Hiragana Hurdle: Are We Perpetuating the Problem?

1993

A study investigated the reading and writing strategies used by four students in a Japanese immersion program at an Australian university. Data were gathered through classroom observation, open-ended interviews, and think-aloud protocols. Analysis revealed that the students had a limited repertoire of Arategies. Their reading and writing of kanji (Chinese characters) was especially weak. They relied heavily on key words and inference to get meaning from written text. Japanese phonetic scripts and characters were read differently by the students, the former by sound leading to meaning, and the latter by tapping directly into meaning. For the writing of characters, repetition was the basic strategy used. Implications are that students in script-based immersion programs need to be taught specific strategies to deal with the new script. Reliance on strategies carried over from their phoncl-ic-script background are ineffective. Appendices include: description of Australian Second Language Proficiency Ratings (ASLPR); Cloze test used for think aloud protocoi; and transcription conventions used. Contains 35 references. (Author/MSE)

2004

This report addresses assessing and reporting student outcomes in Asian languages (Japanese and Indonesian). It has sought to describe Key Performance Measures (KPMs) which would pertain, if and when a decision were to be made, to gather data nationally on student performance.

In foreign language (FL) classrooms, students are rarely alerted to the politics behind a particular use of words. The recent introduction of critical literacy in some FL classrooms has pushed students to understand the ways texts influence how we perceive and act in society. Nonetheless, some of the basic linguistic notions have yet to be challenged in FL classrooms, preventing critical literacy from achieving its full potential. We examined Kumagai's critical literacy project in an intermediate Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classroom at a college in the north-eastern US. The project encouraged students to question the textbook's prescriptive explanation regarding the use of katakana (a Japanese syllabary system that the textbook explains to be for foreign loanwords). Analysis of classroom interactions and students' reflection papers revealed that the notion of foreign loanword stifled the students' critical thinking. We argue that it is because the notion supports an absolute and static foreign/ Japanese distinction, the idea of language as a homogeneous and bounded unit, and marking of only certain 'foreignness'. We call for FL education to include critiques of taken-for-granted linguistic notions in order to make students become aware of the role that language plays in maintaining or transforming social orders. This article analyses how the ideological underpinnings of a particular concept-'foreign loanword' 1 -can stifle learners' critical and analytical thinking even as they engage in critical literacy practice. It is based on a case from an intermediate Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language (JFL) college class in the United States. The Japanese language has three writing systems: kanji, hiragana and katakana. A writer's choice of script often involves meaningcreating processes, but each system of writing also has some normative rules: kanji is used

Reading Research Quarterly, 2004

he problem of how to represent spoken language in writing has historically been solved in different ways (Daniels & Bright, 1996;. One distinction is whether to "write what you mean" or "write what you say." Logographic systems such as Chinese and Japanese kanji use symbols to represent meaning directly and have no or comparatively few cues to pronunciation. Other writing systems represent speech sounds. The characters of syllabic systems such as the Japanese kana correspond with spoken syllables, whereas those of alphabetic systems correspond with separate phonemes. However, alphabetic orthographies vary in the degree to which they are regular in their representation of sound. The writing systems of Serbo-Croatian, Finnish, Welsh, Spanish, Dutch, Turkish, and German are on the whole much more regular in symbol-sound correspondences than those of English and French. The former are referred to as transparent or shallow orthographies in which sound-symbol correspondences are highly consistent, while the latter are referred to as opaque or deep orthographies that are less consistent because each letter or group of letters may represent different sounds in different words.

Foreign Language …, 1994

The following paper chronicles the steps taken in developing a curricular project to design, implement, and evaluate a simulation business course for beginners learning Japanese at the university level. The steps in developing the program, from the selection of materials to the evaluation of the entire project, are presented together with insights gained from the experience and suggestions for improvement. The paper concludes with issues that are still unresolved and new directions to explore. ~ ~~~ ~~ ~~~ ~~~ Theresa Ausrin (Ph.D., UCLA) is

Proceedings XII EURALEX international congress, 2006

The paper presents our experiences in producing a hypertext learners' Japanese-Slovene dictionary jaSlo, which currently contains over 10,000 entries. The paper discusses the conversion of the dictionary from the legacy encoding, which consisted of many separate files in a mixture of different tabular formats, into to a standardised XML format. The conversion consisted of uptranslation from the legacy formats, the enrichment of the dictionary with third-party resources, merging of the data, manual verification, and the ...

2012

Japanese popular culture, such as anime, manga, and video games, influences Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language (JFL) students to study Japanese and is a major channel for interacting with Japanese language and culture. This thesis investigates what kind of relationship university JFL students have with Japanese popular culture. The investigation features two parts: a quantitative Student Survey Questionnaire and a qualitative Textbook Evaluation Questionnaire. The Student Survey Questionnaire asks 164 university JFL student participants about Japanese popular culture that they enjoy and how they acquire Japanese language through Japanese popular culture. The Textbook Evaluation Questionnaire has seven participants evaluate four Japanese language textbooks that use Japanese manga comics as the teaching medium. This investigation finds that university JFL students do indeed interact with Japanese popular culture in a significant way. Japanese popular culture influences them to study Japanese, but is not their main reason for studying the language. Also, the majority of participants believe that positive Japanese language acquisition can occur through engaging with Japanese popular culture.

Lingua, 2008

After introducing what is known about potential interactions between phonetic/phonological and orthographic representations in first (L1) and second (L2) language speech perception studies, loanword and inter- phonology, and literacy-related phonological awareness research, the paper describes the case of Japanese learners of French, with particular emphasis on the syllabic/moraic dimension of their interphonology development. We concentrate on French biconsonantal clusters of the Obstruent + Liquid (/r/ and /l/) and /s/ + Plosive type. 62 Japanese university students in Japan perform a task of syllabic segmentation of non-words presented in three conditions: auditory, visual and synchronous audiovisual. The results suggest a possible influence of orthography on L2 syllabic representations, as the audiovisual and visual conditions trigger more epentheses than the auditory condition. Six arguments are combined to account for these results: working memory, metaphonological awareness, loanword sociophonology, phonetics versus phonology, perceptual constraints and attentional resources. In light of this preliminary study, we conclude that the orthographic factor should not be neglected in L2 speech perception studies, loanword phonology and interphonology research.

2018

Loanwords (外来語・カタカナ語), which are words ‘borrowed’ from other languages, are an integral part of the Japanese language, and are estimated to account for around 10% of the modern Japanese lexicon. While loanwords are conventionally written with the katakana script, recently some examples have been appearing in the hiragana script, which is usually reserved for words of Japanese origin. This research investigates what kinds of loanwords appear in hiragana, in which genres of text they are typically found, and why hiragana is being used in these cases. A mixed methods research design provided a broad base from which to approach this phenomenon, and consequently four different data sets were utilized: a corpus of hiragana loanwords, a survey, a series of interviews with native Japanese speakers, and four case studies of individual texts. The case studies, in particular, drew on the multimodal nature of these texts, and utilized the ‘visual grammar’ of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), and the semiotics of typography described by Stöckl (2005) in order to understand how hiragana was being used within a text. The findings from this research illustrate the wide range of semiotic functions this marked use of script can perform, for example connoting traditional Japanese culture or cuteness; being ‘easier to read’ for perceived audiences; providing a sense of balance with the other scripts used in the text; or highlighting an instance of wordplay. While loanwords in hiragana can be described as a ‘marked’ use of language, another important finding was native Japanese speakers' general level of acceptance of these words within authentic texts, with script having the effect of blurring the line between loanword and ‘Japanese word’. The results of this study therefore extend prior research on Japanese loanwords (Loveday, 1996; Rebuck, 2002; Stanlaw, 2014); typography and graphic design (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Spitzmüller, 2012, 2015); and language play (Gottlieb, 2010; Knospe, 2015). These findings reinforce the often-cited flexibility and adaptability of the Japanese writing system, as well as providing new perspectives on script as a semiotic resource within the Japanese language.

Corpora, 2019

Capitalisation is a salient orthographic feature, which plays an important role in linguistic processing during reading, and in writing assessment. Learners' second language (L2) capitalisation skills are influenced by their native language (L1), but earlier studies of L1 influence did not focus on learners' capitalisation, and examined primarily 'narrow' samples. This study examines capitalisation error patterns in a large-scale corpus of over 133,000 texts, composed by nearly 38,000 EFL learners, who represent seven different L1s and a wide range of English proficiency levels. The findings show that speakers of all L1s made a large number of capitalisation errors, in terms of errors per word and error proportion (out of all errors), especially at lower L2 proficiency levels. Under-capitalisation was more common than over-capitalisation, though this gap narrowed over time. Interestingly, L1s which share English's Latin script had higher error rates, suggesting that (assumed) perceived similarity between the L1 and the L2 increases interference, though this interference could not be explained only through direct negative transfer. There was also an interaction between L1 influence and L2 proficiency, so that differences between speakers of different L1s became smaller as their L2 proficiency improved.