Waseda e-Teaching Award

ICTを効果的に活用した授業のGoodPracticeを表彰します!

オンデマンド授業部門

新城 直樹
上江洲 弘明
折井 麻美子
向後 千春
佐渡島 紗織
戸田 貴子 / Takako Toda
深澤 良彰 / Yoshiaki Fukazawa
細川 英雄
森田 裕介

CCDL授業部門

太田 宏 / Hiroshi Ohta
近藤 悠介
砂岡 和子
根岸 純子

Course N@vi活用部門、その他

荒巻 恵子
尾澤 重知
上沼 正明
武沢 護 / Mamoru Takezawa
田中 久稔
西村 昭治
船木 由喜彦
三尾 忠男
吉田 賢史

On-demand Lectures Section Award

On-demand teaching and multilateral support for improvement of effectiveness of Japanese pronunciation learning

Takako Toda
Professor, Graduate School of Japanese Applied Linguistics

At present, Waseda University has more than 3,000 international students. Professor Toda provides on-demand classes to meet their need to improve their Japanese pronunciation. Her teaching method has been achieving remarkable results by incorporating pronunciation instructions using audio files and a BBS, rather than just showing videos to students in a unilateral manner.

There is a great need among international students to improve their Japanese pronunciation

Professor Toda, an experienced researcher in the area of Japanese speech education, joined the preparations for the establishment of the Graduate School of Japanese Applied Linguistics and launched a special pronunciation course at the Center for Japanese Language after her arrival at Waseda University in 2000. This course attracted so many international students that the class had to be divided into two groups in a hurry so as not to exceed the enrollment limit. “This has brought it home to me how few international students are confident in their Japanese pronunciation.”

Many international students arrive in Japan without having received sufficient Japanese pronunciation training. For this reason, they experience communication breakdowns in Japan, both when failing to make themselves understood, or finding themselves misunderstood. There are also quite a few of international students who have developed psychological ‘complexes’ about their Japanese, worried that their awkward pronunciation makes them seem childish, or frustrated with having difficulty making themselves understood even after many years of study. The reality is that many international students have little opportunity to receive proper pronunciation training, while at the same time they experience Japanese native speakers around them pointing out their incorrect pronunciation.

“One reason is that there are few faculty members who have the expertise to teach Japanese pronunciation professionally. Just because you are a Japanese and native Japanese speaker does not mean that you can provide effective Japanese pronunciation training, unless you have specialized knowledge of it. There are many international students who are looking for the opportunity to learn Japanese pronunciation properly. I wanted to meet their needs.”

Learning the characteristics of invisible “pronunciation” using visual content in a multilateral way

In order to achieve her objective, Professor Toda has decided to introduce on-demand content, including videos in which an instructor explains the characteristics of Japanese pronunciation in an easy-to-understand manner, item by item, such as accents, intonations and rhythms, as well as slides to support them. The instructional videos are capable of displaying both Japanese and English subtitles. Users can also hear model speech by clicking “Pronunciation Practice” buttons. These useful functions allow learners to develop a good theoretical understanding of the characteristics of Japanese pronunciation while at the same time doing actual pronunciation practice on the spot.

An example of on-demand Japanese pronunciation content
with “Pronunciation Practice” buttons

“Pronunciation is invisible and thus is very difficult to teach and learn. However, adopting a multilateral approach by combining videos, sounds, illustrations, animations, and the like can make it easier to understand.”

When face-to-face pronunciation lessons are given by instructors, each of them can only teach a limited number of students at a time, often resulting in a lack of instructors and classrooms. By contrast, on-demand lessons can accommodate any number of learners. Taking a future increase in international students into account, this on-demand approach is expected to help a lot to overcome the shortage of instructors and classrooms.

Another drawback of face-to-face lessons is that individual students are not given much time to practice pronunciation themselves. However, on-demand lessons allow each student to practice pronunciation at their own pace. This means that individual students can personally focus on what they find difficult and repeat those parts over and over again.

Professor Toda also offers localized pronunciation lesson content for speakers of specific mother tongues, like English, Chinese and Korean, as supplementary materials. As different language speakers tend to develop different accents and find different areas of pronunciation particularly difficult, these language-specific materials are designed to allow speakers of various languages to focus on what they find difficult. Another advantage is that because each of these materials is targeted exclusively at speakers of a specific language, they can help learners in a more efficient, precise manner.

Beginning the course with face-to-face lessons with detailed instructions prepares students for later self-learning

Professor Toda has created various learning materials in this way and effectively incorporated them into her courses by getting students to use them for preparations and revisions on an as-needed basis. Building upon this experience, she launched a course named “Nameraka! Hatsuon 3-4 (Fluent! Pronunciation 3-4)” in the autumn semester of 2012. In this course, only the first five out of the 15 lessons are face-to-face lessons and the remaining ten are on-demand lessons.

The purpose of the face-to-face lessons, provided at the beginning of this course, is to give participants careful, detailed instructions on how to make effective use of the on-demand content for their learning in the later lessons, while getting them to actually use the materials together with the instructor and fellow students. After these lessons, participants never come together in class again; they each access Course N@vi to play the videos and learn by watching and listening to lectures on their own in the sixth and later lessons. Besides these “lecture” videos, “shadowing exercise” materials are also provided, as participants are also required to do shadowing (in which they repeat speech immediately after hearing it.)

“It is desirable that students continue to study outside the course hours, so that they can practice more. In reality, however, they have a lot of work to do in their areas of specialization, and are so busy that it is difficult for them to allocate large blocks of time to this course. This is why they should do shadowing exercises using news reports, weather forecasts, dramas, films or other materials that they are interested in, so that they can accumulate practice hours by incorporating the exercises into their daily routines with ease. The shadowing method is a way to help them keep up their motivation to practice.”

An example of “shadowing” learning material in which
a sound file is embedded in reference content
Preventing students from being passive learners, with BBS and pronunciation check systems

As on-demand lessons do not provide students with the opportunity to interact directly with the instructor or fellow students, it may be sometimes difficult for them to maintain motivation. To address this problem, this course provides a BBS, on which mentors post topics related to each lesson and students are invited to interact with them and fellow students by responding freely. This BBS is joined by six graduate students who belong to Professor Toda’s laboratory. “For example, when a person writes about the accent characteristics of his or her mother tongue many other persons can express their opinions in response to it. Topics expand and evolve in this way. Many say that they can learn a lot from simply reading the posts of others. It is more like a forum for intense discussions than a question-and-answer corner.” Useful information, such as websites which may be of use to learners, is also posted on this BBS, which actually contributes a lot to promoting the sharing of information between students and increasing their motivation.

Moreover, by using the report submitting function, Professor Toda has also introduced a system in which students can receive comments from mentors about their own pronunciation which they have recorded and submitted as sound files. This “pronunciation check” system also allows students to receive sound files recorded by native speakers by request. In a face-to-face lesson, there are only a limited number of times that an individual student can have his or her pronunciation corrected due to time constraints. However, they can use this “pronunciation check” service as many times as they want.

The system is designed so that when a learner submits his or her pronunciation,
a mentor will check it and give feedback to the student

Students are briefed thoroughly on how to use the BBS and pronunciation check systems in the first five face-to-face lessons so as to ensure that they can make appropriate use of them later on their own. “I adopted these systems because I wanted learners to make effective use of them. This is why I believe it is important to extend a helping hand to those who are not sure how to use them, rather than leaving it all up to each student.” As a result, both the BBS and pronunciation check systems are quite actively used by students despite the fact that their use is not compulsory.

“Using the BBS and pronunciation check systems gives students the feeling that they are attending the lessons together with their classmates and mentors, while preventing them from feeling a sense of isolation, of learning on their own.”

Designed for ease of self-learning, resulting in a dramatic increase in hours of practice

Although each lecture lasts only 15 to 20 minutes, each lesson is designed to be completed in about 90 minutes, in which the student carries out a whole series of learning activities, such as watching the lecture video while practicing pronunciation every now and then, posting on the BBS, and recording and sending sound files for pronunciation checks. “In addition, they also regularly conduct shadowing exercises. Consequently, there is a dramatic increase in hours of practice.” Students who have not had the opportunity to receive pronunciation training learn what they should do to improve their Japanese pronunciation and keep on practicing Japanese pronunciation on a daily basis in line with the learned methodology. In fact, this is resulting in significant improvement.

“The sound files submitted for pronunciation checks clearly show that individual students’ pronunciation is improving each time. Students also say that they feel it themselves. Some say that Japanese native speakers around them now praise them for their beautiful pronunciation.”

Many people assume that on-demand lessons are just about distributing recorded materials. However, one of the greatest advantages of this course is that it assures interactivity by incorporating activities like using a BBS and exchanging sound files, rather than providing content in a unilateral manner. Professor Toda is planning to analyze the results of this course from this semester and further evolve it in the next semester.

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