Globalization has brought a drastic change to English Education since English is now considered a... more Globalization has brought a drastic change to English Education since English is now considered an International language in Japan. According to a survey given out in Japan by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2017, most of the junior high schools nationwide conduct English lessons as a prioritized foreign language. Compulsory English Education in Japan starts the fifth year of elementary school at the age of ten and continues until the third year of junior high school. If a student attends high school and university, which is voluntary after the age of sixteen, then the student must take another three to seven years of English. Since all Japanese must go through a large amount of English education during school, there needs to be a focus on creating a learning environment that helps them become proficient in English. This paper will discuss how Japanese learners of English are influenced by their native language of Japanese, when producing English sounds and it will provide teaching methods to correct pronunciation errors. Japanese is the official language of Japan. However, including Japanese emigrant countries, more than 120 million people speak Japanese throughout the world. The lingua franca of Japan is called Standard Language or Kyotsugo, which is principally based in the Tokyo area. The country of Japan is divided into two main areas eastern Japan and western Japan. Japan is rich in various regional dialects from Hokkaido in the north, to Okinawa in the south. There are various dialects in the 48 prefectures. Japanese dialects vary in pitch and accent, morphology of the verb and adjectives, particle usage and vocabulary . Tokyo Japanese is a well-studied pitch accent language and many words in the Tokyo dialect have no underlying high tone that appears on the surface and are phonologically inserted (Hayes, 2009;. We could assume that standard Japanese is prevalent nationwide because of its usage in the national curriculum of compulsory education and also due to the influence of television. Different from most European languages, it is difficult to classify Japanese within a particular language family. Japanese syllabic and phonotactic structure do not match any other language, certainly not Chinese and Korean which are the two most geographically close neighbors. Although Japanese shares Chinese characters in the writing system, it is grammatically and phonologically distinct from the Chinese. Phonologically speaking, Japanese is also different from Korean although both languages have the same a five-vowel system . The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts; Chinese characters called Kanji, and two syllabic scripts called Hiragana and Katakana. Kanji was brought from China in the late 5 th century. Hiragana and Katakana were both adopted from Kanji in the 9 th century. The Latin alphabet, Romaji, is also used in modern Japanese. The traditional way of writing is to write vertically, lines progressing from right to left. But today both vertical writing and horizontal writing are practiced. In terms of grammatical structure, it is completely different from English. Japanese basic sentence order
Women’s and Gender Studies: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives
In the annual Global Gender Gap Report, which tracks gender parity in education, health, politics... more In the annual Global Gender Gap Report, which tracks gender parity in education, health, politics, and economic participation, Japanese women consistently rank last among the group of seven industrialized nations and far below those in other Asian countries such as the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand in spite of governmental policies such as former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's "Womenomics" initiative to encourage Japanese women to enter the workplace. Although the number of working women has increased, most are not engaged in career-track jobs; the number of women in executive or managerial positions, as well as high-level government jobs, lags far behind that of other industrialized nations. Similarly, compared to their counterparts in other developed countries, Japanese men participate far less in household labor. Research suggests that the less than stellar labor market outcome for Japanese women may be in part because they are choosing part-time or lower-level jobs to balance employment with nonwork obligations. Japanese working women who are married with children still bear the brunt of childcare, housekeeping, and caring for elderly relatives. Furthermore, they are left with little time for activities that might lead to career advancement. There are indications, however, that gendered perceptions of domestic labor in Japan are changing. In this study, we conducted a survey to investigate the attitudes of current Japanese university students, who were born in the mid to late 1990s and are part of the so-called Generation Z, toward domestic tasks and determine whether there has been a generational shift in attitudes about who is responsible for domestic work.
Globalization has brought a drastic change to English Education since English is now considered a... more Globalization has brought a drastic change to English Education since English is now considered an International language in Japan. According to a survey given out in Japan by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2017, most of the junior high schools nationwide conduct English lessons as a prioritized foreign language. Compulsory English Education in Japan starts the fifth year of elementary school at the age of ten and continues until the third year of junior high school. If a student attends high school and university, which is voluntary after the age of sixteen, then the student must take another three to seven years of English. Since all Japanese must go through a large amount of English education during school, there needs to be a focus on creating a learning environment that helps them become proficient in English. This paper will discuss how Japanese learners of English are influenced by their native language of Japanese, when producing English sounds and it will provide teaching methods to correct pronunciation errors. Japanese is the official language of Japan. However, including Japanese emigrant countries, more than 120 million people speak Japanese throughout the world. The lingua franca of Japan is called Standard Language or Kyotsugo, which is principally based in the Tokyo area. The country of Japan is divided into two main areas eastern Japan and western Japan. Japan is rich in various regional dialects from Hokkaido in the north, to Okinawa in the south. There are various dialects in the 48 prefectures. Japanese dialects vary in pitch and accent, morphology of the verb and adjectives, particle usage and vocabulary . Tokyo Japanese is a well-studied pitch accent language and many words in the Tokyo dialect have no underlying high tone that appears on the surface and are phonologically inserted (Hayes, 2009;. We could assume that standard Japanese is prevalent nationwide because of its usage in the national curriculum of compulsory education and also due to the influence of television. Different from most European languages, it is difficult to classify Japanese within a particular language family. Japanese syllabic and phonotactic structure do not match any other language, certainly not Chinese and Korean which are the two most geographically close neighbors. Although Japanese shares Chinese characters in the writing system, it is grammatically and phonologically distinct from the Chinese. Phonologically speaking, Japanese is also different from Korean although both languages have the same a five-vowel system . The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts; Chinese characters called Kanji, and two syllabic scripts called Hiragana and Katakana. Kanji was brought from China in the late 5 th century. Hiragana and Katakana were both adopted from Kanji in the 9 th century. The Latin alphabet, Romaji, is also used in modern Japanese. The traditional way of writing is to write vertically, lines progressing from right to left. But today both vertical writing and horizontal writing are practiced. In terms of grammatical structure, it is completely different from English. Japanese basic sentence order
Women’s and Gender Studies: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives
In the annual Global Gender Gap Report, which tracks gender parity in education, health, politics... more In the annual Global Gender Gap Report, which tracks gender parity in education, health, politics, and economic participation, Japanese women consistently rank last among the group of seven industrialized nations and far below those in other Asian countries such as the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand in spite of governmental policies such as former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's "Womenomics" initiative to encourage Japanese women to enter the workplace. Although the number of working women has increased, most are not engaged in career-track jobs; the number of women in executive or managerial positions, as well as high-level government jobs, lags far behind that of other industrialized nations. Similarly, compared to their counterparts in other developed countries, Japanese men participate far less in household labor. Research suggests that the less than stellar labor market outcome for Japanese women may be in part because they are choosing part-time or lower-level jobs to balance employment with nonwork obligations. Japanese working women who are married with children still bear the brunt of childcare, housekeeping, and caring for elderly relatives. Furthermore, they are left with little time for activities that might lead to career advancement. There are indications, however, that gendered perceptions of domestic labor in Japan are changing. In this study, we conducted a survey to investigate the attitudes of current Japanese university students, who were born in the mid to late 1990s and are part of the so-called Generation Z, toward domestic tasks and determine whether there has been a generational shift in attitudes about who is responsible for domestic work.
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Papers by Yoko Kita