Ideal Japanese Class for Taiwanese High School Students: A Gender Comparison

Abstract

Learning Japanese has become very common amongst Taiwanese high school and university students, ranking thesecond most sought for language. A concise study of the likeable activities in a typical language class for theTaiwanese students seems to be quite useful. Therefore, the present study has concentrated on the senior high schoolstudents’ opinion about the ideal Japanese class. Subjects in this research were 478 students (181 boys, and 297 girls)in nine private schools in three counties. The instrument was a 10-item multiple-choice Chinese questionnaire basedon Littlewood (2010). The findings illustrated that females and males had similar opinions concerning thecommunicative language activities in an ideal Japanese class. They revealed much more differences related tonon-communicative activities, though. Moreover, both boys and girls displayed the highest interest in a relaxed classatmosphere, and the lowest interest in the usage of smartphones in the activities in the class.