Assistance to collaborative distance learning between students who want to be a Japanese teacher and Japanese learners with emphasis on understanding of different cultures

With the recent proliferation of the Internet, e-leaming is now in increasing demand. Against this backdrop, authors have been working on development of teaching assistance systems, among others education of foreign language such as German, Chinese, and Japanese, in compliance with the requests from teachers and schools. Then we started a new study to introduce e-leaming in practice teaching. Practice teaching in Japan is a program where students who want to be a teacher teach actual classes for a few weeks in order to acquire teaching experience. At present they do not have any other opportunities to teach classes. The system authors propose in this paper aims to assist practice teaching by providing other opportunities to teach aside from the few weeks of practice teaching. We tried to achieve this goal through distance education that connects practice teachers who want to be a Japanese teacher and students who are learning Japanese. This system also tries to enable diverse communication between them by using voice files and video images in electronic bulletin boards and other features. Further, the goal of this system is not only to provide assistance to practice teaching, but also to help efficient development of Japanese learner's language skills. As described above, this system was developed with three aims, assistance to practice teaching, Japanese learning and interchange of different cultures.