Paper short abstract:

How can beginning learners of Japanese transform into Japanese characters on the stage? This paper will introduce the training program of the Japanese language theater group that I've been coordinating in Italy since 2004, reporting results with projection of video clips of our past drama pieces.

Paper long abstract:

Theater is a communication medium consisting of two dimensions: actors or actresses communicate with a live audience, as communicating with each other on the stage by creating a drama through dialogues. Since the dawn of the communicative approach, which sets communicative competence acquisition as the learner's goal, gained popularity in the 1970s, drama-based activities such as skits or role-plays have been widely used in a language-teaching setup, based on the idea that they can encourage collaborative learning, lower learners' emotional barriers, and, most importantly, provide natural contexts for oral communication. In the field of Japanese language education, in 2007 the International Association of Performing Language was founded, and it has been contributing to spread the drama-based approach. As for pronunciation, Hashimoto (2009) proposed a dramatic approach to teaching pronunciation, arguing for its effectiveness in teaching paralinguistic characteristics of speech (the speaker's intention, emotion, psychological state, etc) that are fundamental for natural communication.

Since 2004, I have been coordinating a Japanese language theater group in Italy. Every year we produce a full-fledged theater piece, and we have so far performed twelve original dramas in theaters. The majority of our performers are Italian learners of Japanese whose competence is at the beginning level. To reach their goal, i.e., to transform themselves into Japanese characters on the stage, they need to learn not only Japanese pronunciation, but also speech, gestures and expressions that are natural and appropriate for both the assigned role and a certain speech context. Our pronunciation training features five characteristics: 1) aiming at the intelligibility of performers' pronunciation rather than native-like accuracy; 2) focusing on prosody (word accent and intonation, in particular) rather than segments; 3) jointly learning all linguistic, paralinguistic and non-linguistic characteristics of speech for the assigned role; 4) using not only audio pronunciation models but also visual cues displaying word accent position and intonation patterns; 5) using body movements closely connected to the sounds of script lines. In the present paper, I will describe our theater activities and pronunciation training, also reporting results of training with projection of video clips of our past drama pieces.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation reports that teaching Japanese with the recent TV drama is effective in improving a learner's listening and vocabulary abilities in terms of the Second Language Acquisition Theory.

Paper long abstract:

The theory of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has been developing since Pit Corder's 1967 essay "The Significance of Learners' Errors" and Larry Selinker's 1972 article "Interlanguage". Afterwards, various theories and hypotheses have been proposed in the field of second-language acquisition, regarding how people learn a second language in the classroom. Among them, the theories of Stephen Krashen "the Input Hypothesis" would be the most prominent paradigm in SLA. This presentation reports that teaching Japanese with the recent TV drama is effective in improving a learner's listening and vocabulary abilities in terms of the Second Language Acquisition Theory.

Audio materials such as TV dramas, movies and animated cartoons are in great demand from language teachers in the Japanese teaching environment both within and outside Japan. However, an interview survey of teachers using audio materials shows that many teachers are not certain about the effect of using videos relative to their teaching methods hence no strong conviction. A suggested reason may be that every teacher has a different educational purpose when using video materials and they have doubts about its teaching effect, particularly where there are no beliefs based on a reliable educational theory.

This presentation reports on an intermediate Japanese language class for improvement of listening and vocabulary abilities and proposes the idea that a recent popular TV drama can be used as a way of producing a major comprehensible input for the classroom. Here, most SLA researchers agree that this is essential to second language acquisition, and it shows what teachers need to "think and do". Although it is difficult to verify the true effect of improvement, the students' survey tells us that most students acknowledge their improvements in listening and vocabulary abilities in Japanese. Japanese teaching classrooms outside of Japan, such as European educational environments, have an essential lack of a large volume of actual language source input. Audio materials may supplement the disadvantage of "little input", and would be an effective measure in foreign language teaching environments. There is little doubt that this practical report provides some useful educational suggestions to the Japanese teachers in Europe.

Paper short abstract:

An attempt of effective use of Japanese modern literature in 4th grade students' lessons of the "St. Klement Ohridski" Sofia university in Bulgaria have been underway.In this attempt, it aims to train intercultural communication ability. "text theory" was also applied in the lessons.

Paper long abstract:

An attempt of effective use of Japanese modern literature in 4th grade students' lessons of the "St. Klement Ohridski" Sofia university in Bulgaria have been underway. The fourth grade class is the final year of undergraduate of Japanese Studies. Many of them who have been enrolled in 2016 - 2017 academic year studied abroad in Japan for for one year and returned to Bulgaria. Students' Japanese acquisition levels are N2 level or N1 level in JLPT. They are expected to accompulish C level of "CEFR" until their graduation.

In the CEFR 's ability description sentence, those that include' literature 'are the C2 level. It means this is top level capability description. Furthermore, in the JF Japanese Education Standard, the B2 level capability description sentence of "Reception" substantially corresponds to keyword of "novels". Thus, as a level it is reasonable for the current 4th graders of the Sophia University.

In handling modern Japanese literary works in classes, what I was more conscious of than a normal reading activity was "understanding of different cultures". In order to cultivate "intercultural communication skills", it acquires the "knowledge" of the target culture. Furthermore, understanding of self culture and "comparison" of the target culture is really necessary, and training of "tolerance" attitude ranges as the final stage(Matsuura · Miyazaki · Fukushima 2012). In the lessons, based on this, the reading comprehension and contents understanding were promoted. At that time, "text theory" was also applied.

Text theory is a position that "keep the vector of analysis closed only for the author", and "can refer to anything as much as era background and all object". It also gives possibility of interpretation "from the framework that the general reader does not adopt about that text" (Ishihara 2009). This is a position giving great degrees of freedom when interpreting literary works by readers with different cultures, and it can be applied to comprehension with the target culture while considering their own culture. For that reason, in class, we proceeded to consider literary works from the standpoint of text theory.

In this presentation, the above attempt will be reported.