Creation of an animation component incorporated online unit translation and writing Japanese

This paper describes our project titled “Creation of an animation component incorporated in the JPN261 online unit (Translation and Writing Japanese Workshop I)”. The project’s objective is to address students’ difficulties in choosing the appropriate Japanese prepositions/particles used to describe the relative position of objects. Acknowledging that certain animation has been previously used to assist students to develop language proficiency, the project endeavours to develop the student’s holistic understanding of language by using animation in a way that elicits students’ interactivity through their perceptiveness, sense of language and imagination. It sets out to develop a prototype exercise and implement it in the online unit, to facilitate research of the concept and the effectiveness of this type of animation as an educational tool. This is an initial step towards developing a full-scale exercise program, which will employ animation in E-learning of the Japanese language, and prospectively other languages. The development of the prototype exercise has just completed at the end of October 2002, and an analysis of its performance will be undertaken at the end of the second semester, 2002.