by discussion of how instruction can be innovated. The first paper will discuss the ability to read kanji in on- and kun-readings among native and non-native Japanese and its relationship to Japanese language proficiency (i.e., written and spoken skills), followed by discussion of what the results can suggest for the future Japanese language instruction. The second paper will discuss how instruction can capitalize on students? metalinguistic sophistication which allows them to detect structural regularities inherent in input in promoting analytical, self- regulatory approaches to kanji learning and processing. The third paper will look at the use of the linguistic cue usage in L2 Japanese sentence comprehension and discuss how instruction can foster optimal attentional biases among students by manipulating input.
The panel will be wrapped up by discussing how these research insights can be incorporated into curriculum design and materials development by the discussant.