This article considers the content and utilization of cultural elements that promote effective learning in Japanese language education classes, based on a survey and analysis of cultural elements that Korean learners of Japanese are interested in. Effective learning means that learners ‘discover’ their own culture in the process of inter-action through learning and activities, recognize and understand other cultures, find problems through mutual understanding and critical thinking, and fosters cooperation and creative problem solving.　As a result of analyzing the cultural elements surveyed, <B2. Products(with substance)> in the analysis framework was the most common, followed by <C. Practices>. In this way, students, regardless of whether they majored in Japanese or not, were highly interested in products and practices as external cultural elements. However, it does not mean incorporating all the cultural elements that the learners desire into a class is proper. There are variables such as the environment and purpose of learning the target language, goals, interests, Japanese level, motivation to sustain learning, communication effectiveness, time constraints, and whether or not the learner is a Japanese major. It is necessary to incorporate ‘cultural elements’ with these limitations in mind.

The purpose of this study is to design a Japanese language class based on the analysis of college students’ assignments and their misuses of ‘can’ expressions in them during a Japanese conversation class. In the class, the assignments required the students to record their thoughts about conversation topics. For the assignments, the instructor tried to transcribe the students’ recordings, find their misuses of ‘can’ expressions and provide some corrective feedback for the misuses. Following the feedback, the students were asked to resubmit their recordings and then, the instructor examined their recordings again focusing on ‘can’ expressions. The findings from the students’ first recordings revealed that the students used some verbs that describe ‘possibility’ at first, and gradually they used more ‘surukotogadekiru(=can)’ expressions. Then, finally, the students tended to use both ‘possibility’ verbs and ‘surukotogadekiru(=can)’ expressions regardless of the students’ proficiency levels. However, by comparing to the students’ second recordings, the use of ‘possibility’ verbs increased while the use of ‘surukotogadekiru(=can)’ expressions decreased in the second recordings. Based on the findings, a class design that can be applicable to the Japanese language conversation classes was suggested.