A Study on the Educational Applications of Multimedia Corpus for Japanese Language Learners at Beginner and Intermediate Levels: Focusing on Japanese subtitles in MMC motion pictures

Abstract

I developed an MMC (Multimedia Corpus) of talk shows, drawing upon Japanese TV programs. The MMC can be useful for learning Japanese, as it provides users with an opportunity to observe the use of Japanese language and its communication behaviors practiced in everyday life. However, since the MMC has been established for research purpose in general, lower-level Japanese learners face difficulties in using it. Therefore, this paper aimed to increase the application capacity of the MMC by presenting motion pictures with subtitles that are created by adding yomigana tags to transcripts of spoken dialogues from the MMC. Further, using the MMC talk shows, I conducted a classroom activity with Japanese learners of kamoshirenai, which is a Japanese grammatical expression. Due to the yomigana tags, I did not have to explain to the students how to read Chinese characters and numeric numbers one by one; therefore, I was less stressed than before in preparing a class and undertaking classroom teaching. In addition, the overall satisfaction level among learners was high. I believe that my personal experiences can be extended to other teachers. However, the responses regarding students’ experiences of the subtitled motion pictures of the MMC for their learning, collected from the learners in my class activities, should be interpreted with care, as they are merely based on an opinion survey. A further investigation should be undertaken on which learning effects can be achieved using subtitled motion pictures of the MMC.