Project for Improving Japanese Listening and Speaking Skills through Skype: A Survey of Students' opinions and Self-assessments

Abstract

Since students learning Japanese abroad have few opportunities to make contact with Japanese people in everyday life, it is very important and necessary to conduct activities aimed at improving listening and speaking skills and communication skills regularly. We carried out extracurricular activities with Japanese and Thai students who had conversations through Skype. A pair of Japanese students and Thai students had a 30 minute conversation through Skype twice a week, speaking in Thai for 15 minutes and speaking in Japanese for 15 minutes. This was practiced for 6 weeks in total from June to August 2016. We conducted a questionnaire survey shortly after the activity started and again after the activity had finished. For this piece of research, we studied students' opinions of this activity and self-assessments. The results confirmed that students have a positive opinion of the activity and their motivation for learning Japanese has increased. More than 90 percent of students had fewer conversations than the number of hours and number of times that they were asked to. The main reason for this was because their free time did not match with their conversational partner. Most students prepared a topic before starting a conversation. The main topic was everyday life. However, they still had difficulties finding things to talk about. Students also had language problems, especially concerning vocabulary.