Under the Interactional Umbrella: Presentation and Collaboration in Japanese Classroom Discourse

TAKE 1: FRED E.ANDERSON TAKE 2: SYLVIA WOLFE

TAKE 1

Introduction

While formal education plays an important role in the socialization of children in any culture, the role of Japanese schooling in socialization cannot be overemphasized. There are a number of reasons why it may be even more important than school socialization in other societies, particularly Western societies. Japanese children spend a great deal of time at school, with the number of designated school days ranging between 220 and 225, compared with 175–180 days for American children (Wray, 1999). In addition, there are school attendance days, where pupils are expected simply to show up for formal ceremonies, even during vacation periods. Moreover, as has been pointed out by a number of authors (e.g. Peak, 1991; Tobin et al., 1989), modern Japanese children tend to be indulged at home. Hence, much of the socialization necessary for teaching them to be productive members of a community takes place only after they enter preschool. To borrow Peak's words, 'learning to go to school' appears to be a more significant result of preschools than content learning. This emphasis on socialization continues well into the primary school years. As noted by White (1987: 123): 'For the Japanese child, social lessons are everywhere to be found, meaning all activities during the school day are valued, not just those with explicit academic content.'

Children's communities of learning as found in school classrooms both reflect the adult society and serve as systematic preparation for it. Values necessary to succeed in the adult world are developed in the classroom explicitly, through formal instruction, and implicitly, through participation in culturally significant verbal and nonverbal activities. The present chapter examines language socialization in a Japanese lower primary school classroom as reflected in the classroom discourse. The focus is on three recurring routines that are seen to be representative of Japanese socialization more generally. The first is an aisatsu or 'greeting' routine used to open and close lessons; the second a happyoo or 'presentation' routine, through which students present ideas in response to a teacher's questions; and the third a hannoo or 'reaction' routine through which classmates formally respond to each others' presentations.

Setting

The principal data for the study were collected ethnographically in a first-/second-grade classroom in Fukuoka Prefecture, southern Japan. As is customary in Japanese primary schools, the students and teacher remained together as a unit for two academic years. The examples used in this chapter were extracted from 65 hours of participant observation: 23 of these hours were audio or videotaped, and 16 were fully transcribed with the help of native Japanese-speaking research assistants. After an initial period of general observation, social studies lessons were singled out as the main focus of the study for two reasons. First, they were rich with the routines that were seen as integral to Japanese language socialization. Second, the explicit emphasis in the social studies curriculum was on learning about society, especially the local community, and not on language per se; hence the lessons could provide a window on the process of language development as related to more general sociocultural learning.

Theoretical Framework

The study was conducted within the general framework of language socialization, defined as 'socialization to use language' and 'socialization through the use of language' (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986: 2). The language socialization perspective sees the development of language and world view as occurring in tandem and being mutually influential. The analysis that follows is a condensation of themes discussed in more detail in Anderson (1995). Although this research was, to my knowledge, the first extensive study of Japanese classroom discourse presented in English, related analyses have since been carried out in Japanese first-language environments (Cook, 1999; Dotera, 1998; Walsh, 1998); in the context of teaching and learning Japanese as a second language (Kanagy, 1999; Ohta, 1999); and in relation to the teaching of English as a foreign language in Japanese schools (LoCastro, 1996). The body of research developing in this area allows me to theorize with a greater degree of confidence than was previously possible.

The basic unit of analysis used in the present study is the 'interactional routine' (Gleason, 1976; Kanagy, 1999; Ohta, 1999; Peters & Boggs, 1986), defined as 'a sequence of exchanges in which one speaker's utterance, accompanied by appropriate nonverbal behavior, calls forth one of a limited set of responses by one or more other participants' (Peters & Boggs, 1986: 81). In classroom discourse, it is normally the teacher who initiates the sequence, and students who provide responses, individually or as a group. Although Peters and Boggs's definition specifies that the possible responses are limited, the form of a response may vary in a continuum from formulaic to flexible depending on the initiation. Formulaic responses – such as aisatsu, and to some extent hannoo, in the present study – require presentation of language in memorized chunks. Flexible responses – such as happyoo in this study – do not...