Japanese TV Programs Research Articles

The Interlanguage Pragmatics of Japanese Daily Greetings by Malaysian Learners

Scholars in pragmatics argue that the teaching of a second language (L2) must pay extra attention to the language forms and expressions within specific cultural contexts. Not being able to use a L2 according to the nature of its cultural context could sometimes lead to misunderstanding and miscommunication. This study aims to explain the interlanguage pragmatic transfer in daily greetings used by Malaysian learners of Japanese. Using a convenient sampling technique, the respondents are 80 Malay students enrolling in a Japanese preparatory program prior to attending Japanese universities. Being competent in using Japanese language in context is therefore crucial for them. This study employs a qualitative research approach using Discourse Completion Tests (DCT) and follow-up interviews. Shleykina’s model of greetings is appropriated and used as the framework which allows data to be categorized into six patterns. The findings show that Malaysian learners chose to use less greetings when they greet their Japanese friends vis-a-vis their Malaysian friends. The types of Japanese greetings they use are mostly greeting expressions from what they have learned in the classrooms. Other casual greetings applied are learned from anime , dramas and Japanese TV programs. This study revealed that some of the Japanese greetings used are actually a direct translation from Bahasa Melayu. This pragmatic transfer has offered two perspectives, which are, success transfer and failure transfer. The results contribute towards the importance of exposure to and the understanding of the cultural context of a target language in choosing appropriate greetings among L2 in interlanguage context.

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

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.

Telop, Affect, and Media Design: A Multimodal Analysis of Japanese TV Programs

Japanese and other Asian TV producers have been deploying multi-colored, and highly visible, intra-lingual captions on TV programs to enhance their appeal and to influence their viewers’ interpretations. The practice of adding these captions is far from innocent and is prone to abuse and overuse due to the lack of official guidelines and an evidence base. We conducted a multimodal analysis within the framework of relevance theory to provide an empirically supported insight into the way in which these captions, known as “telop” in Japan, form part of a production’s deliberate and careful media design. Our findings suggest that telop are deployed in conjunction with other communicative resources that are deliberately used to influence viewers’ interpretations, to enhance and make affective values in TV programs more explicit. The increasing use of diegetically integrated captions elsewhere further justifies the need for critical TV and new media research on telop.

MEN'S ADULTERY AS SICKNESS: METAPHOR, GENDER CATEGORIES AND THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER DIFFERENCES ON JAPANESE TELEVISION CONSULTATION PROGRAMS1

This article describes how Japanese TV programs adopting a consultation framework construct different realities for women and men concerning a specific social phenomenon, namely adultery. To do so, two perspectives, the theory of metaphor promoted by George Lakoff and membership category analysis, are combined toward a discursive analysis which reveals that, in the case of men's adultery, advice givers typically shift responsibility away from men and instead scrutinize the behavior of women. In contrast, in the case of women's adultery, participants on the programs directly reprimand the female offenders, using metaphors and gender categories to emphasize the immorality of their actions and how those actions are detrimental to men. The implications of the analysis for the study of gender and language in general and, more narrowly, in Japan are discussed.

Segmentation of broadcasted baseball videos into every inning and plate appearance

Most current ideas for producing highlights of broadcasted sports videos are focused on scenes of scoring and receiving loud cheers. However, depending on recent performances of Japanese baseball players in the US, Japanese TV programs often show their performances as highlights in the broadcasts without depending on the highlight. This paper presents a method for segmenting broadcasted baseball videos into every inning and every plate appearance by analyzing the change of the sports ticker by a correlation coefficient. The proposed technique could be efficiently used as a preprocessing method in extracting highlight scenes about a batter from broadcasted sports videos and making an index of the videos. The experimental results have shown that the proposed method has exactly segmented broadcasted baseball videos into each inning and each plate appearance. © 2006 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Content Analysis of Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior in Japanese TV Programs

Despite the proven potential of educational robotics as a learning tool to promote disciplinary and transversal skills needed in 21st-century society, robots are still underused in schools. Teachers’ attitudes towards educational robotics play an important role in whether or not robotics is implemented in schools. This study analyses the attitudes of 174 teachers towards educational robotics, differentiating by region, gender, age, school level and disciplines taught. The results show that teachers are interested in educational robotics and that they perceive potential in the use of robots for the development of transversal skills. Some factors that limit the implementation of robotics are the costs, the time needed to prepare the activities and the fact that technologies are massively present in our everyday life and therefore some teachers do not want to bring them into school as well.

Content Analysis of Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior in Japanese TV Programs

Content Analysis of Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior in Japanese TV Programs