Mariko NAITO (内藤 真理子)

Papers written in Japanese by international students in undergraduate courses frequently include repetitions of words and expressions, thereby making the papers appear poorly written. These redundancies may be avoided by training students to become more aware of unnecessary repetitions in writing. However, our research indicates that students have difficulty avoiding such repetitions as this topic is not actively addressed in many Japanese language writing textbooks and lectures. Therefore, we devised a study to support efforts to heighten student awareness of repetitive writing. In this study, cases of repetition from papers written by international students were identified by several Japanese native speakers. Next, we classified these redundancies into four types based on the perspectives of prominence, cohesion, logicality, and coherence to analyze the papers at both the sentence-level and discourse-level. Lastly, we compared these with sentences that were evaluated to be non-repetitive.

In the 1990s, fervent debates on whether to promote the Kansai dialect in Japanese education did not reach a conclusion. However, the students' consciousness of the dialect may provide some information to resolve this problem. In this study, we conducted a questionnaire survey on the consciousness of elementary level and pre-advanced level foreign students regarding their short-term stay in Kansai. According to the results, regardless of their Japanese proficiency level, the students liked the Kansai region, had a strong learning motivation, and desired to study the Kansai dialect at universities and through natural learning.