Developing teaching materials for education of spoken Japanese based on contrastive studies among Japanese, English and Chinese

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In order to achieve our object of developing basic materials for teaching spoken Japanese, we used technique of Magnetic Resonance Imaging on one hand and natural conversation data on the other hand.Through over 45 experiments using MRI technique, we developed audio-visual materials with explanation concerning articulation of Japanese standard sounds such as vowels, liquids, nasals, palatalized sounds, pressed sounds, and so on, in contrast with English and Chinese articulation when necessary. This enables teachers of Japanese language to know very clearly how Japanese articulations differ from English and Chinese counterparts and how English and Chinese learners of Japanese language have difficulty to produce it.By using over 100-hour recordings of Japanese natural conversations in actual situations, we developed audio-visual movie materials with explanation to show how various ways of pronunciation have pragmatic effects respectively in Japanese communication. This bears many insights including that voice qualities and ways of breathing previously almost ignored actually play a great role in daily interaction.Integration of knowledge newly gained by these two methods further made us realize the importance of grammar in conversation, namely the fact that prosody and phonation function in accordance with grammar.Our basic materials and our research were published through our site on internet, books, collections of papers, oral/poster/panel presentations, and newspapers. In order to gain much feedback from the area of Teaching Japanese as L2 especially, we organized one inland meeting under the Society for Teaching Japanese,as Foreign Language and one oversea meeting concerning studying Japanese communication.