Effective use of learning management system for large-scale Japanese language education

As a mode of Japanese language education, a spoken Japanese course without Japanese characters (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji) for reading/writing is a promising option to attract more Japanese learners with easier beginning to make. However, existing language teaching methods, even using ICT, suffer from issues of scalability and learning effect when deployed in a large-scale spoken language class. This paper proposes to effectively use Learning Management System to improve the scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness of Japanese language and culture education. The course using LMS is practiced and evaluated in an actual large-scale Japanese language class with more than 100 students in an overseas university. The proposed LMS 1) enables individual monitoring and feedback mechanism of each student, 2) visualizes the learning progress and achievement, and 3) provides a comprehensive User Interface to manage online homework and exams. To the best knowledge of the authors, the use of LMS in a large-scale spoken Japanese class has not been well studied. The evaluation results exhibited the load reduction of course management and the various benefit of LMS, which natively digitizes the contents management and can increase the students’ engagement in the class.