●1.Project Title

【Project Title】Study on Teaching and Learning Japanese as a Second Language in a Multicultural Society：Research on the acquisition of Japanese as a second language in different learning environments
【Project Leader】SAKODA Kumiko

●2.Summary of the Study

Using the framework of Second Language Acquisition studies, this study empirically elucidated the relationship between the language environment and acquisition process of Japanese learners, drawing on a number of related fields such as psycolinguistics and contrastive linguistics. The study is comprised of the following parts: (1) Investigation of how differences in learners' environment of learning affects their acquisition of Japanese; e.g. "environment of native language and that of the second language," "classroom instruction environment and natural acquisition environment", etc. (2) Investigation of how learners' native language affects their acquisition of Japanese (language transfer); and (3) Investigation of the content and structure of the corpus of Japanese learners speech (utterances), composition, etc., which are useful as basic material for (1) and (2). These studies lead to pathfinding of research that comprehensively analyzes second language acquisition from the perspective of learners' inner and outer language environments. It also reorganized the basic data of second language acquisition research.