Abstract:

The demand for Japanese language has increased steadily in recent years in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China both for commercial reasons and for academic reason The Mongols who live in Inner Mongolia usually use Mongolian language for oral communication and the traditional Mongolian script for written communication. But most of the educational classes and the materials including Japanese language trainings are provided in Chinese in the past. From the viewpoint of educational methodology, the situation that students cannot take a course in their mother tongue indicates several steps of knowledge division that might be occurring during this learning process. Since 2003, Chinese government and the Chinese Ministry of Education begin to encourage bilingual education for ethnic minorities to use both their own languages and Chinese, the common national language. In spite of the improvement in Mongolian language utilization, educators and instructors at educational institutes in Inner Mongolia have not developed teaching materials written with traditional Mongolian script, compared with the situation in Mongolia. In this study, we develop the new teaching method for learning Japanese language for Mongolian speakers. Our innovative approach of constructing the teaching method is to utilize the grammatical similarities between traditional Mongolian and Japanese – the feature of agglutinative languages. Languages in the world are classified into three general categories based on the expression of grammatical functions. One of the category is “agglutinative language” which include Japanese, together with Mongolian, Korean and Turkish., The essence for the method is to construct a “Mongolian-Japanese grammar comparison chart”．In Japanese grammar, it is understood that the use of particle is most difficult to learn. Therefore, we focus on the usage of particles among the students to develop teaching materials, and construct the chart for particle. To do it, we compare all particles of Japanese and Mongolian languages, and analyzed the similarities and the differences. Then, we have summarized how these particles correspond to each other in the figure. After constructing the chart, we develop learning materials based on the chart for complex/simple correspondence topics. In Japanese grammar, there are several types of particle. To choose the most important type of particle, we performed a morphological analysis for typical text, such as newpaper. In our case, we treat Japanese famous newspaper, and we focus on case particle from the result of frequency of appearance. With the method, we conduct tests to subjects who come from Inner Monglia to analyze the influence of the method. From the test, we believe the method seems good influence to subjects whose mother tongue is Mongolia. Through the process, we indicate the possibility that “grammar comparison chart”, which the method of developing foreign language learning material is useful method for learner, teacher, and educational designer.