学園メールマガジン「VISTA Plus」
キャンパス便り

A two-day Japanese language education workshop was held at TUEC on the weekend of November 5 & 6. The workshop was the fourteenth, so far, in TUEC’s series of Japanese language education workshops aimed at Japanese language teachers in the Nordic countries, and held twice annually (in the spring and fall) since 2010. The workshop series targets institutions offering Japanese language education with primary focus being on universities with Japan studies programs. The fall 2016 workshop was organized in cooperation between TUEC and Professor Fusato Taniguchi of Tokai University’s International Education Center.

With the title “Japanese Metaphors and Idiomatic Expressions: A comparative analysis with Arabic” the workshop examined the role and meanings of metaphors and idioms, which for ages have been used by human cultures to give expression to experiences and conceptualizations of the world and life in it. In addition to their universal aspects, metaphors and idiomatic expressions can also convey very particularistic (or culture-specific) meanings, depending on the environments, lifestyles, cultures and mentalities that produce them. This workshop discussed how cultural circumstances are reflected in language, and examined the extent of extant research in the field of metaphor and idiom study.

Associate Professor Dr. Abdalla El-Moamen of Tokai University was featured as main speaker and contributed with a lecture and two subsequent work sessions. The lecture, “Considering Metaphor in Japanese and Arabic: Surveying the mental landscape of Japanese and Arabs,” presented metaphor as a cognitive tool and examined how physical experience via conceptualization translates itself into culturally-loaded abstract idiomatic expressions.

Supplementing the main lecture and its related work sessions, two participants also contributed with presentations. The topics were 1) Introduction of the Japanese language course at the adult education
center in Western Copenhagen (VUCV), and 2) A proposed selection of the five hundred initial kanji to be learned by children studying Japanese as heritage language.

The fall 2016 workshop again provided a free-talk session for discussing teaching experiences and sharing teaching tips. Topics introduced for discussion included ‘textbook and exercise suggestions for reading comprehension classes for lower intermediate level learners’ and ‘ideas for in-class kanji learning’.
The workshop gathered participants from Denmark, Sweden and Japan. In addition to Tokai University, universities present at the workshop were the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University and Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and Lund University in Sweden. Freelance Japanese language teachers active in Denmark also participated.

TUEC is currently in the process of producing the workshop proceedings which will report in more detail on the content of the workshop (please direct any inquiries in this regard to TUEC). The proceedings will be made available on TUEC’s website upon completion (www.u-tokai.dk), alongside all previous Japanese language education workshop proceedings already available online.

TUEC’s fall 2016 Japanese language education workshop was supported by the Japan Foundation.