earticle

영어

Researchers and practitioners in the academic field of Japanese language education are unified by a common research question: “How can we better teach Japanese to speakers of other languages?” The process of answering this question requires the development of relevant theories-a series of ideas which inform us on more effective ways to instruct a second language. These are developed through a process of first creating a theory by a combination of research conducted using descriptive empirical and rational approaches. The validity of this theory then needs to be tested through experimental research which seeks to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses (predictions created from theory). This paper reports the results of an analysis of 622 papers from three language education journals (Japanese Language Education Research, Japanese Language Education, and TESOL Quarterly) in order to describe the current state of research and offer suggestions as how best the field can move forward. Findings show that research in the field of language education is largely focused on the creation of theories, and does not seek to test or further develop those theories. In addition, the use of inferential statistics which is essential for effectively generalizing quantitative research results is very rare in Japanese language education and is much more common in English language education.