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Paper short abstract:

In the study we investigate plurilingual and pluricultural ability through the analysis of intermediate Japanese learners' essays written by students in Germany, Serbia and Japan. An analysis reveals that the same word has different meanings and is used in different contexts in each country.

Paper long abstract:

Plurilingual and pluricultural ability research has mostly been limited to philosophical and abstract discussions, but in this study we have attempted to investigate this ability through the analysis of learners' compositions. University students from different countries were tasked with writing essays on the same subject and we performed a quantitative analysis of the words used to express their thoughts, taking into consideration linguistic anthropology. The results indicate what teaching methods should be applied in order to obtain a deeper understanding of linguistic and cultural differences.

We examined essays on the subject 'A country easy to live in' written by intermediate Japanese learners in Germany and Serbia (35 + 33) and Japanese university students (8). In the analysis, (1) words that appear frequently in essays from each country were extracted using text mining techniques and examined with the co-occurring words. (2) Based on these results, the social background of each country was discussed from the viewpoint of linguistic anthropology.

An analysis of commonly used words in each country with co-occurring words revealed that the same word has different meanings and is used in different contexts. For example, "life" was strongly associated with words such as "individual, peace and happiness" in Germany, "work, salary and money" in Serbia, and "stress, climate and environment" in Japan (3)-(5).

3) To live happily in a country, peace, national politics and personal things are required. (Germany)

(4) People who do not have a high salary job have no money and their life is difficult. (Serbia)

(5) It is not necessary to have a comfortable climate all year round, like it is in spring and autumn in Japan, but it is important that the environment is not stressful. (Japan)

The results of this study show that same word may be used to imply different cultural and social nuances in different countries. In order to develop learners' plurilingual and pluricultural abilities it is important for L2 teachers to be aware of this.

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Paper short abstract:

The present study investigated e-mails written in English and Japanese based on four tasks with different levels of imposition by 13 native English speakers who were students of Japanese and had spent a year in Japan. The e-mails submitted were analysed from the aspect of politeness strategies.

Paper long abstract:

Previous studies of request e-mails have generally compared e-mails written by learners with those written by native speakers (Wang and Wen 2015, Dong 2015) or only dealt with e-mails written in the sender's native language (Li 2004, Otomo 2009). Thus, it is unclear to what extent e-mails written in the target language by foreign language learners reflect the e-mail customs of their mother tongue, as well as their own cultural and socio-pragmatic influences.

With this in mind, the present study investigated e-mails written by native English speakers who were students of Japanese and had spent a year in Japan. The 13 students were given four tasks with different levels of imposition and asked to write e-mails to imaginary teachers. The first two tasks required the participants to write in Japanese and the following two tasks, which were similar to the first tasks, were written in English. The e-mails submitted were analysed using the authors' own categorisation table based on Brown and Levinson's (B&L) (1987) "politeness strategies (PS)", as well as Li (2014) and Wang and Wen's (2015) categorisations.

The provisional results revealed that whilst "negative politeness strategies (NPS)" were more frequently used in the Japanese e-mails for the more imposed tasks, no statistically significant differences were observed between the Japanese and English e-mails for the less imposed tasks. Furthermore, in contrast to B&L's theory, the e-mails for the less imposed tasks generated more NPSs which suggests that the use of PS depends, not merely on the level of imposition, but also on more specific contexts where it may or may not be appropriate to shorten the psychological distance between the senders and the recipients.

This presentation will examine the characteristics of learners' use of PS, with examples, and on a basis of a questionnaire the participants also completed, their thoughts and awareness of the differences of PS between English and Japanese language request e-mails.

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Paper short abstract:

The research deals with the possible ways of implementation of social networks for developing undergraduate students' communicative competence, which is crucial for a democratic culture. A series of communicative project is described and changes in students' communicative competence are analyzed.

Paper long abstract:

One of the essential elements of a democratic culture is an efficient communication within various contexts, particularly when it comes to the interaction with other cultures and other people. Nowadays SNS provide people with instruments to organize and maintain such communication. Nevertheless, in the educational sphere SNS tends to be used only for the supplementary organizational tool, i.e. in a non-communicative way. However, a communicative way to introduce SNS into the language class can be advocated. This way means the purposeful organization of virtual communication in Japanese within a social network among learners.

The shift from the non-communicative approach to the communicative one in the use of SNS presupposes the shift from regarding the virtual space as storage of information to its view as a field for creative communication. In order to organize such communication with the ultimate goal to foster learners_€ ™ communicative competences we organized a series of communicative projects in Instagram.

The first one was "a communicative album". Students were asked to publish some photos corresponding to a certain topic and then to express their opinion on others' choice in comments under the photo in their profiles. The second one was "a group portfolio of the Japanese language". Students were asked to distribute between themselves small parts of their current language material, e.g. new vocabulary, new grammar or new communicative strategies, and after that to make a publication in their group profile where to explain their part of material to the followers. A communication in Japanese within this public was organized as well. Students themselves made up communicative tasks in their publications for other learners to do in the comments. Thus, by the means of such projects the students' communication competence got furthe r development.

After completing the series of such projects, students were asked to do questionnaires about different aspects of their communicative competence and their attitude to others. The results have shown an increase in their ability to use Japanese for communication and an improvement in their attitudes towards each other which contributes to their democratic conscience.