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- Convenors:
-
Marcella Mariotti
(Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
Noriko Iwasaki (Nanzan University)
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- Stream:
- Japanese Language Education
- Location:
- Torre B, Piso 3, T13
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
This study shows the linguistic and cognitive development of 131 elementary school children in both Japanese and their home language, either Chinese or South American Spanish. These data are part of series of our study in the last twelve years, focusing on the CLD children (Cummins, 2014) in Japan.
Paper long abstract:
The number of Japanese living abroad exceeded 1.3 million (MEXT, 2016) and that of foreigners in Japan is 2.23 million (MOJ, 2016), and both numbers are record high at the time of globalization. As the number of the Culturally Linguistically Diverse (CLD) children (Cummins, 2011) has also been rapidly increasing in Japan and abroad, it is important to pay attention to their linguistic and cognitive development in both their home language and Japanese, keeping in mind that they are different from adult learners. Our research group has conducted series of both qualitative and quantitative studies on their overall language development during the past twelve years in Japan.
We present a study focused on the "speaking" skill, which is the foundation of the entire language development of children, and the purpose of the study is to show some developmental features and relationship of the two languages as they grow older.
Subjects of the study consist of 131 of 1st to 6th graders whose home language is either Chinese or South American Spanish, and 58 Japanese native children as the control group. Three tasks of different cognitive requirements were selected for this study from the "Dialogic Language Assessment" (MEXT, 2014). We changed the recorded data to the monadic format, and then analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively.
Strong relationship with age and the two languages was found in their grasping causality and perceiving conceptual framework.　Although the results showed that the clear age distinction was not found in terms of the discourse patterns and the amount of utterance, younger children were found that they could not often generate a discourse and just utter single sentences. Such a tendency in CLD children appeared in both languages in the similar way. Our data will describe their development of two languages.
Paper short abstract:
In this study, the authors researched how learners introduce themselves and what they want to convey, as well as what kind of skills the speakers need to effectively communicate these points to the addressee. The self-introduction video data were collected from a Facebook project.
Paper long abstract:
Language education needs to respond to individual needs, but so far, many language lessons focus on providing learners particular sets of patterns. For example, there are sets of self-introduction patterns, for which learners essentially fill in the blanks to "create" their own self-introductions. However, this is far from a creative endeavor. When learners want to express their own personality, they are limited by those set patterns and cannot effectively convey their own individuality. As a result, almost everyone begins to sound like the same person.
The researchers put questions to the current language-learning environment and argue for a circumstantial (jokyo) syllabus, in contrast to the more common functional syllabus, or even situational syllabus (Kobayashi, 2005, 2016).
In this study, the authors researched how learners introduce themselves and what they want to convey, as well as what kind of skills the speakers need to effectively communicate these points to the addressee. The self-introduction video data were collected from a project in which JFL learners interacted with EFL learners through Facebook. The survey data included learners' evaluations of their own self-introductions. Interviews were conducted with students in counterpart schools to evaluate the learners' self-introductions. The authors analyzed the data and extrapolated the most useful skills for effective conveyance from most successful self-introductions. The results showed discrepancies between learners' self-evaluations and the opinions of the addressees. Non-verbal communication strategies were also shown to play an important role in successful conveyances.
In this paper, we will provide a brief overview of the project and report the salient results obtained through the analysis of the data. We will also share pedagogical implications of the results, and suggest alternative approaches to language pedagogy.