Foreword

A Study of the Influence of Chinese language and Culture on Second Language Communicative Competence Acquisition

The article is devoted to the study of the phraseological fund of the Chinese and Japanese languages, in particular to the comparative analysis of phraseological units from the point of view of their form, structure, features of drawing hieroglyphic signs, semantics and national-cultural components contained in them. The national-cultural specificity of the Chinese and Japanese phraseology is closely related to the characteristic features of the people’s consciousness, the relationship between the language and thinking, the language and culture, therefore the main research approach is primarily comparative, linguistic and cultural. The work examines the development of the Chinese language and culture on the formation and development of the phraseological system of the Japanese language, outlines the relationship between the Chinese and the Japanese idioms. A comparison of the forms of drawing hieroglyphs represents changes in the writing systems of the Chinese and Japanese languages, caused by the historical processes of the development of both languages. The diversity of language habits is reflected in the change in the order of words in a phraseological unit in the Japanese language while preserving the original meaning of the Chinese original source. A number of Japanese idioms borrowed from the Chinese language demonstrate the process of adaptation to the features of the Japanese language, which is determined by the change of certain components in the structure of the phraseology. Despite the close ties and borrowing of elements of the Chinese language and culture, the Japanese language has created its own, purely Japanese, phraseological units that contain national and cultural components that reproduce elements of the people’s lifestyle, customs and historical facts. The composition, structure, national and cultural connotation of the actual Japanese idioms distinguish them from idioms built with the norms of the wenyan, the classical Chinese language. They came from the Chinese language and then became entrenched in the language and consciousness of the Japanese people.

This article is devoted to the study of Japanese loanwords in Chinese and their classification. Particular attention is paid to the lexical units in writing in Chinese characters, coming from the Japanese language as graphic loanwords in modern Chinese and Japanese, popular on the Chinese-language Internet. The material of the study is loanwords of Japanese origin, selected from dictionaries and scientific works on this topic, as well as word usage in messages on Russian and Chinese Internet forums. We distinguish between two types of Japanese loanwords in Chinese according to how they are borrowed: phonetic and graphic borrowed words. Graphic borrowed from the Japanese language, including the actual Japanese words spelled in Chinese characters, and words created by the Japanese using Chinese characters to convey tokens of other languages, as well as the words of the ancient Chinese language, rethought by the Japanese to create terms, then returned back to modern Chinese language, constitute a characteristic group of graphic loanwords in Chinese.

This study investigated the perceived speaking skills of undergraduate students who were majoring or minoring in Japanese Studies at two universities in Vietnam and Bulgaria. It also examined the factors associated with students’ speaking skills, their motives for studying Japanese, and their needs for communication with native Japanese speakers while proposing a hypothetical model linking these constructs. A total of 108 students participated in the cross-sectional online survey questionnaire, which included questions on personal information, perceived Japanese language skills, motives for studying Japanese, needs for communication with native Japanese speakers, and self-esteem. The data were analyzed using SPSS. The results showed that the respondents perceived their Japanese speaking skills level as lower than the other three skills. Factors such as age, year of enrollment, years studying Japanese, English level, co-living status, study abroad experience, and self-esteem were found to be associated with the perceived speaking skills of the respondents. Family-related factors, such as parents’ education and the family’s study abroad experience, were also found to be associated with perceived speaking skills. The study also validated three constructs of motives for studying Japanese, including being interested in Japan, being interested in communication, and being interested in going to Japan and highlighting the respondents’ needs for communication with native speakers. The proposed model suggests that motives for studying Japanese influence perceived speaking skills and the need for communication with native Japanese speakers. The findings of this study have implications for Japanese language education, particularly in the development of teaching strategies that enhance students’ speaking skills and provide opportunities for communication with native speakers. It also underscores the importance of understanding students’ motives for studying Japanese, as these motivations can influence their language proficiency and the effectiveness of language education programs.

… multicultural education does not necessarily have to imply the study of foreign second languages but the former without the later is limited and will have difficulty in producing the results it often claims to want to achieve, i.e. tolerance, peace and cross-cultural understanding (Crozet et al., 1999). This volume of Acta Linguistica Asiatica is dedicated to the area of teaching Asian languages in non-native surroundings. It is our great pleasure to announce 9 research papers on language teaching and articulation covering a wide-area of Central and Eastern Europe. The papers show us a map of Asian language teaching sites, including secondary and tertiary education, and their background systems.In her work “Poučevanje tujih jezikov v slovenskem šolskem sistemu: prostor tudi za japonščino?”, which opens the present volume, Bronka STRAUS outlines the picture of Slovene educational system. The paper reminds us that language teaching when taught as a curricular course, must be incorporated into the country’s system.The article »Chinese as a Foreign Language in Slovene Upper Secondary Education and Outline of Curriculum Renewal«by Mateja PETROVČIČ proposes a dynamic curriculum reform in secondary education mostly but targets tertiary education as well.The next article, authored by Nagisa MORITOKI ŠKOF and named »Learner Motivation and Teaching Aims of Japanese Language Instruction in Slovenia«, discusses main aims and objectives to teaching Japanese at secondary level education, and looks into the ways of how to find the place for Japanese language teaching in Slovene language curricula.Kristina HMELJAK SANGAWA in her paper “Japanese Language Teaching at Tertiary Level in Slovenia: Past Experiences, Future Perspectives” gives an introduction to the history and contents of Japanese language teaching in tertiary education in Slovenia.Following are the two articles concern teaching Asian languages in Serbia. Ana JOVANOVIĆ’s research, entitled »Teaching Chinese at the University Level – Examples of Good Practices and Possibilities for Further Developments«, presents several cases of Chinese language teaching and articulation from primary all the way to tertiary education.On the other hand, »Current State of Japanese Language Education in Serbia and Proposal for Future Solutions« by Divna TRIČKOVIĆ’s similarly discusses the Japanese language courses and their present situation in secondary education. The author points out the need for a well-thought pick up of both the teacher and the textbook, and offers an exemplar from University of Beograd.The next two articles on teaching Asian languages in Romania concern articulation mainly. Angela DRAGAN in her work »Teaching Japanese Language in Tertiary and Secondary Education: State and Private Institutions in Romania« offers a perspective on articulation at tertiary level mainly, while on the other hand, Mariana LUNGU discusses it from the view of secondary education. The Ion Creanga National college in Bucharest is the only institution in Romania which provides Japanese language education at secondary level ongoing every year.The final article by Karmen FEHER MALAČIČ “Teaching of the Japanese and Chinese Language in Extracurricular Courses for Children, Adolescents and Adults in Slovenia” brings the story back to Slovenia in a form of a survey on teaching Asian languages as extracurricular subjects. The author considers the problems and perspectives that arise within such extracurricular course and at the same time shape language education within curricular course. Nagisa Moritoki Škof

The article has an attempt to prove the genetic level of relationship between the Korean *mōi(h), *mòró “1) mountain; 2) forest” and Japanese *mǝ́rí “forest” that reach the Altaic *mōr[u] “tree, forest”. It is based on the comparison of the genetic matches of the Korean and Japanese languages, proposed by Starostin in The Global Lexicostatistical Database “Babel Tower”. The three versions of the degree of affinity between these languages are provided: genetic (according to Kyzlasov) and universal (according to Burykin), as well as its absence (according to Vynogradov). A historical note on the Korean-Japanese linguistic relations with the assumption of the areal contacts has been presented.Although the reconstruction of the Altaic took place based on the reconstructed etymons from different language groups: 1) Mongolian *mo-du (< *mor-du) “tree”; 2) Tungus Manchu *mō “tree”, the article focuses on 3) Korean *mōi(h), *mòró “1) mountain; 2) forest” and Japanese *mǝ́rí “forest”.In the process of the study, an attempt was made to prove the genetic relationship between the Korean and Japanese languages based on the phonomorphological processes that appeared to be common to these languages: 1) the law of prosody as a doctrine of emphasis in the Altaic languages, where the presence of low and high tones, as well as musical accent is observed; 2) the law of articulation; 3) the law of the morphemic structure of words, the effect of which is to fix the law of composition for the Korean and Japanese languages. In this case, the actions of certain laws are typical only for the Korean language: 1) the law of palatalization of the sonorat phoneme /m/, which hardness / softness becomes soft /m'/ in the Modern Korean language; 2) the law of articulation while pronouncing the palatalized consonants; 3) the law of harmony of vowels; 4) the law of prosody, in particular the presence of a long tone and force accent; the Japanese language: 1) the law of articulation, while pronouncing the velar consonants; 2) the law of the morphemic structure of words, in particular the law of the mora as a special unit of the Japanese language, which is absent in the composite languages, as well as the law of open composition.The comparison of the semantic structure of genetic matches has shown that the meaning of “forest” is common to the Korean *mōi(h), *mòró “1) mountain; 2) forest” and Japanese *mǝ́rí “forest” that reach the Altaic *mōr[u] “tree, forest”. Its choice is associated with the archeological culture of the Huns on the system of homebuilding and heating.

Based on the NTCIR-4 test-collection, our first objective is to present an overview of the retrieval effectiveness of nine vector-space and two probabilistic models that perform monolingual searches in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English languages. Our second goal is to analyze the relative merits of the various automated and freely available toolsto translate the English-language topics into Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, and then submit the resultant query in order to retrieve pertinent documents written in one of the three Asian languages. We also demonstrate how bilingual searches could be improved by applying both the combined query translation strategies and data-fusion approaches. Finally, we address basic problems related to multilingual searches, in which queries written in English are used to search documents written in the English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages.

Neclle: Network-based communicative language-learning environment focusing on communicative gaps

The article presents a heuristic approach to studying the strategies of refusal employed by advanced Japanese learners of Spanish as a foreign language when compared with those of native speakers of Spanish and of Japanese. It examines responses of refusal to requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions while observing the linguistic phenomena of pragmatic transfer used by the speakers. We administered a discourse completion to elicit refusal strategies from participants. The data include 1101 strategies employed in 432 responses formulated by 54 participants comprising advanced Japanese learners of Spanish, native speakers of Spanish, and native speakers of Japanese We found that linguistic ability among Japanese learners correlated positively with pragmatic transfer. The findings demonstrate how cultural priming and the degree of freedom with which learners prompt their responses are interrelated within their mental pragmatic interface in given situations.

Reviewed by: Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora Sally E. McWilliams Jing Tsu , Sound and Script in Chinese DiasporaCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, 306 pp. Jing Tsu makes a provocative claim in the conclusion to her newest book: "whatever appeal Sinophone studies now has, it will need to establish stronger dialogical roots in the long history of diaspora and migration in all its disarticulated forms" (234). The revelatory importance of linking China to its diasporic sites of linguistic and literary production reframes the terrain of study from one that positions China as the unified center from which all discussions about Chinese-language literature emerge and return. In this moment of globalization Jing Tsu's Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora asks readers to step back and critically contend with multi-faceted, polynodal presentations of Chinese as language and literature. Her textured and illuminating analyses of native language and writing debates, technological innovations, and the politics implicit in linguistic standardization open up possibilities for engaging with identity and "all its attendant concepts of nativism, nostalgia, nationalism, and 'Chineseness'" (13). Deeply grounded in the intricacies of language and literature, Jing Tsu provides entrée into the complex study of Chinese in a time of global movements of people, languages, cultural products, and knowledge from a theoretical understanding of how phonetics, orthography, literacy, and migration connect and fracture dependent on location. Rather than pitting an undifferentiated monolithic Chinese language against its seemingly lesser diasporic relatives, Jing Tsu deftly exposes the submerged linguistic assumptions that support a literary field; she takes the dyad of "sound and script" as the contentious starting point for her enlightening study. Since the 1990s cultural critics and feminist theorists have underscored how we must rethink modernist notions of a unified and unquestioned Chinese identity and language. Proposing a literary process she calls "literary governance," Jing Tsu examines the local and global tensions that arise between how one accesses the language and script and the persistent reliance on the concept of a primary linguistic home (2). Her scholarship remains closely tethered to analyses of nationalism to understand the process of literary governance. At the heart of her study is an attentiveness to linguistic nativity. Questions of authentic speaker—"native speaker"—inform discussions of language learning and usage. Jing Tsu provides a new way to conceptualize this struggle: instead of taking linguistic competence as innate to certain speakers, she unmasks the politics in play with regard to linguistic nativity. She explains and demonstrates that "networks of normalization operate both within and outside of monolingual national traditions, motivating writers and readers to observe a common currency of language" (3). She unveils the [End Page 331] functioning of these operations over the course of her book, thereby destabilizing reductive concepts about the nation, mother tongue, and the primacy of native speakers to literary production. The scope of Jing Tsu's research details key historical and socio-political moments impacting Chinese language and literature that attest to the interwoven threads of nationalism and globalization. Whether in the technological advances brokered through a new typewriter or the scholarly and politic endeavors in the mid-20th century to craft a world literature, Chinese language has been invested in nationalism within a global forum. The Chinese-language typewriter is a physical incarnation of this phenomenon. In chapter three Jing Tsu tells a compelling history of the Chinese language typewriter and the man who patented it in the U.S., Lin Yutang. Positioned against a cultural war over the medium of writing, where world literacy was seen as the exclusive purview of alphabetic script, Lin Yutang conceptualized a reclassification system that broke up the traditional inventory of Chinese characters as inherently non-alphabetic and instead treated stroke order as serial manifestations of the ideographic. This innovation, made manifest in the Chinese-language typewriter, demonstrates "how the technologization of writing advanced the aims of a national language into an international arena" (78), but only through engagement with other worldly sites of technological production. When we consider languages and literatures as "going global" a certain postmodern freewheeling tendency can creep into the realm of translation theory. Jing Tsu turns away from any easy pomo liberation that abrogates the...

Japanese is one of the foreign languages that many students learn in Indonesia, including at MAN 1 Pasuruan. Students of MAN 1 Pasuruan have a great curiosity about Japanese culture, especially about the lives of Japanese high school students, shodou 'Japanese calligraphy', Japanese language, and JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test). However, learning Japanese at MAN 1 Pasuruan has limited learning time, so that during learning hours it is more focused on teaching basic Japanese, while teaching about Japanese culture and JLPT is still very necessary. Therefore, this community service activity aims to increase students' understanding and interest in Japanese culture and language so that students can measure their own learning success and Japanese language skills with JLPT test. This community service activities were carried out at MAN 1 Pasuruan using a blended method which was attended by 50 students (40 students via online and 10 students via offline) from class X Language, XI Language, and XII Language by introducing Japanese high school life, simulations of JLPT test, as well as demonstrations and shodou workshops by native speakers and experts who expert in their fields. The high activity and enthusiasm of students shows that this community service program is very much needed by MAN 1 Pasuruan to accommodate the needs and to increase students' interest in learning Japanese language and culture that has been learned during teaching and learning activities in class.

This study investigates how the cross-cultural variation between Spanish and Chinese interactional styles influences the interlanguage pre-request sequences in Spanish produced by Chinese-speaking learners. Ninety-four university students, including 40 Chinese learners of Spanish at intermediate and advanced levels, 24 native Spanish speakers and 30 native Chinese speakers, performed 10-item open role-plays that elicited requests. Results revealed that learners exhibited negative transfer concerning cross-cultural differences, but did not always make positive transfer in aspects of cross-cultural similarities. Notably, learners and native Chinese speakers differed from native Spanish speakers in their production of the pre-requests asking about the recipients’ availability and their responses to the pre-requests inquiring about the existence of certain belongings. Furthermore, in comparison with native speakers, learners more frequently used the pre-requests asking for a favor. The findings of this research highlight cultural diversity in speakers’ pre-request sequences and pragmatic transfer at the interactional level. Additionally, the study brings attention to the issue of verbosity in intermediate and advanced learners’ sequential organization.

Learners of Japanese language outside Japan are mostly high school students, and the majority of their teachers are non-native speakers of Japanese. The Japanese government has dispatched Japanese native speakers to high schools in Asian countries, but the roles of these native speakers, as well as their teaching methods and relationship with local teachers, have not been clearly identified. It is important that such programmes meet the needs of the local schools if Japan wishes to promote Japanese language and culture as a form of soft power. Based on interview data collected in high schools in South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, this chapter examines whether the Japanese government policy on overseas Japanese language education addresses local needs and satisfies local expectations.

Elaborative or maintenance rehearsal strategy-use during a verbal working memory task was the grouping variable for a study that tested whether group membership distinguished 53 healthy adults by age, education, or performance on reading comprehension and verbal working memory tasks. No significant differences in age or reading comprehension emerged as a function of strategy-use. However, the elaborative strategy group had significantly better performance on one measure of verbal working memory. Several within age-group differences as a function of strategy-use were also significant. Younger adults who used elaborative rehearsal had superior working memory measures, and older adults who used elaborative rehearsal had superior reading comprehension measures, suggesting elaborative rehearsal's memory-enhancing function in verbal working memory and reading comprehension tasks.

Teaching Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Heritage Language Students: Curriculum Needs, Materials, and Assessment, edited by Kimi Kondo-Brown and James Dean Brown, is a collection of empirical research on Japanese, Korean, and Chinese heritage language (HL) education. To contextualize the research, the editors define HL learners as individuals “who have acquired their cultural and linguistic competence in a nondominant language primarily through contact at home with foreign-born parents and/or other family members” (p. 3). The book covers important and timely issues, such as the two-track system of heritage and non-heritage language (NHL) learners, the assessment of HL proficiency, and the intricacies of HL curriculum design, currently under contemplation in the field of HL education. The wide array of articles collected in this publication will interest researchers, policy makers, curriculum writers, teacher educators, and teacher trainees at all levels. Prior publications on HL education have been predominately based on Spanish as an HL and do not directly address matters that are unique to East Asian HL education. This volume provides HL educators of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese a much-needed resource that speaks to their unique experience and needs.