Paper Title
Effects of Romaji Task in the Course of Basic Japanese Focusing on Errors in Writing Hiragana

Abstract
This study aimed to identify the error characteristics of hiragana writing among novice JFL students, and to explore the sources of the errors. Fifty students were tested on their writing skills in hiragana and /words . Students were asked to convert thirty Japanese words written in romaji to hiragana. The result indicated that students made mistakes on hiragana based on the similarity of the shapes between hiragana and another hiragana. Certain hiragana could be confused with each other. Most writing errors of students (30 %) occurred to a syllabary “め” in which it was transliterated to “ゆ” in the word yume（ゆめ）and musume （むすめ）. It could observe that writing errors occurred most frequently in the context of attempting to write a word made of hiragana syllabary in ra-row (ら-row). Keywords: Hiragana, Katakana, Romaji, Writing Error