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This article updates the trends and developments of Japanese as a second language (JSL) research since Mori and Mori (2011) by reviewing nearly 200 selected empirical studies published in English or Japanese between 2010 and early 2019. The first section of this review examines the cognitive aspects of second language (L2) Japanese development, focusing on vocabulary and kanji (i.e., Chinese characters transferred into Japanese) learning, syntactic development, and the issues surrounding reading and writing. The second part investigates sociocultural issues in L2 Japanese development and use, including pragmatic development, multilingual/translingual perspectives, and multilingual youth. The third section explores the role of affective variables (primarily learner motivation) in L2 Japanese development. The last section considers various pedagogical issues, including corpus-based studies and the development of materials and resources, instructional designs and classroom studies, technology-enhanced language learning and new instructional models, critical approaches to teaching Japanese and content-based instruction. The review of these themes illuminates trends and emerging areas of interest in post-2010 L2 Japanese research inspired by current developments in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research, as well as unique features of Japanese language and sociocultural contexts.

The current study examines how Japanese and international care workers at a geriatric healthcare facility in Japan manage one of the most fundamental elements of handover interactions -- person reference and recognition to identify a particular care receiver and discuss their specific conditions and needs. By using Conversation analysis (CA) as a central mode of inquiry, this study examines how the participants approach the establishment of referential common ground while simultaneously attending to the progressivity of ongoing activity, and how written records on care receivers are incorporated into the process. The juxtaposition of three international care workers' performances effectively illustrates how the international care workers' performative competence is co-constructed with their Japanese colleagues in this interactive process and how the participants exhibit different kinds of orientations towards the activity arranged for the dual purpose of actual handover and for the international care workers' language learning and socialization. As a contribution to a growing body of CA studies of second language talk at work, this study considers possible tensions between engaging in a language-learning activity regarding specific linguistic elements during a particular professional activity and learning to become a competent actor in the particular activity.

Translingualism advocates for the appreciation of multilingual speakers' fluid, flexible, and creative deployment of semiotic resources without regard to the ideological constructs of named languages. While this scholarship has been developed primarily in the contexts of world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and bilingual education in Anglophone nations, its implications to foreign language education in higher education have not been fully explored. The current article addresses this issue by shedding light on the conditions of teaching and learning of indigenous languages spoken in once-colonized regions of the world as an additional language for English speakers. More specifically, it examines how American students who participated in an eight-week Yorùbá study abroad program in Nigeria navigated a rather conspicuous gap between a monolingual utopia promoted by the program and the complex translingual realities of everyday language use outside of the classroom. Through the review of the perspectives of students with diverse backgrounds, the article discusses the significance of taking sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts surrounding the target language into account to cultivate informed learners.

The recent influx of international students from Asia to the United States has drastically changed the demographics of students studying languages, including languages other than English, in many large universities. For some languages, it is not uncommon for international students from Asia to constitute more than 50% of current enrollments in a language class. This new reality poses a number of questions, including how to meet students' diverse needs and goals for language study and how to mobilize increasing student diversity to enhance the development of global competence among all students, regardless of country of origin. Using semi-structured exploratory interviews conducted with domestic and international students of Japanese as a foreign language at an American university, this study investigated the challenges and opportunities presented in the globalized language classroom.

A growing number of studies have examined qualitative research interviews in terms of how researchers' own identities and agendas are implicated in the construction of interviewees' responses. Adopting the constructionist conception of research interviews, the current study introduces a comparative analysis of 2 interviews with a multilingual speaker of Korean, English, and Japanese conducted by 2 researchers who come from distinctive cultural, linguistic, and professional backgrounds. Informed by ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and membership categorization analysis, the current analysis reveals how the interviewee came to co-construct a different set of accounts with each interviewer in comparable segments where the same topics were discussed. The focal segments examined in this study can be seen as an illustration of how this Korean student interacting in her everyday life with others may co-construct her ever-shifting identities vis-a-vis membership categories such as American, Korean, or Korean-American. (Contains 11 notes and 8 excerpts.)

Encountering trouble producing a word in the midst of a turn at talk is an everyday experience for foreign language learners. By employing conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, the current study explores how students undertake a range of word searches while they organize a pair work session designed for the purpose of language learning. The analysis demonstrates how the learners simultaneously employ structurally different kinds of semiotic resources, such as language, body, and the structures of their textbooks and notebooks for language learning. The close explication of the ways in which cognitive states are embodied, displayed, and treated by the two students during the word search sequences reveals how they conduct indigenous assessment of each other's knowledge while "doing being a foreign language learner in a classroom."

This article explores recent changes in the landscape of second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language pedagogical (FLP) research. Firth and Wagner's (1997) proposal for the reconceptualization of SLA has been supported by SLA and FLP researchers who share the sentiment concerning the need for increased attention to social and contextual dimensions beyond the diversity of their theoretical and methodological orientations. In the meantime, a growing number of studies have adopted conversation analysis (CA), the sociological methodology on which Firth and Wagner have built their arguments, to examine data involving second language speakers, even though not all these studies may be viewed as addressing the issue of language learning and therefore may not belong to the category of SLA studies. The review of developments in the last decade points to potentials and remaining issues in using CA to conduct SLA and FLP research and to draw pedagogical implications.

This study examines casual interactions between first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Japanese, paying special attention to the coordination of vocal and non-vocal resources that are brought to bear on the achievement of intersubjectivity. More specifically, this study investigates a practice of "embodied completion" (Olsher 2004), namely the practice of deploying a partial turn of talk that offers a projectable trajectory of ongoing action and completing that action with a gesture or other embodied display. The participants' conduct that precedes this embodied completion reveals the local processes used to evaluate, discover, and establish shared linguistic and non-linguistic resources in pursuing intersubjectivity. Further, the sequence of actions that follows the embodied completion provides an incidental, interactionally motivated opportunity for the L1 speaker to reformulate what the L2 speaker has said with a more sophisticated linguistic expression. Through the close analysis of two focal cases of embodied completion, which underscores the conversation analytic (CA) perspective of "competences as resources," this study explores the kinds of contributions that can be made by using CA's explication of interactional details towards the understanding of language learning as it occurs in socially situated practices.

Using the methodological framework of conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, this study examines a peer interactive task that occurred in a Japanese as a foreign language classroom. During the short segment of interaction, the students shifted back and forth between the development of an assigned task and the management of problems associated with their lack of lexical knowledge. The close observation of the participants' vocal and nonvocal conduct during these different types of sequences and sequential boundaries demonstrates how the students transform in a moment-by-moment fashion their converging or diverging orientations towards varying types of learning and learning opportunities. Through the presentation of a single case analysis, this study discusses one way of applying CA techniques to the study of classroom interaction in order to promote an overall sensitivity to the intricacies of classroom talk and to generate critical reflection on classroom policies and instructional designs.

Investigates how Japanese and American students initiate topical talk as they get acquainted with each other during their initial encounter at a student-organized conversation table. Looks at the observable and reportable ways in which the participants demonstrate the relevance, or the irrelevance, of interculturality in the development of the interaction. (Author/VWL)

Using conversation analysis as a central tool of analysis, examines the sequential development of talk-in-interaction observed in a small group activity in a Japanese language classroom. Explores the relationship among task instruction, students' reaction to the instruction during their pre-task planning, and the actual development of talk with the native speakers. (Author/VWL)

Introduces the special issue of this journal on microanalyses of classroom discourse, providing an explanation of the how the issue is organized and describing each of the five articles contained. (Author/VWL)

Kampung Baru Archeological Site is situated in Bujang Valley archaeological area and the site is in Kuala Muda, Kedah to be exact. Past excavations conducted in Bujang Valley have discovered a lot of Middle Eastern ceramics and the archaeological sites which had been found in these excavations were dated from 5th to 12th century AD. Middle Eastern ceramics had been produced in Middle East but have been found not only in Middle East but also in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. Most Middle Eastern ceramics found in Southeast Asia and Far East Asia are Blue-Green Glazed ceramics and the archaeological sites where these ceramics had been found usually dated from 8th to 10th century AD. Many Blue-Green Glazed ceramics are believed to be used as container to transport trade goods and finding of these ceramics can be evidence of trade with Middle Eastern countries. This study employed typological and morphological analysis on the Middle Eastern ceramic that have been discovered at this site. The results of this study found that there were 241 shards of Middle Eastern ceramic discovered in Kampung Baru site and dating for these ceramics is from 8th to 10th century AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examines how Japanese and international care workers at a geriatric healthcare facility in Japan manage one of the most fundamental elements of handover interactions – person reference and recognition to identify a particular care receiver and discuss their specific conditions and needs. By using Conversation analysis (CA) as a central mode of inquiry, this study examines how the participants approach the establishment of referential common ground while simultaneously attending to the progressivity of ongoing activity, and how written records on care receivers are incorporated into the process. The juxtaposition of three international care workers' performances effectively illustrates how the international care workers' performative competence is co-constructed with their Japanese colleagues in this interactive process and how the participants exhibit different kinds of orientations towards the activity arranged for the dual purpose of actual handover and for the international care workers' language learning and socialization. As a contribution to a growing body of CA studies of second language talk at work, this study considers possible tensions between engaging in a language-learning activity regarding specific linguistic elements during a particular professional activity and learning to become a competent actor in the particular activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article updates the trends and developments of Japanese as a second language (JSL) research since Mori and Mori (2011) by reviewing nearly 200 selected empirical studies published in English or Japanese between 2010 and early 2019. The first section of this review examines the cognitive aspects of second language (L2) Japanese development, focusing on vocabulary and kanji (i.e., Chinese characters transferred into Japanese) learning, syntactic development, and the issues surrounding reading and writing. The second part investigates sociocultural issues in L2 Japanese development and use, including pragmatic development, multilingual/translingual perspectives, and multilingual youth. The third section explores the role of affective variables (primarily learner motivation) in L2 Japanese development. The last section considers various pedagogical issues, including corpus-based studies and the development of materials and resources, instructional designs and classroom studies, technology-enhanced language learning and new instructional models, critical approaches to teaching Japanese and content-based instruction. The review of these themes illuminates trends and emerging areas of interest in post-2010 L2 Japanese research inspired by current developments in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research, as well as unique features of Japanese language and sociocultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kampung Pengkalan Pasir is one of the areas that have archeological sites associated with the prehistoric era where the remains of a temple built using laterite stone and brick have been found in this area. The study regarding the distribution of foreign ceramics in Kampung Pengkalan Pasir has not been done in detail where the Song Dynasty ceramic finds were only reported by Dorothy and Quaritch-Wales when they excavated Pengkalan Pasir Temple (Site 31). The discoveries of various types of foreign ceramics in Kampung Pengkalan Pasir has given a little insight into the chronology of the site of Kampung Pengkalan Pasir which is believed to have been active since the 13th century AD. Based on the report released by Sullivan, he suggested that the Pengkalan Pasir Temple is a Buddhist influence temple with the discovery of Buddhist bronze statues and lotus statues made of descriptive copper such as Avalokitesvara or the features of Goddess Tara are considered to solve the issue of the function of this temple. Analysis of the discovery of various types of ceramics in Kampung Baru shows that these ceramics originate from the identifiable times are T'ang-Song, Song, Song-Yuan, Song-Yuan-Ming, early Yuan-Ming and even Persians represent the century- 8 to 10 M. The most common types of ceramics are celadon and stone ware while whiteware, Qing-Pai and Persian ceramics are found in small quantities. This foreign ceramic analysis proves that the site of Kampung Pengkalan Pasir has been actively used since the 8th century AD and also indirectly shows that the site of Kampung Pengkalan Pasir serves as a jetty built along the Sungai Muda to accommodate the busy port of Kedah Tua entrepot [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]