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Case Study 1: The Language in Class Contents
First, we consider the relation between the language in class contents and
knowledge acquirement of learners.
In the Nagaoka University of Technology (NUT), there are about 200 exchange
students. We extract 10% exchange students (the total number of students is
27, the largest mother tongue holder were Spanish with 10.4%, Malay with
8.3%, Chinese with 4.2%, Vietnam with 3.1%, Mongolian and Indonesian each
with 1.4%) and take questionnaires for language use. Seven of ten students are
enrolled at NUT with the primary objective of receiving professional education
(engineering), not to learn language. For the most of exchange students,
the competence in Japanese (non-mother tongue) is minimum for contextembedded
language. Moreover, our university has no care of teaching language
to bachelor course exchange students – they have to use Japanese for classes.
For master course, there are several classes given in English, but students need
to be good at Japanese or English to attend a class. It means they need to master
Japanese or English if they would like to make high quality study or learning.
From these facts, we can point out that exchange students in our university
face a deep estrangement between special subjects they hope to acquire and
the context-reduced language needed to achieve their hope. However, as the
exchange students are small in number and their mother tongues are diverse,
it is very difficult to support the mother tongue of each foreign student.
Therefore, we have developed the multilingual learning support system with
ICT and researched reactions of exchange students to the system. Figure 1
shows the structure of the multilingual learning support system.
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Figure 1. The structure of the multilingual learning support system