Al-Azkiya : International Journal Languages and Education

It is crucially important to know what strategies are used by language learners in learning the targeted language, so that teachers will have better insights to prepare classes that equally suit learners’ behaviour. This is a pilot study aiming to identify what are the most and less frequent learning strategies used by Japanese language learners at Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM). A set of questionnaires adapted from the Oxford’s Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) has been distributed to 259 USIM Japanese learners at the end of semester academic year of 2021/2022. 54 students volunteered to participate and answer the questionnaire. The average frequency for each category in SILL has been identified. As for the results, Japanese language learners at USIM are moderate users of metacognitive categories as the average frequency is at the highest. In contrast, strategies from affective categories have the lowest frequency of usage. It is a hope, that in the future, learners are introduced with a set of learning strategies before or during the classes in order to help them find the best way of acquiring the target language.

Foreign language education has often been overlooked in terms of space and value and this has impacted the amount of support and professional development that its teachers receive. In Malaysia, Japanese language is among the foreign language offered in schools and universities. As of the year 2021, there are more than 38,129 students learning Japanese language and over 215 institutions offering courses for the language all over the country. Despite the encouraging progress, Malaysia is facing a shortage of Japanese language teachers. While the exact reason behind the attrition of teachers is yet to be identified, research indicates that the lack of support and professional development are among the key factors. While training programs are offered year-round by teacher associations and organisations such as The Japan Foundation and MAJLIS, these programs are largely voluntary and often limited in the number of seats available for participants. This paper is an examination of the current efforts in providing support and development for non-native Japanese language teachers in Malaysia and explores suggestions that can be considered to facilitate teacher development in the country.