Who Is To Say ‘Your Japanese Is Incorrect’? Reflection on ‘Correct’ Japanese Usages by Learners of Japanese

Abstract

This paper discusses the Japanese language used by JSL learners in Japan, while examining JSL classrooms as public space. It draws upon JSL literature, Japanese textbooks and their discourses to find the kinds of Japanese that are taught and used in JSL classrooms and how they are presented and consumed, and it observes how diversity in learners' language is dealt with inside and outside of JSL classrooms in Japan, keeping in view the danger of ‘colonisation’ of classrooms. It will then study new developments where JSL speakers are participating in development of their own ‘third space’, which values hybridity more than diversity, and in turn the continuous re-construction of the public space.

Notes

¹Ōno, Nihongo renshūchō.

²Saitō, Koe ni dashite yomitai Nihongo.

³Komori, ‘Nihongo būmu to nashonarizumu’.

⁴Accessed on 3 September 2009.

⁵Kōnobe, Sono Nihongo wa machigai desu.

⁶Ōhashi, Imasara kikenai.

⁷Sasaki, ‘Individual Variation’.

⁸Healy, ‘Expanding Student Capacities’.

⁹Bhabha, ‘The Third Space’.

¹⁰For the ru-verb group, for example, tabe-rareru functions as potential, passive and honorific. For the u-verb group, nom-eru functions as potential, while nom-areru functions as passive and honorific.

¹¹Hidaka, ‘Gengo henka’, 14–26.

¹²Ibid.

¹³Ibid., 25

¹⁴Selinker, ‘Interlanguage’, 209–231.

¹⁵Sakoda, Nihongo kyōiku ni ikasu.

¹⁶Grammatically, the learner should omit ‘no’ and state ‘Akai kutsu ga hoshii’.

¹⁷Thomson and Iida, ‘Mada meshi kutte nai', provides detailed discussion on this utterance.

¹⁸Shioda, ‘Hōsō ni arawareta Nihongo no machigai’, 46–57.

¹⁹Tatsuki, Kotoba wa ikiteiru.

²⁰Summarised from a conversation with a Tokyo-based publisher specializing in Japanese Language Education. 3A Corporation, Minna no Nihongo; Association for Overseas Training Scholarship, Shin Nihongo no kiso; Banno et al., An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese: Genki; Association for Japanese-Language Teaching, Japanese for Busy People.

²²Ibid., 9.

²¹Healy, ‘Expanding Student Capacities’.

²³Where classrooms host the meeting of two or more cultures, rethinking the classroom as ‘third space’ allows different cultural practices to be acknowledged, appropriated and adapted; Otsuji and Thomson, ‘Promoting “Third Space” Identities’.

²⁴Association for Japanese-Language Teaching, Japanese for Busy People, 21.

²⁵Kanazawa, Ryūgakusei no Nihongo.

²⁶Association for Japanese-Language Teaching, Japanese for Busy People, 19.

²⁷A more polite alternative of dōzo yoroshiku.

²⁸Association for Japanese-Language Teaching, Japanese for Busy People, 9.

²⁹Sei, ‘Tsumaranai mono desu ga’.

³⁰Nagoya Daigaku, A Course in Modern Japanese.

³¹Noda, ‘Nihongo kyōiku’.

³²Wells, ‘Re-evaluating the IRF Sequence’.

³³Ohara, ‘Design of Learning Environment’.

³⁴Yoshida, Learners in Japanese Language Classrooms.

³⁵Sanada, Okamoto and Ujihara, Kiite oboeru Kansai-ben.

³⁶Maynard, Te iu ka.

³⁷Yang, Toki ga nijimu asa.

³⁸Zoppetti, Ichi-gen san.

³⁹Levy, Chiji ni kudakete.

⁴⁰Nezammafi, Shiroi kami.

⁴¹Nihon Bungaku Shinkō-kai, ‘Senpyō’.

⁴²For Australian practices, see Thomson, New Pedagogies.

⁴³For examples of the ESL practices, see chapters by Hammond, Gibons, Guse and Harwood in Kawakami, et al., Idō suru.