Attitudes of Thai Learners towards Teaching in Japanese by Thai Teacher in Advanced Japanese Reading Class

Abstract

The objective of this research was to study the attitudes of Thai learners toward being taught in Japanese by a Thai teacher in an advanced Japanese reading class. The population of the study was 4th- and 5th - year students majoring in Japanese that were enrolled in the subject “Japanese Reading and Discussion,” which is a required subject in the first semester of the 4th year of the Bachelor of Arts Program in Japanese at Kasetsart University (Revised Edition 2012). One hundred and thirteen students participated in the study and the results were as follows. Most of the learners (85%) expected the teacher to use the Japanese language more than 70 percent of the time to conduct the class. It was also found that the learners were satisfied with the lecturer using Japanese at a high level (x=4.27). Further, most of the learners expressed the following: the
Japanese language that the Thai teacher used in the classroom was easy to understand; they had learned Japanese from the Japanese language that the Thai teacher used in the classroom; and the instruction in Japanese by the Thai teacher increased their Japanese input and encouraged them to use more Japanese. Moreover, most of the learners did not feel that it was strange or a burden to listen to Japanese by a Thai teacher. In addition, what the learners thought that they most learned from the Japanese language that Thai teacher used in the classroom was “vocabulary” (88%). The second thing was “pronunciation” (71%), and the third was “spoken language that may not be syntactic” (59%). The study also found that the teaching of the Japanese language by a Thai teacher helped the learners build confidence in their speaking ability and stimulated their motivation to learn Japanese.