And no, this time for
this person, they should bust
out the first shot.
Martin Parsons.
Parsons they're having.
Yes, they are both in the Faculty of Business
Partner University in Osaka,
where he teaches English to touch
science and has
in the curriculum in the kitchen in Japan.
If you think about it,
and the intersection between the digital literacy
of foreign language teacher in bytes and the interest is to explore
the possibility of proliferating on virtual exchanges in the future.
Being Australian by birth, he's
remained an Australian football fan,
but it takes a passing interest in soccer.
Checking the record results for Arsenal
in the Premier League, currently also by La Liga.
So thank you very much for being here today.
For your presentation. We will be
exploring the use of subtitles in the future.
Exchange Japan.
China is quite interesting and we are looking for work.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
And I don't know those ladies still here.
That's a bit of a hard act to follow.
I don't have any jokes for you today, but yeah, thank you very much.
And it's great to be here because I haven't been able
to travel out of Japan for
three or four years now, and it's the first time
I've been able to travel to a conference.
So it's fantastic to come to this beautiful city.
Thank you also for last night.
The walking tour and the dinner was fantastic. Was a lot of fun.
Don't Tony.
I'm here to talk about an exploratory study done
using English language subtitles
with short student produced English language videos, which were then
exchanged between the students in Japan and China.
And I'm only going to be talking about this from the Japan side.
I'm not going to discuss anything to do with the with the Chinese students.
So what I want to try and do
is start by giving you a little bit of background
about English language education in Japan
and then a very brief kind of literature review to kind of
give some context to the whys and wherefores of what I'm trying to do.
And then I'll discuss what happened, what the results were, etc., etc..
And if this time and I'm not sure there will be time, very briefly,
touch on the students impressions of China.
And finally, I'd like to wrap it up with some reflections and a kind
of an offer for the future.
So let's get into this
foreign language.
Education in Japan equals English language education.
There really is nothing else,
and pretty much everyone in Japan has finished high school, which means
pretty much everybody has had six years
as a minimum of formal English language education.
Now, those who've done it in primary school
and university could have eight or ten or even 12 years.
But at least everyone has done that six years.
On top of that, we've got millions of kids in cram schools
in the evening, on the weekends, and they'll be studying
basically three languages, three subjects, Japanese language,
mathematics and English, because these are the subjects
that are in all the entrance exams for high schools and for universities.
On top of that, you've got millions of people in these
private language school system
spending a huge amount of money every single year.
And despite all that study, study, study, study, study on fortunately,
most Japanese people really only have
a very rudimentary level of English skill.
Now, there's probably several reasons for that that are unique to Japan,
but as far as I'm concerned,
the important one for me here is that for Japanese kids,
there's no reason for them to use English once they leave my classroom.
No purpose, no reason, no one to talk to.
And if they want to find a reason, they're going to have to go
and find it for them.
So it's a huge internal economy.
They just don't need it.
And that's probably one of the reasons I hold it back.
But there's another thing, too, that I've noticed in recent times
that as kind of a trend, we're seeing in Japan
and this is based on a survey that's done by the Sano Institute,
we're down in the southern part of Japan,
and they've been doing a survey with new company
entrance basically graduates for quite a while.
And one of the questions they ask is, do you want to work abroad?
And they offer three possible answers.
Yes, that they would work in any country wherever they send
that go, depending on which country it was.
And those who said no, they wouldn't like to go at all.
And the trend is not really great.
And I think particularly in these
times, you know, we're looking what's going on in Ukraine and Yemen.
And, you know, I even think of my own country, Australia,
where the way we treat refugees and
and have been doing for decades.
This isn't really a good sign from my point of view.
And so
I kind of wanted to give my students some kind of meaningful input output
and also some way of connecting them up with other people
in the world because otherwise they're just never going to do it.
Which I guess brings me neatly onto to China.
Japan and China have this really long over
a thousand years history of cultural interaction, right?
And particularly a lot of borrowing by Japan from China.
So the entire Japanese writing system is based on Chinese
religion.
The main religion come through China ethics and school.
The schools of art, even the most ubiquitous
product in Japan, which is teak, they all come from China.
So Japan really, I think, owes China
a debt of thanks, but unfortunately in the last, say,
150 years or so, that's really changed a lot.
In the 1890s, there was a small war, short war between Japan and China,
which Japan won very easily, and then of course into the 1930s,
right through the 1930s, right to the end of the Second World War.
Massive, massive problems with Japan invading China.
And still today there's an enormous amount
of anger and resentment on both sides about this.
And every now and then it bubbles up into into popular culture.
And so we see things like this.
This is an anti Japan demo in China and around the same time
it's in recent years and anti-China Devo in Japan
and they're both talking about the same thing which is a
set of really tiny islands that are sort of
in between the two countries and who has sovereignty on it.
And they both claim it. Right.
As important for, I guess, fishing rights, but also for military rights.
And, you know, honestly, I think it's a political or diplomatic problem.
But because of all that resentment, every now and then, it just goes
crazy and people feel this stuff really, really deeply.
So that's, you know, another thing I wanted to sort of
look at what we can do about that.
And together with my colleague in in China,
we just started off with this basic hypothesis a few years ago
that if we could give them a chance
to interact with each other in some way,
that maybe their attitudes to each other could improve.
And then over these last couple of years,
we started to try and look at other lines of research
like multi-modal city and various aspects of language acquisition,
digital literacy. And this time
I'm talking about
can subtitles help my students understand the videos?
Now, just to give you a little bit more of a kind of
human side of this, to give some more context to it,
I'd like to tell you a couple of stories,
and one of them is from about six or seven years ago
when a friend of mine from the University of Cordoba came to Japan
and he gave a speech, I gave a talk about English language
acquisition in the theater to mice, professors and students.
And at the end of his talk, I
you know, I asked if there are any questions,
and one of the professors said, yes, I've got a question.
I asked him a simple question in beautiful English.
And, you know,
I turned to him waiting presents and he looked at me and went,
So I had to tell explain him again.
Oh, she's just asking you to be honest.
I can't remember what it was,
but I explained it to him in English and he said, Oh, yes.
And he explained the answer in perfect English.
Of course, I turned back to that Professor.
Maybe she has a follow up question.
She looked at me, What's he say?
And that really stuck in my mind that
they all everybody was speaking English.
I'm interpreting for them and luckily my English is okay.
So we we managed,
but just the maybe the pronunciation or intonation
was enough for them to really struggle to understand one another.
And that sort of stuck in my mind.
And the other story is about sushi,
and this comes from one of our first exchanges,
and we asked the students to make little short videos on
some cultural aspect of the country that they wanted
the students in the other country to know about.
And we pop them up into a website that I made.
And then we ask the students to
to watch them and write some sort of a feedback rubric.
And I'll show you that in a few minutes.
And I was watching one of the classes.
I had one of the students was, you know, holding the phone up to her,
to her ear and obviously should have been watching a video.
And I thought it was really strange.
I went and asked, what's going on?
You know, I forgot my earphones, no problem.
It doesn't really matter.
But I noticed that she was kind of agitated.
And so I asked her, what's the problem?
She said, Well, it's the video, it's sushi.
And sushi is not Chinese, it's Japanese.
And she was really, really upset.
The problem being, of course, that the video was about
sushi, a famous Chinese classical poet,
and because she
couldn't see the video, she couldn't see kind of the statue of sushi, the
the sushi family compound, the museum dedicated to she
she was just trying to listen and she couldn't understand it.
And that kind of made me think, too, because
my idea is sort of putting these things together
so they're going to feel better about each other.
But if they can't understand one another, then what are we doing?
And especially in this case, she might have come away from
that kind of experience,
even more angry with Chinese people than she was beforehand.
So that's sort of my starting point for America.
Now, let me give you a very, very brief
literature review.
I'm the
start with intercultural communication because that's where we started.
This is kind of a slippery concept.
I think culture is difficult to define.
So obviously
intercultural communication is difficult,
but there's a couple of definitions here from Deardorff and Sharifi
and that kind of focus on the idea of appropriate,
appropriate communication.
That's pretty hard to concretely pin down
because it's going to be different for, you know, every dyad and so forth
and so on. But it's a good starting point
and there's a fair bit of and
I think other people have touched on this this way,
a fair bit of research out there
that says that the foreign language classroom can really help here.
So we're not just working on language competency, but hopefully introducing
some aspects of the target culture and students can begin
to develop their own intercultural communicative competence.
And that's where I'm sort of coming from, too.
And finally this this one
idea that really stuck in my mind about a reconciliation
pyramid, and this comes from
all about talking about Israel and Palestine.
And his idea was that if the people on the opposite side of each other
can have access to the kind of narrative stories of the other one,
the kind of
culturally important stories
that they might begin to understand one another a little bit more,
have some empathy for each other,
and perhaps eventually build up to some sort of
situation of reconciliation.
Now, obviously, I'm not trying to do that.
I'm not trying to reconcile Japan and China here.
But that idea of getting the students to
trade stories with one other rather than me telling them
what it's like in another country, but their peers of a similar age,
describing something about their country
in their own words, obviously
in English, I thought might be helpful in this situation.
The next one, very, very, very religious.
Really virtual exchanges.
What I'm doing, often
known as tele collaboration, online, international exchange,
lots of research suggesting there's a lot of benefits to this. And
it was really helpful for us during COVID to work in this way
because most of our students can't travel to China anyway.
They need visas.
And the same for the Chinese guys.
It's really difficult.
And finally, subtitles, which is where this comes in,
and I'm an absolute novice here, so you, I hope, will help me
and direct me in the right place from now on.
But I kind of had this idea first and then I started reading
and a lot of the reading I came across was suggesting
that same language subtitles can be very, very helpful.
And it seemed to me that a lot of the focus was on
kind of L2 learners and some sort of comparison
between target language subtitles and L1 subtitles and things like that.
And I didn't really find much correct me if I'm wrong on the sort of thing
that we were trying to do where we got to different L2 context
and which is English, in this case the L2, and then using that same
L2 subtitles. So
if there's something I should be reading, please tell me later.
Okay. All right.
So let me show you what we did.
We did this last year.
All my students are first and second year students
when there was a 141 of them.
This is just the Japanese students that I'm going to be talking about.
We split them up with small groups of three or four
and they were asked to make videos and there were two different topics.
There's one small group of 34 students did something on cuisine
and the rest did on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
And obviously the Chinese kids were doing something similar.
I then at random asked students to add subtitles to the videos
that hopefully
I was going to get 19 videos with subs and 19 with sorry, 18 without.
It was a few problems.
And so we ended up with 19 with subtitles
and 14 that didn't have subtitles.
The students then wrote some
comprehension questions, multiple choice comprehension questions
which we put into a rubric, and I'll show you that in a moment.
And then we exchanged videos with each other,
assigned them to the students.
And in this little study we gathered data with Pre and Post Survey Freedom
Project Survey, the rubric, which I'm about to show you
some written reflection and we did a simple focus group
sort of interviews, and I'm going to focus mainly today on this rubric,
but let me just show you just some snippets
of some of the videos that they they made for us.
And fingers crossed we get
pretty clear, right?
I think most people can understand this one
and maybe this one, too, but the subtitles are kind of interesting.
But I hate
how that's a bit
hard to write.
I don't know why we've got a bit of blackness in here,
but that's what they presented.
And this one
you're
okay.
I have a sense it might be difficult to understand that without subtitles.