Developing teaching materials for promotion of intercultural understanding using Japanese story-manga

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This project is the successor to the 1999-2001 project (code number 11878039) and is an endeavor to find an effective way of using the works of Japanese story-MANGA in order to enhance intercultural awareness among learners and native speakers of the Japanese language. The major products of our efforts are collected into a report of 218 pages.The report consists of two parts. The first part includes eight out of twelve articles published by the three investigators during 2002-2005 as well as a resume of a lecture on the course design for using the developed teaching materials. The second part includes two series of teaching materials.The articles discussed the characteristics of Japanese conversations, the functions of Japanese stylistic features, the learner's interpretation of conversations, and the quality and state of Manga in neighboring countries. The major theoretical contributions are : 1)we have revealed the mechanism in which the stylistic features contribute to the production of utterance meaning in an actual discourse ; 2)we have revealed that even an advanced learner can fail to understand utterance meaning because of his inadequate knowledge about stylistic features and different cultural values.The teaching materials are titled "Looking at Japanese and Japan through Manga No.3 : Working Women" "Looking at Japanese and Japan through Manga No.4 : Heroes next to you". All the used works realistically reflect the contemporary society of Japan. The teaching materials can offer the learner substantial elucidation of how people talk and behave and why. They also help the native speakers deepen their awareness about their own culture