Japanese Archive

Results in BLC Posts

Developing an Online Placement Test for the Japanese Program at UC Berkeley

Currently, Japanese lecturers create and give 60-minute walk-in placement exams for new students one week before each semester starts. The lecturers grade each test manually, so the results may vary depending on how and by whom the tests are graded and various subjective factors. Therefore, the Japanese Program needs a more efficient and objective method…

Teaching Japanese Pragmatic Competence Using Film Clips

In all 1st- through 3rd-year Japanese courses at UC Berkeley, students are expected to write several skits over the course of the semester. Each skit is submitted to the instructor for corrections, after which students perform the skit in class. Students appear to enjoy these oral quizzes. While checking 3rd-year Japanese students’ scripts, I have…

BLC Lecturer Profile: Chika Shibahara

From a Fan of Little House on The Prairie to a Japanese Lecturer at UC Berkeley: Chika Shibahara PROLOGUE: As a teenager, Chika Shibahara had her mother sew clothes designed by Chika and inspired by her favorite American TV series, Little House on the Prairie. Little did Chika know then where life would lead her…

Lecture by Masako Hiraga, April 6, 2007

Iconic Creativity in Haiku: A Linguistic Analysis of Basho’s Revisions by Masako Hiraga, Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Linguistics Department, University of California, Berkeley This presentation focuses on the styles of meaning creation by metaphor and iconicity in Basho’s haiku. The analysis particularly looks at the revising process of his two haiku texts, in terms of semantics,…

Results in L2 Journal Articles

Teaching Japanese Pragmatic Competence Using Film Clips

Taking three common pragmatic errors by intermediate students of Japanese as a starting point, namely, overuse of the 1st person pronoun watashi, and incorrect use of hearsay markers and sentence final particles, this paper develops a strategy for employing film clips ...