This paper examines the listening journals (LJs) written in English by a group of Japanese college students as a means to uncover their behavior and thoughts while they are engaged in extensive listening (EL). The participants were 36 male and female college freshmen with high-intermediate English proficiency. The parts about the comprehension of materials were extracted from LJs for analysis. The students’ entries were analyzed by manual categorization as well as by using KH-Coder, corpus analysis software (Higuchi,2012). From the analyses, the main factors affecting the students’ listening comprehension turned out to be vocabulary knowledge, speed of speech, and background knowledge. It was also revealed that, to enhance their comprehension in EL, the students listened to the same audio repeatedly, used subtitles, and selected the content they were somewhat familiar with. The effectiveness of using corpus analysis to investigate the students’ LJs seems to have been endorsed.

The purpose of this research was to investigate whether or not watching a foreign language video and doing a cloze listening dictation exercise in groups results in increased content knowledge of the subject matter or an increase in vocabulary knowledge. A classroom experiment with Japanese junior college students learning English found significant gains in both vocabulary and subject matter knowledge. The experiment was conducted over three weeks with pre-tests being administered in the first week, the video clip treatment in the second week, and the post-tests in the third week. The pre- and post-measures consisted of a matching test for receptive vocabulary, a cloze test for productive vocabulary, and a content knowledge test to determine what the students knew about the climate change issue. This research should be considered preliminary because of the small number of subjects and a quasi-experimental design that did not incorporate a control group. The paper includes possible future modifications to the experiment for further research.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how foreign views on Japan have been shaped bymedia coverage. The March 11 Japan earthquake was significant in terms of the foreign media coverage on Japan and its people. Especially, the foreign media attempted to describe aspects of Japanese culture through their reports on the devastated disaster. This paper examines evaluations of words employed by the foreign media reports on the March 11 Japan earthquake. Corpus-based analysis is applied in extracting research words. Media evaluation measures are also taken to analyze the research words in target sentences, using sentiment scores derived from lexical resources. In conclusion, it is asserted that words used in the foreign media coverage on the March 11 Japan earthquake have an impact on shaping positive and negative views on Japan, and which stems from cultural distinction in Japan and English-speaking countries as environmental factors.

In recent decades, international news coverage has been steadily increasing as a result of globalization. However, it was not until the launch of the “Translation in Global News” initiative at the University of Warwick in the mid-2000s that news translation started attracting the attention it deserved. Researchers worldwide participated in this multi-year project, but no case study was carried out regarding news translation practices in the Japanese media. This paper examines how US President Obama’s speeches during and after the 2012 Presidential campaign have been translated as his direct quotes in Japan by comparing five major newspapers. The purpose of this research is: 1) to make visible the existence and the role of journalist-translators in Japanese newsrooms; 2) to illustrate that translations by five different newspapers are significantly different from one another; and 3) to analyze those differences through the use of translation strategies, namely omission.

This study reveals the dynamism of cultural change that the film “Slumdog$Millionaire” (2008) brought about by analyzing the controversy over the film in India.Because this film is a hybrid between the UK and India, it helped accelerate the dynamism of cultural change and further cultural fluidity. The analysis shows that the Indian attitude toward the film changed from negative to positive. Initially the film sparked protests and criticism. Indians criticized the film as westerners’ stereotypical and discriminatory portrayal of India. Gradually, however, the global praise of the film, especially the film’s winning of the Oscar influenced the Indian perception. The Indianness of the film came to be emphasized in India, and the perception that the film was “Indian” (Bollywood) and therefore the praise was for India or Bollywood, gained power. The process shows the India’s identity struggle between the global and the local.

Translation studies as an academic genre has not still received a proper attention in Japan. It is particularly true with subtitle translation. When we watch a subtitled movie or other audiovisual productions, we receive all kinds of information through subtitles. However, we do not always realize that we are also constantly exposed to cultural elements both though images and language expressions in subtitles. In this article we will examine the relationship between subtitle translation and culture from semiologic points of view, and discuss the role of subtitles in terms of the transmission of cultural information to the audience of other cultures through the analysis of the Japanese movie, Tasogare Seibei directed by Yoji Yamada.

Education for intercultural understanding is very important in the process ofEnglish teaching at junior high school, high school, and universities. This paper analyzes the new English textbooks of junior high school approved by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology from the perspective of intercultural understanding. First, it looks at (1) the variety of the countries referred to in the textbooks, (2) the types of cultural materials included, and (3) the extent of materials intended to promote understanding of Japanese culture. Then, it discusses some of the materials concerning the Japanese culture from the viewpoints of students, current state of affairs, and so on. Finally, based on the data, it compares the new materials with the old ones and shows how the new textbooks have changed. The results of the research indicate that the new textbooks contain more materials concerning English-speaking countries as well as those concerning Japan to promote students’ understanding of their own culture than did the old textbooks.

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the effects of the fourskills integrated teaching approach on oral fluency in a Japanese university EFL context.Learners were instructed to read a newspaper article, then watch a TV news story that covers the same theme, answer fill-in-the-blanks comprehension questions, write a summary, work on dictogloss, and discuss their reactions with partners. This teaching approach includes such fluency-enhancing elements as repetition, recycling and deep processing of vocabulary (i.e., using words in multiple contexts), time on task, and automatization. Participants were third-year English communication majors. Classes met once a week for the academic year. Quantitative data were collected from tests administered at the beginning and at the end of the year. L2 speaking fluency was measured using a news story-retelling test that assessed rate of speech. Results showed that L2 speaking fluency improved as measured by the test, thus lending support to the employment of the four-skills integrated teaching approach.