A crossectional study of the Japanese of Australian high school students after one year in Japan

Abstract

One of the perennial problems faced by language teachers is how to assess learners' language skills reliably to place them at suitable levels in courses. Learners who have lived In a community where the target language is spoken pose the greatest problem in terms of where they should be placed because while they frequently lack the accuracy In grammatical form of students who have studied the language formally, they have skills in pragmatic areas (communicative ability) which have traditionally played only a minor role in foreign language teaching.