Mednarodni simpozij - International Symposium ob 20. obletnici ustanovitve azijskih študij na Univerzi v Ljubljani - celebrating the 20 anniversary of Asian Studies at the University of Ljubljana Vzhodnoazijski jeziki in didaktika - East Asian languages and language pedagogy
15. in 16. januar - 15th-16th January 2016
Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani - Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
Aškerčeva c. 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Namen
Namen simpozija je vzpodbujati razmislek o teoretskih in praktičnih vprašanjih, s katerimi se soočamo, ko poučujemo in raziskujemo jezike Vzhodne Azije.
Purpose
The purpose of the symposium is to reflect on theoretical and practical issues that we face teaching and researching East Asian languages.
Naslov / Title
Vzhodnoazijski jeziki in didaktika - East Asian languages and language pedagogy
Sekcije / Sessions
1. Didaktika kitajskega in korejskega jezika / Chinese and Korean language pedagogy
2. Didaktika japonskega jezika / Japanese language pedagoy
3. Teoretski temelji (1) / Theoretical underpinnings (1)
4. Teoretski temelji (2) / Theoretical underpinnings (2)
5. Mešana vprašanja / Miscelanea
Organizator
Oddelek za azijske študije, Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani
Organising body
Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
Jezik / language: angleški / English
Koordinator / Coordinator
Andrej BEKEŠ,
Profesor, Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani / Professor, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
Kontakt / Contact: andrej.bekes@ff.uni-lj.si, andrej.bekes@gmail.com
Program / Programme
Friday 15th January, 2016
| 13:00 - 13:15 | Opening Address Jana Rošker (Head of Department of Asian Astudies, University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts) Andrej Bekeš (Professor, Department of Asian Astudies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana |
| Session 1 - Chinese and Korean language pedagogy Chair: Jana Rošker (University of Ljubljana) | |
| 13.15 - 14.15 | Keynote Lecture I George Xinsheng Zhang (Richmond, the American International University in London) |
| 14.15 - 14.45 | Paper 1 Mateja Petrovčič (University of Ljubljana) |
| 14.45 - 15.15 | Paper 2 Hyeonsook Ryu (University of Ljubljana) |
| 15.15 - 15.30 Coffee break | |
| Session 2 - Japanese language pedagogy Chair: Irena Srdanović (University of Pula) | |
| 15:30 - 16:00 | Paper 1 Chikako Shigemori Bučar (University of Ljubljana) |
| 16:00 - 16:30 | Paper 2 Nagisa Moritoki (University of Ljubljana) |
| 16:30 - 17:00 | Paper 3 Jasmina Bajrami (Doctoral program, University of Ljubljana) |
| 17:00 - 17:30 | Paper 4 Katarina Šukelj (Master program, University of Ljubljana) |
Saturday 16th January, 2016
| Session 3 - Theoretical and practical underpinnings (1) Chair: Chikako Shigemori Bučar (University of Ljubljana) | |
| 10:00 - 11:00 | Keynote Lecture II Barbara Pizziconi (SOAS) |
| 11:00 - 11:30 | Paper 1 Irena Srdanović (University of Pula) |
| 11:30 - 12:00 | Paper 2 Nina Golob (University of Ljubljana) |
| 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch (Japanese style obento) | |
| Session 4 - Theoretical and practical underpinnings (2) Chair: Nagisa Moritoki (University of Ljubljana) | |
| 13:00 - 14:00 | Keynote Lecture III Yuriko Sunakawa (Professor emerita, University of Tsukuba) |
| 14:00 - 14:30 | Paper 1 Luka Culiberg (University of Ljubljana) |
| 14:30 - 15:00 | Paper 2 Andrej Bekeš (University of Ljubljana) |
| 15:00 - 15:30 Coffee break | |
| Session 5 - Miscellanea | |
| 15:30 - 16:30 | Presentations Exchange students from partner universities |
| 16:30 - 17:00 | Overview 20 Years of the Department of Asian Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana Andrej Bekeš, Kristina Hmeljak, Mateja Petrovčič |
| 17:00 - 17:30 | Conclusion Possibilities of East Asian linguistics and tasks for the future (discussion) |
| 17:30 - 17:40 | Closing Remarks Andrej Bekeš (University of Ljubljana) |
| 18:30 - 21:30 Uchiage dinner | |
Sunday 17th - Monday 18th January, 2016
(optional)
Excursion to Slovene Carst:
Caves, walled villages and wine cellars
Departure from Ljubljana Sunday 9:00 AM
Return to Ljubljana Monday 9:00 AM
(Price: including visit to Škocjanske Caves, lunch, wine tasting in the wine cellar and stay at the tourist farm including dinner and breakfast - total will be about 100EUR)
Povzetki / Abstracts
Session 1 - Chinese and Korean language pedagogy
13.15 - 14.15 Keynote Lecture I
George Xinsheng Zhang (Richmond, the American International University in London)
EBCL and Teaching of Chinese in Europe
More and more higher education institutions in Europe now offer courses in Mandarin Chinese language, and a challenge is how the level of their Chinese language courses can be described adequately with reference to the Common European Framework of References (CEFR), the framework widely used in Europe for language learning and language teaching.
There is a European effort to get the Chinese learning and teaching in Europe in line with CEFR, such as the European Benchmarks for Chinese Language project (EBCL 2010-2012), the first EU funded project to benchmark a non-European language based upon CEFR by the joint effort of universities across France, Germany, Italy and the UK. The outcomes of the EBCL, however, are quite different from some other existing standards and tests like new HSK and the Chinese Language Proficiency Scales for the Speakers of Other Languages (《国际汉语能力标准》.
The talk gives a brief introduction to the EBLC project with an example of how the various frameworks of standard differ from one another in terms of their linguistic requirements with comparisons between the EBCL, HSK and Chinese as foreign language test (TOCFL). The talk will also discuss the significance of the EBCL and its implications for the teaching of Chinese in Europe, especially in the sector of higher education.
14.15 - 14.45 Paper 1
Mateja Petrovčič (University of Ljubljana)
On Chinese Character Set Standards, Legacy Encodings and Input Support in Different Versions of Windows
Paper starts with the notion of non-coded and coded character sets and highlights their internal structure. A closer look to the arranging principles reveals some interesting cultural information. The next part explains the rise and decline of the most important legacy encodings. Although almost superseded by Unicode, legacy encodings represent a very important period in the history of information processing. The last part of paper compares different versions of Windows in relation to input methods, character support and overall flexibility regarding processing of Chinese writing system.
14.45 - 15.15 Paper 2
Ryu Hyeonsook (University of Ljubljana)
University of Ljubljana Korean Language I Students' Characteristics
In 2003, Korean language course of the University of Ljubljana was established at the Department of Asian and African Studies (present Department of Asian Studies) of the Faculty of Arts and is also open as an elective course to the students of other majors.
Since 2005, a survey by questionnaire on 13 topics has been carried out among participants of the course. Deriving from the acquired data, an analysis of Korean Language I course students' characteristics has been implemented.
As a result, it has been observed that the average age of course participants has lowered and the gap between students attending due to their interest in Korean language and those attending due to their interest in Korean society and culture has been narrowing, since the implementation of Bologna System in 2009.
Among the ways students intend to use the acquired Korean language knowledge in the future travel, study abroad, translation/interpretation have been chosen most often, with travel being ranked as the highest and discussions on professional topics as the lowest.
It is clear that students' image of Korea is positive, due to their description of Korea as being a country with long history, rich culture, possessing advanced technology, a country that has achieved rapid economic growth and is currently among the most developed countries.
On one hand, students imagine Korean language as being structurally similar to Japanese and on the other, they seem to be aware that its structure is less complex in comparison to that of Chinese characters and kana scripts. Furthermore, students of Korean Language I course at the University of Ljubljana consider grammar and pronunciation of the language to be difficult, but find Korean language to be beautiful as well.
Session 2 - Japanese language pedagogy
15:30 - 16:00 Paper 1
Chikako Shigemori Bučar (University of Ljubljana)
Aspect and tense: Contrastive studies in Slovenia and Croatia
In Slavic languages such as Slovenian and Croatian, aspect is an explicit grammatical category of the perfective/imperfective opposition. On the other hand, aspectuality in Japanese is observed in the inherent verbal semantics, and this part of grammar is usually discussed in close connection with tense. Acquiring verbal aspect, especially for learners of L2 whose L1 is of a distant language system, is a complex and lengthy process, demanding language knowledge of various areas, i.e. morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics etc.
This paper is a report on the first stage of an on-going research, a closer look at the aspect-related understanding and performance of learners (whose native tongue is either Slovenian or Croatian) of a non-slavic language (Japanese) at our university, and briefly presents the following:
• an overview of existing contrastive studies on aspect in Croatia and Slovenia;
• the most frequent errors in aspect and tense in Japanese by learners whose L1 is Slovenian/Croatian;
• recent attempts among slavists to clarify terminological inconsistencies and to set up a truly universal ground for contrastive research in aspect.
Important verb categorizations are Vendler 1967, Kindaichi 1950 and their modified versions. It is also meaningful to consider the principle of gradual learning (such as Aspect Hypothesis: Robison 1995, Bardovi-Harlig 1995, Anderson & Shirai 1994, 1996 etc.) and the principle of prototypes.
In the context of Japanese-language learning at the beginners' and intermediate level by our students, a special attention should be paid to the following dangerous misinterpretation, i.e., Slavic perfective ≒ Japanese instantaneous, and Slavic imperfective ≒ Japanese continuative.
16:00 - 16:30 Paper 2
Nagisa Moritoki (University of Ljubljana)
Dyslexia and Japanese language teaching in Europe
According to the survey conducted in July and August 2015 by the research group which includes the presenter, 80% of the 124 Japanese language teachers in Europe know what dyslexia is while only 30 % of them have learned about it so far. Their knowledge of dyslexia is therefore often incorrect and uncertain. Apart from that, interviews with teachers in the Central and Eastern Europe revealed that more dyslexic learners are studying in the private language schools than in the higher education institutions. Teachers in such private language schools do not have the appropriate knowledge to teach learners with dyslexia since support centers for learners with learning difficulties are not ordinarily found in this type of schools. Teachers are therefore not able to find special instructors they could turn to for advice. On the other hand, in private schools learners with learning difficulties often proceed to the higher level in spite of their poor grades due to business strategies of the school.
This presentation first points out that further survey about the situation regarding dyslexic learners in Europe is required, especially among the institutions of non school education which were less represented in the 2015 survey. Further it discusses (1) the necessity of teachers' early detection of dyslexia by means of appropriate knowledge, (2) the necessity of a general support network for teachers instead of individual support centers at each institution, and (3) the necessity of a provision for various teaching methods at the support network to help both teachers and learners with various conditions.
16:30 - 17:00 Paper 3
Jasmina Bajrami (Doctoral program, University of Ljubljana)
Politeness strategies in disagreements and criticisms in Japanese and Slovene
The choice of the way we speak is closely connected with politeness. Scholars and researchers, who have been studying politeness, have been trying to explain how people speaking different languages use politeness strategies in order to preserve harmonious relationships. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson were the pioneers of such research and have developed a universal theory of politeness, which, up until today, remains one of the leading and most comprehensive politeness theories.
The disertation deals with politeness strategies in Japanese and Slovene, used in expressing disagreements in public discourse, and is based on the theory of politeness, proposed by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987).
Sornig (1977) claims that any utterance that comments upon a pre-text by questioning part of its semantic or pragmatic information, correcting or negating it (semantically or formally) is called an act of disagreement or contradiction. Pomerantz (1984), looking at assessments, regards disagreement as a dispreferred response and says that speakers use various strategies to soften it (for example, delaying their utterance by long pauses, token agreements, eplanations, etc.). Similarly, Brown and Levinson (1987) claim that speakers, when expressing a disagreement, use politeness strategies, such as repetition, token agreement, white lies, hedges etc., as a redress directed to the addressee's face.
Disagreements are speech acts, which can threaten speaker's and/or hearer's face, therefore it is expected that in uttering such acts spekaers will use different politeness strategies to mitigate face threats in order to avoid the conflict. The purpose of this research is to determine which politeness strategies Slovene and Japanese speakers use in formal disputable situations when expressing disagreements and to clarify which factors influence the choice of certain politeness strategies.
17:00 - 17:30 Paper 4K
atarina Šukelj (Master program, University of Ljubljana)
Critical analysis of the representation of Japanese culture and society in the context of Japanese as a foreign language textbooks
Teaching culture in foreign language education is seen as something that is a must in order to cultivate intercultural communicative competence. Textbook(s) still have a prominent position in foreign language education and the information and knowledge presented in them are seldom questioned. Through the textbook learners not only learn the language, but also about the target culture and its members. I have therefore critically analyzed intermediate Japanese language textbooks with regard to the culture and society presented in them. On the one side the textbooks fail to include minorities of any kind, generalize about the sociocultural behavior of the members, present stereotypical images and the linguistic variety in Japan is given limited consideration. On the positive side, changes in the "real world" society are acknowledged, and can be seen in the variety of topics presented and the explicit commentary by the authors.
Session 3 - Theoretical and practical underpinnings (1)
10:00 - 11:00 Keynote Lecture II
Barbara Pizziconi (SOAS)
Tracking intercultural competence development in learners of Japanese
The development of an "intercultural communicative competence" is given increasing prominence in recent theorizations of foreign language education. I first discuss the complex set of assumptions which underlie the concepts of "intercultural speaker" and "intercultural competence", and the challenges that achieving such objectives poses for learners and teachers, as well as researchers investigating these constructs. I then offer some critical reflections based on empirical data from current learners of Japanese at SOAS; this group epitomizes a type of multicultural, multilingual, mobile learner starting the process of "nth" language learning from a far more advanced position than most theories account for, making the task of tracking "developments" even more challenging.
11:00 - 11:30 Paper 1
Irena Srdanović (Juraj Dobrila University of Pula)
Corpus lexicography: Japanese adjectives
The last decade provided us with a number of new large-scale contemporary Japanese language corpora and a few state of the art tools that can be or are already widely employed in the field of corpus lexicography. The most important to mention is the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ, c.f. Maekawa et al., 2013), which was thoroughly planned and compiled using sampling methods. Besides that, the novel technologies and methods in the development of web-based corpora brought to the researchers and lexicographers collections of billion words of authentic data in a language enabling new dimensions in analyses and description of a particular language and human languages in general. They proved to be especially relevant in empirically based exploration and confirmation of behaviour of word combinations as well as their constraints. JpTenTen and TWC are examples of such kind of Japanese language web corpora (c.f. Pomikalek & Suchomel, 2012; Imai et al., 2013), and Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2004; for adaptation of its functionalities for Japanese, c.f. Srdanović et al., 2008, 2012) and NINJAL-LWP (Pardeshi and Akasegawa, 2010) are major tools that use Japanese corpora for sophisticated lexical profiling. The aim of this presentation is to demonstrate possibilities of corpus based lexicography while taking Japanese language i-adjectives as an example. The research gives an overview of various discoveries driven from corpora, such as the distribution of i-adjectives, productive adjectival suffixes, the distribution of patterns of three major roles of adjectives (predicative, attributive and adverbial), lexical constraints in some adjectives' syntactic patterns. Furthermore, it explores in detail the attributive role of i-adjectives preceding a noun and presents the pattern usage of the adjective in a form of a lexical map, showing how the corpus-based resources can be used in the creation of reference dictionary materials.
Literature:
Imai, S., Akasegawa, S., Pardeshi, P. (2013) Development of NLT: the Search Tool for Tsukuba Web Corpus, Proceeding of the 3rd Japanese corpus linguistics workshop, Department of Corpus Studies/Center for Corpus Development, NINJAL, 199-206.
Kilgarriff, A., Rychly, P., Smrz, P. and Tugwell, D. (2004) The Sketch Engine. In: G. Williams and S. Vessier (eds) Proceedings of Euralex, 105-16. Bretagne, France: Université de Bretagne-Sud.
Maekawa, K., Yamazaki, M., Ogiso, T., Maruyama, T., Ogura, H., Kashino, W., Koiso, H., Yamaguchi, M., Tanaka, M. and Den, Y. (2013) Balanced corpus of contemporary written Japanese. Language Resources and Evaluation. Netherlands: Springer
Pardeshi, P. and Akasegawa, S. (2010) BCCWJ wo katsuyō shita kihon dōshi handobukku sakusei: kōpasu braujingu shisutemu NINJAL-LWP no tokuchō to kinō. Tokutei ryōiki kenkyū Nihongo kōpasu Gendai Nihongo kakikotoba kinkō kōpasu kansei kinen yokōshū. 205-216.
Srdanović, I., Erjavec T. and Kilgarriff, A. (2008) A web corpus and word-sketches for Japanese. Shizen gengo shori (Journal of Natural Language Processing) 15(2), 137-159.
Srdanović, I., Suchomel, V., Ogiso, T, Kilgarriff, A. (2013) Japanese Language Lexical and Grammatical Profiling Using the Web Corpus JpTenTen (in Japanese). In: Proceeding of the 3rd Japanese corpus linguistics workshop. Tokyo: NINJAL, Department of Corpus Studies/Center for Corpus Development, 229-238.
11:30 - 12:00 Paper 2
Nina Golob (University of Ljubljana)
Cross-language phoneme mapping: Slovene schwa in Japanese
It is reasonable to think that in the past, phonetic realizations of loanwords that were imported from a geographically distant language were in some way marked by its written form rather than spoken. In the past few decades this tendency has been changing due to modern technology and overall mobility that enables easy exposure to the sounds of a distant language. Though speech is phonetically a continuum, its perception is well known to be categorical, and categories play an important role in borrowing phonetic material of a foreign language. According to Perceptual Assimilation Model there are several classifications of how we assimilate non-native phonemes into our own phonemic inventory. Based on the supposition that nowadays borrowings are conducted mainly on the auditory level, I conducted an empirical research on how native Japanese listeners perceive and categorize the Slovene mid-central unrounded vowel sound /ǝ/ or schwa, which can be found in unstressed positions as well as a stressed vowel. Since both of the realizations may or may not be represented by a letter e in a written Slovene word, the research also examines whether and to what extent orthography influences the Japanese perception of the Slovene schwa. Results in general confirm the expectations; namely that (1) the Slovene vowel /ǝ/ is mainly interpreted as either /a/ or /u/, which further depends on the accentedness of the vowel and on the proceeding consonant, and that (2) under the influence of a written word, assimilation into Japanese /e/ gets more common in certain cases. Results also suggest that perception may be influenced by the Japanese phonotactic rules which is a topic for further research.
Session 4 - Theoretical and practical underpinnings (2)
13:00 - 14:00 Keynote Lecture III
Yuriko Sunakawa (Professor emerita, University of Tsukuba)
Dialogue between writers and readers
As Bakhtin points out, all language, whether written or spoken, is "dialogic". The major difference between written and spoken language is whether it utilizes paralanguage or not. Although written language has no means to utilize paralanguage, it has variety of ways to supply the information that paralanguage conveys. I first deal with Computer-Mediated Communication and discuss the way it communicates paralanguage information to the readers. Then I proceed to the light essays and blog texts to discuss the expressions that have dialogic functions and analyze the type of the functions. Finally I analyze newspaper articles to find out the means the writers use to communicate with readers.
14:00 - 14:30 Paper 1
Luka Culiberg (University of Ljubljana)
Bound in communication: Language as social institution
Language as a specific type of semiotic system is universal in human species. However, as a semiotic system it is also a social phenomenon par excellence. Language can only exist in society and is therefore one of the main markers which define certain society. In order to understand the nature of language in all its aspects we must therefore approach language not by only looking at its internal structure but also by looking at it as a social institution, i.e. looking at its role in society and the meaning society attributes to the language and its use. This is important because the linguistic internal structure itself is never something separate from its social character but is deeply connected to the ideological meaning societies attribute to their languages, which can be most clearly seen in the case of formation of national languages in the context of modern nations. I will discuss this nature of language as a social institution which helps shape societies while at the same time societies must shape their languages in order for them to perform this integrating role.
14:30 - 15:00 Paper 2
Andrej Bekeš (University of Ljubljana)
Topic and modality in Japanese editorials
Modality expressions are an explicit signal as to what kind of verbal interaction is going on in a particular context. There are several possibilities to look at modality expressions. One is from within a sentence, the prevalent approach to discussion of modality in sentence-based approaches until recently. Another one is to look at modality expressions from the point of view of their distribution in discourse, used in genre and style analysis. The third possibility is to look at how different modality expressions, embedded in respective sentences, interact with co-text.
This paper proposes an exploratory analysis of sentence-final modality expressions in Japanese editorials (shasetsu) as seen from their interaction with co-text. The paper argues that such analysis offers, combined with topic continuity based analysis of segmentation a possibility to reconstruct argumentative aspects of written texts as verbal interaction, on the basis of content dependencies within the text