W-09 The multicultural classroom: a challenge for engineering educators

抄録

Lectures delivered in Japanese at some large private and public universities in Japan were collected and uploaded to a corpus (database) called OnCAL.jp. The corpus confirmed that classroom discourse reflects the culture in which instruction is conducted. Concretely, OnCAL.jp was analyzed for the usage of pronouns in lectures, and the results were compared to those obtained from analysis of a corpus of lectures delivered in English, OnCAL. It was found that the first person singular was the most frequent pronoun in OnCAL.jp, while the second person (singular + plural) pronoun was the most frequent in OnCAL. This result can be seen as evidence that the Japanese educational process is teacher centered, while the American educational process is more student centered, in agreement with predictions in the literature.