Pursuing a Better Elementary Japanese Textbook for Indonesian Learners

Abstract

Japanese language textbooks used in many universities and schools in Indonesia these days
are not designed to be used by the Indonesian learners. In this paper, we conducted a survey
on 151 Indonesian leaners who are currently studying Japanese in universities in Indonesia.
We applied quantitative and qualitative methods to collect data and employed five point scale
questionnaires and an open-ended question to understand the characteristics of the textbook
that the learners want/need.
The questionnaires contained sixty seven questions which were evaluated on a five point
scale from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ by the subjects. The main findings were that
the learners wish to (1) learn all four skills, and want to improve their speaking skill the most;
(2) learn grammar rules through many example sentences, (3) acquire knowledge from
contrastive analysis between Indonesian and Japanese in the areas of language, culture,
customs, and manners; (4) learn standard language and also major dialects, language of the
young, children, aged people, words of foreign origin, onomatopoeia, body language, and
honorific language; (5) practice meaningful drills, discourse, role-play, shadowing,
translation, and composition; (6) expose themselves to Kanji from the beginning; (7) have
bidirectional vocabulary list of Japanese and Indonesian.
Based on this survey, we concluded that Indonesian learners of Japanese are looking forward
to the emergence of newly written innovative Japanese language textbooks that fit the
expectancies of the Indonesian learners and also make the full use of the outcome of
contrastive study of language and culture.