This course is for students with basic grammatical and structural proficiency in Japanese, but who are interested in improving their speaking skills. This includes (but is not limited to) students who are concurrently taking other Japanese language classes but desire more speaking practice, students who have studied Japanese on their own but are not currently enrolled in a regular class, students who studied Japanese in the past and are looking to refresh their skills, or students who simply want to become better speakers and listeners. It is an opportunity for all students of Japanese to refresh and reinforce their speaking and listening skills. This course employs a situational, role-playing approach (students are given situations in class and asked to generate conversations appropriate to those situations). Language functions learned in JAPN 228 will now be applied in more concrete, real-life situations. Students will encounter and learn various Japanese expressions for occasions such as dining out, shopping, traveling, visiting the doctor, communicating at school, making phone calls, and more. In these situations, students also will practice switching smoothly to the most appropriate speech styles (casual/polite/honorific) based on the relationship between the speaker and the listener. Multimedia sources from Japan (movies, television, websites, etc.) will also be used in class sessions. |