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We did the research of exchange students’ comprehension of contents with and
without their mother tongues. We prepared 3 types of contents: A – electronic
field (the rate of technical term t is 63.0%), B – mechanical field (t is 43.7%),
C – information and communication field (t is 37.5%). Learners viewed the
contents both with mother tongues support (type II) and without it (type I)
and they were asked to evaluate their comprehension of contents with three
degrees: ”E1: I understood the content”, “E2: I understood the content a little”,
“E3: I could not understand the content at all.” Table 1 shows the result of the
rate of understanding contents.
Table 1. The rate of understanding contents
Contents A Contents B Contents C
Type I Type II Type I Type II Type I Type II
E1 13% 27% 13% 20% 13% 27%
E2 20% 66% 20% 73% 20% 73%
E3 67% 7% 67% 7% 67% 0%
Seven out of ten students answered E3 in the case of type I contents, but in
the case of type II contents seven out of ten students answered E2. This means
that for subjects including many technical terms, especially highly specialized
subjects, learners’ comprehension can be clearly improved with mother
tongue translation support for technical terms. Moreover, applying summary
submit and evaluation function has the effect not only to encourage learners’
comprehension but also to train to learn technical terms.
Case Study 2: Problem Based Language Activities in Cyberspace
The students’ learning activities is not only to learn knowledge via contents.
The internal thought alienation or knowledge acquired by the communication
with others is also important as an achievement of educational activities.
In particular, growing attention is paid to collaboration important for the
promotion of learners’ independent actions, student participation learning,
adoption of cross-cultural communication to respond the globalization that
bring drastic change to university education. We implement the Problem
Based Learning (PBL) in cyberspace as an effective method of providing
education smoothly (Kanematsu et. al.(2011), Nakahira et. al. (2010),
Taguchi et. al. (2011), Nakahira et. al.(2011), etc.). PBL is a learning method
developed by McMaster University in Canada. The learning method is
designed for one or a small group of learners to be able to acquire systematic
knowledge on a subject by their independent activities (such as research on
the previous works, discussion and so on) to find a method to solve problems.
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