English in the Japanese Linguistic Landscape: An Awareness-Raising Activity Examining Place, Form, and Reason

要旨

The Japanese linguistic landscape offers a space beyond the classroom in which to engage Japanese learners of English with a critical examination of the English in their environment.Such an opportunity for continued learning beyond the classroom is of particular value in English as a Foreign Language contexts where exposure to the target language outside of formal classes is limited.This article reports on an awareness-raising activity which involved students first receiving a lecture on the Japanese linguistic landscape focused on the themes of place (where English can be found), form (in what ways English is used), and reason (the purposes of using English).Students were then asked to critically examine the English in their linguistic landscape outside of the classroom over the following week, framed within the three themes, and then submit a 400-word English report discussing what particular features they noticed.Using a corpus-based analysis of the reports, it was found that students had noticed and further explored not only things discussed in the lecture, but also their own insights and discoveries into where, how, and why English was used around them.

主題