Implicit Culture in Japanese Immersion Classroom Discourse

Implicit Culture in Japanese Immersion Classroom DiscourseAuthor(s): Carl Falsgraf and Diane MajorsSource: The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Nov., 1995),pp. 1-21Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489587 .

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JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE I 1

ARTICLES

IMPLICIT CULTURE IN JAPANESE IMMERSION CLASSROOM DISCOURSE*

Carl Falsgraf and Diane Majors

INTRODUCTION

While most learners of Japanese in the United States study in classrooms where the language itself is the focus of instruction, a growing number of school districts have established Japanese immersion schools where the language is merely the medium through which content is communicated. Immersion classes represent not only a different pedagogic approach, but also a different discourse type. While a number of excellent studies on English classroom discourse (e.g., Cazden 1988; Mehan 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard 1975) and Japanese foreign language classroom discourse (e.g., Ohta 1993) exist, Japanese immersion classroom discourse has yet to be studied in depth.

This paper is part of a long-term research program investigating classroom discourse and related issues at a Japanese immersion school in

Eugene, Oregon.' Specifically, this study examines Japanese immersion classroom discourse in terms of the implicit cultural messages it contains.

Working within the theoretical framework of language socialization, this

study finds that Japanese teachers' speech is more direct than that of

English-speaking teachers. Drawing on sociolinguistic models of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987), we argue that this discourse characteristic reflects asymmetrical status relationships between teachers and students in Japanese culture. This analysis supports the language socialization model, which views discourse as a means of displaying both cultural notions and linguistic forms as a seamless whole. It also suggests that language socialization is a viable model of second as well as first

language acquisition (c.f., Poole 1992) and that immersion programs help promote biculturalism as well as bilingualism.

LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION

Language socialization theory holds that culture is expressed through language and language is embedded in culture (Ochs and Scheiffelin 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). The speech of caretakers displays not only the

linguistic code, but the underlying culture as well. By interacting with experts (i.e., caretakers, teachers), novices (i.e., children, second language



2 I VOLUME 29, NUMBER 2

learners) are socialized into the social and linguistic behavior characteristic of a competent member of a particular culture. In the classroom setting, the teacher is the expert whose speech displays the linguistic and cultural

patterns to the learners. Within this model, a careful analysis of interactions, and the linguistic forms used to mediate those interactions, can reveal the

sociolinguistic patterns displayed to novices and, therefore, the input which allows them to be socialized as members of a cultural and linguistic community. This study performs such an analysis in the very special linguistic and cultural environment of Japanese immersion classrooms.

ETHNOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND

This study was conducted at Yujin Gakuen,2 a Japanese partial immersion school in Eugene, Oregon. Ethnographic observations were made over a period of three years. During this time, one of the authors

(Falsgraf) has become a peripheral, though familiar, participant in the

enterprise of developing the educational program of the school, enabling him to examine the school's social and educational environment at close hand.

In the spring of 1992, the Yujin Gakuen principal asked Dr. Patricia Rounds of the University of Oregon to make videotapes of classes at the school. Dr. Rounds incorporated this videotaping into a graduate seminar on classroom-based research. The purpose of the original project was to provide the school with a record of instruction, as well as a public relations tool, and to train graduate students in data collection and ethnographic techniques.

Children at this school spend half of their day in an English-speaking classroom and half the day in a Japanese-speaking classroom. In the

Japanese classroom, where all teachers are natives of Japan, all subject matter is presented in Japanese, but the language itself is not explicitly taught.

At the time that data were collected, there were four classes in the school: first grade, second grade, "new" third and fourth grade, and "old" third and fourth grade. The "new" third and fourth grade class consisted of students who had recently enrolled in Yujin Gakuen after spending their first years in English-only elementary schools. This class was taught essentially like the other classes, but students were somewhat sheltered from the higher demands of the "old" third and fourth grade class which consisted primarily of children who had been at Yujin Gakuen since the first

grade. Teaching assignments are summarized in Table 1.




TABLE 1. Teaching Assignments at Yujin Gakuen

Japanese English

1st Teacher A Teacher D

2nd Teacher A Teacher D

Old 3/4 Teacher B Teacher E

New 3/4 Teacher C Teacher F

Immersing children in Japanese in this way presents both linguistic and cultural challenges. The linguistic challenge is to present complex instructional material to children with limited Japanese proficiency. Teachers

creatively employ visual materials, contextualization, and a number of

linguistic devices to help these learners master complex subject matter

presented in Japanese. Perhaps more daunting is the challenge of conducting a class according to standards of Japanese cultural appropriateness with children from primarily American middle-class backgrounds. Of particular importance to this study is the high status of teachers in Japanese society as

opposed to the more egalitarian ideal prevailing in mainstream U.S. society (Stevenson and Stigler, 1992).

RESEARCH QUESTION AND STRATEGY

These ethnographic observations raised the possibility that the language which teachers used to control classroom behavior may reveal implicit cultural assumptions regarding teacher-student status relations. Preliminary analysis of the videotapes suggested that directives were the primary means

employed by both English and Japanese teachers to control classroom behavior. This led to the hypothesis that teachers' use of directive speech acts displays to children the implicit cultural notion of status.

Directives clearly display asymmetrical status relationships between interlocutors. Because directives require that one participant manipulate another's behavior, they constitute what Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) call face-

threatening acts (FTAs). While people of much higher status may state directives more bluntly ("baldly" in Brown and Levinson's terminology), those of equal or lower status must state directives less directly. For example, a mother may tell her

child, "Sit down;" an acquaintance may say, "Please, have a seat;" and a student

may ask a professor, "Would you like to sit down?" In general, the higher one's status relative to the hearer, the more directly a person may state a directive.




By comparing the degree of directness of directives in the Japanese and

English classrooms, we can determine whether Japanese teachers are

socializing American children into an important Japanese cultural notion: Teachers are of much higher social status than students. This aspect of

implicit Japanese culture is particularly amenable to quantitative research because status differences are expressed morphologically and are ubiquitous in the language (Hill, Ide, Ikuta, Kawasaki, & Ogino 1986; Ide 1982; Smith 1992).

While status distinctions certainly exist in mainstream American society to which most of the Yujin Gakuen children belong, these distinctions differ

markedly from Japanese patterns of interaction. Previous work within the

language socialization framework has shown that white middle-class

caregivers tend to avoid overt displays of status (power) differences (Ochs & Schieffelin 1984). Poole (1992) found that this was true of white middle- class classroom teachers as well. Because of the significant differences between the two cultures' definitions of and attitudes toward status, American children are unlikely to infer Japanese status-related norms from their native culture. The degree to which they display sensitivity to this norm when speaking Japanese must reflect their experience in the classroom, their only source of Japanese input.3

The situation, then, is this: We have identified an aspect of Japanese culture which differs from that of white middle-class America (status) and a

linguistic form (directives) which expresses it. We also have videotapes of an immersion school that depict the same children on the same day studying similar material in both Japanese and English, thus creating a virtual

laboratory for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Consequently, this paper compares the use of directives by Japanese- and English-speaking teachers at Yujin Gakuen to determine whether this cultural notion is indeed expressed through the language to which children are exposed.

This leaves open the question, however, of whether the language and culture of the Japanese classrooms is peculiar to Yujin Gakuen, or whether it is representative of Japanese classrooms in general.4 Therefore, this study also examines the classroom speech of Japanese teachers in an elementary school in Japan, Sakushin Gakuin, as a control of sorts. Foreigner talk or cross-cultural phenomena are obviously not factors in the Japanese classroom in Japan. If differences in directive usage by Japanese and English teachers at Yujin Gakuen are due to foreigner talk or cross-cultural phenomena, then the native Japanese classroom data should yield different results.




This was not the case. The use of directives in the native Japanese classroom exhibited essentially the same characteristics as that of Yujin Gakuen Japanese teachers. Both of these differed in the same way from English teachers' directive usage: The Japanese teachers addressed students more directly, reflecting the higher status of teachers in Japan and their propensity to express this status linguistically.

METHODOLOGY The data for this study were collected in the spring of 1992. Four teams

of graduate students, each assigned to one grade level, made videotapes of an entire day of classes. Preliminary analysis of the tapes raised intriguing cultural and linguistic issues, so we sought and gained permission from the school to use the tapes for research.

The native Japanese classroom data consist of videotapes taken at Sakushin Gakuin, a private school located in Utsunomiya City, Ibaraki Prefecture. We taped one 45-minute class for each grade, one through four. The teachers of these classes were all females in their twenties, with one to three years' teaching experience.

Unlike Yujin Gakuen, the teachers and students at Sakushin Gakuin were not accustomed to visitors (particularly foreign ones) or video cameras. Furthermore, the principal of the elementary school accompanied the researcher to all classes and remained to observe during all tapings. Naturally, this situation made these relatively inexperienced teachers nervous and certainly had an effect on their speech. This pressure to produce "proper" Japanese should result in less direct forms. Nevertheless, the Sakushin Gakuin teachers were still more direct than the English teachers at Yujin Gakuen. We will return to this point below in the discussion.

TRANSCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

Tapes of Yujin Gakuen Japanese classes and Sakushin Gakuin classes were transcribed in full. Only directives from the Yujin Gakuen English classes were transcribed. The Japanese transcripts were written in Roman characters according to the Hepburn System. Utterances were divided into clauses, defined as finite or non-finite predicates and associated arguments which do not modify an NP (i.e., do not function as a relative clause).

The comparability of the English and Japanese data at Yujin Gakuen is clear: The tapes depict the same students at the same school on the same day receiving instruction on similar material in English and Japanese. The




language of instruction and individual teaching styles are clearly the primary variables here. The following section provides a linguistic justification for the analysis of directives in these two data bases.

CRITERIA FOR DEGREE OF DIRECTNESS We have chosen to analyze teachers' directive speech acts according to

linguistic as well as pragmatic criteria. This differs from the most common scale of directness, the CCSARP (Blum-Kulka, House, and Kaspar 1989), which was developed for scoring discourse completion tests and is based only on pragmatic criteria. Our scale is more appropriate for this study for the following reasons:

(1) Working within the theoretical framework of language socialization, it is important to examine how particular linguistic forms socialize children. It is preferable, therefore, to base the analysis on linguistic as well as pragmatic criteria;

(2) The directives in our data fall almost exclusively into the top three categories of the CCSARP scale. Thus, it is not fine-grained enough for our purposes; and

(3) The CCSARP was developed for scoring written discourse completion tests. We believe that our scale is more appropriate for analyzing naturalistic classroom data.

Our scale aims to provide a principled basis by which to measure the relative degree of directness in the speech of English-speaking and Japanese- speaking teachers at Yujin Gakuen.

"Directness" is an intuitively attractive notion but, upon closer examination, represents a conceptual and terminological minefield. The following discussion synthesizes work from functional linguistics and sociolinguistics into a workable system for arranging directives on a scale of directness according to three criteria: 1) iconicity, 2) conventional indirectness, and 3) presumption of action.

ICONICITY

Giv6n (1990) discusses "manipulative strength," roughly equivalent to the term "directness" used here, in terms of iconicity: the idea that

increasing sentence length weakens the manipulative strength of the directive. Iconicity is a primary criterion because it is quantifiable and is a

widely accepted linguistic principle (Giv6n 1984; Haiman 1980; Newmeyer 1992), making it ideal for the cross-linguistic comparison undertaken here.




The following examples from English illustrate this concept (after Giv6n 1990: 807). Number of morphemes are given in parentheses.

Highest Manipulative Strength Get up! (2) Get up, will you? (4) Would you please get up? (5) Would you mind getting up? (6) Do you think you could get up? (7) Would you mind my asking you to get up? (10) Wouldn't it be nice if you could perhaps get up? (11)

Lowest Manipulative Strength CONVENTIONAL INDIRECTNESS

Conventional indirectness (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) refers to strategies for going "off-record" in making a request. For example, if one says, "Pass the salt," he goes on record as having given a command, and it will be the cause of some social strife if the hearer does not comply. If one says, "Could you pass the salt?" the hearer could reply, "No, I can't (both my arms are broken.)" and, at least in terms of the literal meaning, would not have rejected the speaker's command. In other words, by not directly forcing the hearer to choose between compliance and blatant disobedience of a command, one is showing concern for the imposition placed upon the hearer by being less direct.

PRESUMPTION OF ACTION

Not presuming action involves epistemic hedging on the part of the speaker when performing a directive speech act. In Brown and Levinson's terms, not presuming action shows deference to the hearer's negative face needs, that is, the need to be free of unwarranted intrusion on one's ability to act according to one's own interests. To assert that an utterance is true is to claim power over the hearer's ability to refute the statement. Tag questions, for example, are a common form of epistemic hedging in

English. Thus, "You can pick me up at 4 o'clock" is more direct than "You can pick me up at 4 o'clock, can't you?" because the presumption of a

positive reply has been ameliorated by the tag question hedge. (Notice that this also follows the principle of iconicity outlined above.) In short, an utterance which does not assume performance of the action is less direct.




DIRECTIVE TYPES AND DEGREE OF DIRECTNESS

QUESTIONS Definition: Questions are syntactic interrogatives in which the directed

behavior is embedded, as in examples one and two. The embedded commands are underlined. 1. Could you stand to the side so people might be able to see some of the

the pictures? (embedded command: Stand to the side.)

2. enpitsu dashimashitaka

pencil take out POL:IMPERF:Q 'Have you taken out your pencils?' (embedded command: Take out your pencils.) Because these are isomorphic with interrogatives, it is sometimes

necessary to consider pragmatic criteria to identify an utterance as a directive speech act. A question was considered a directive speech act if (1) the students were observed subsequently performing the behavior embedded in the question, or (2) the teacher clearly expected such behavior to be

performed. Teacher behaviors such as repeating the request or waiting until the behavior was performed were prima facie evidence that the interrogative functioned as a directive.

DEGREE OF DIRECTNESS

Questions often contain the same number of morphemes as less directs (see definition below), but more than other forms identified here. According to the criterion of conventional indirectness and presumption of action, however, questions are clearly less direct than any other form. A question literally seeks only to elicit information, so the speaker does not go on record as having issued a directive. A question does not presume action; it asks whether that action will occur. Questions are, therefore, the least direct form analyzed here.

LESS DIRECTS Definition: Less directs are syntactic declaratives that are "hedged"

(Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) and have the directed behavior embedded in them. In English, this includes modals and the inclusive

imperative "Let's..." (Celce-Murcea & Larsen-Freeman 1983).

3. You should be working. 4. Let's get ready.

For our analysis, the pragmatic constraint on less directs category is that




they must be addressed to children. This excludes cases such as a pensive, "Now let's see...," which is clearly not directed at the class.

In Japanese, less directs include the suggestive form (-mashoo) and the

permissive form (-te ii desu) as shown in examples 5 and 6 in which directed behaviors are embedded.

5. Kazoete mimashoo count:NF try:POL:SUGGESTIVE NF=non-finite 'Let's try counting.'

6. socchi shinakute ii

that.way do:NEG:NFgood 'It's all right not to do it that way.


Less directs often have the same number of morphemes as questions. They are not as conventionally indirect since the speaker states or suggests an action rather than merely asking about it. The presumption of action in such an utterance is higher than for questions since the speaker makes an explicit suggestion rather than giving the listener a choice as in questions. Less directs are, therefore, more direct than questions. POLITE IMPERATIVES

Definition: Polite imperatives are defined as bare verbs with the politeness marker "please" in English or a non-finite (V-te) and the politness marker "kudasal' in Japanese. There are no pragmatic constraints on this category. Examples seven through nine are examples of polite imperatives. 7. Please sit down. 8. Hand them to me, please. 9. R, mite kudasai

name, look: NFplease 'R, please look.'


Polite imperatives have fewer morphemes than less directs. They also

place the speaker on record as having made a request and presume that the action will be performed unless the hearer explicitly rejects the request. Polite imperatives, therefore, are clearly more direct than less directs.



10 1 VOLUME 29, NUMBER 2

NORMAL IMPERATIVES5 Definition: In English, the normal imperative contains a predicate

consisting of an unmarked verb. The subject, understood to be "you," is

ellipted. In Japanese, the normal imperative is a clause containing a non- finite (V-Wte) verb which is not part of a concatenative, serial, or compound form. The following are examples of normal imperatives in English and

Japanese, respectively. 10. Raise your hand.

11. kiite listen:NF 'Listen.'

DEGREE OF DIRECTNESS Normal imperatives, by definition, have one less morpheme than polite

imperatives, which always have a politeness marker to soften the impact of the request. They do not differ significantly in terms of conventional indirectness or presumption of action. On the basis of iconicity, therefore, they are more direct than polite imperatives.

DECLARATIVE COMMANDS

Declarative commands, which occur only in the Japanese data, are

syntactically declarative clauses that elicit, or are obviously intended to elicit, student performance of a behavior embedded in the utterance. This definition excludes indirect manipulative speech acts (e.g., "It's hot in here" =

'Open the window') and fragments (e.g., "The window" = 'Open the window'). Though difficult to render in English, examples twelve and thirteen illustrate the general notion. 12. Drill sergeant: You're doing 20 pushups for that, private!

Private: Yessir. (starts doing pushups) 13. Mother: You're going to your room right now, young man!

Child: (trudges off to room, whimpering) Fourteen is an example from the Japanese data. The teacher has just written

a character on the board, but some children are not paying attention to her. 14. koko miru

here look:DEC:IMPERF 'You (shall) look here.'6

In 15, the teacher utters two declarative commands (utterances two and three). A student has just sat down with the wrong group.




15. Teacher: 1. B., anata ichi no guruupu ja nai (name) you one GEN group COP:NEG 'B., you aren't in group one.'

2. koko suwaru here sit:IMPERF '(You) sit here.'

3. koko suwaru '(You) sit here.' [child sits down]

4. hai

yes 'Yes (that's good.)'

The fact that the teacher issues the command a second time after not

receiving compliance from the student (3) indicates that the utterance is intended as a directive. Her reaction when the student finally sits in the

right place ('Yes, that's good.') also shows that this syntactically declarative utterance is intended to function as a directive.

Some native speakers of Japanese find it hard to believe that teachers

actually use this form in the classroom since it is rarely uttered in general society. Clancy (1986), however, reports that mothers use declarative sentences, which she calls instructions and generalizations, as directives to small children. Smith (1992) identifies declaratives used as commands by male characters in Japanese cartoons and detective stories. Though neither of these studies analyze the form in detail, they both identify a phenomenon similar to what we have called the declarative command: a syntactic declarative functioning as a command. The videotapes provide clear

empirical evidence that Japanese teachers do employ declarative commands

fairly regularly. While it appears that the use of this form is severely constrained, the elementary school classroom is one social environment in which it can be used.

DEGREE OF DIRECTNESS The declarative command contains fewer morphemes than all other

directives, with the exception of the normal imperative to which it is equal in length. Both the normal imperative and declarative are so clear in putting the speaker on record as having issued a command that they cannot be

distinguished on the basis of conventional indirectness. Because it is syntactically declarative, however, the declarative command presumes action




more clearly than the normal imperative. By saying "You (shall) sit down" rather than "Sit down," the speaker makes the action a statement of fact rather than a request. According to the criteria of presumption of action, therefore, the declarative command is more direct than the normal

imperative. Because the declarative command has not been discussed in the

literature and because establishing its directness is crucial to our analysis, we wish to present additional empirical evidence demonstrating that it is more direct than the normal imperative. This evidence comes from the distribution of the sentential particles yo and ne. Generally, yo emphasizes the truth value of the utterance, while ne indicates a degree of uncertainty and elicits confirmation from the hearer.7 If a clause is marked with yo, therefore, the clause has greater epistemic certainty. According to Giv6n (1990), greater epistemic certainty correlates with a greater presumption of action and, therefore, a greater degree of directness.

An analysis of directive type and the associated sentential particles yo and ne in the Yujin Gakuen Japanese corpus (N=5765 clauses), as shown in Table 1, reveals that declarative commands were marked with yo (+certainty) more than a third of the time, and never marked with ne (-certainty). The normal imperative, on the other hand, was marked with yo only 1% of the time. Because yo indicates a higher dgree of epistemic certainty, it is more direct than the normal imperative. TABLE 2. Absolute Numbers and Percentages of Clauses with Epistemic Markers yo and ne (percentages in parentheses)

yo ne unmarked total

Declarative command 70 (42) 0 (0) 95 (58) 165(100)

Normal imperative 3 (1) 11(4) 275 (95) 289 (100)

Declarative 122 (11) 244 (22) 743 (67) 1109 (100)

THE SCALE OF DIRECTNESS Based on the criteria of iconicity, conventional indirectness, and

presumption of action presented above, we constructed the following scale of directness.




Less Direct

Questions Less Directs

Polite Imperatives Normal Imperatives Declarative Commands

More Direct

Two types of directive speech acts found in the data are not included in the above list: indirect requests and fragments. Indirect requests (sometimes called "non-conventional politeness") are syntactic declaratives or

interrogatives without an embedded command (e.g., "It's cold in here" to mean "Close the window"). Indirect requests were rare, especially in the

Japanese classrooms. We excluded them from the quantitative analysis because of their scarcity and pragmatic complexity.8 Fragments are

syntactically incomplete utterances which function as directives. In the

Yujin Gakuen English data, for example, one of the teachers uttered "Hands" to mean "Raise your hands." While more common than indirect

requests, the difficulty of separating production errors and interruptions from actual directive speech acts led us to exclude these from the analysis also.

EVIDENCE FROM NATIVE SPEAKER JUDGMENTS FOR THE SCALE DIRECTNESS

According to the criteria of iconicity, presumption of action, and conventional indirectness, this scale of directness appears sound. Though these are widely accepted concepts in functional linguistics and

sociolinguistics, it is still conceivable that these concepts are flawed or

misleading in this particular situation. However, independent evidence in the form of native speaker judgments also supports the validity of this scale.

Hill et al. (1986) surveyed 30 native speakers of Japanese and 30 native

speakers of English on their ratings of the politeness of various expressions used to borrow a pen.9 Because they were eliciting judgments of request forms as opposed to classroom commands, less direct and declarative command forms do not appear. As Table 2 shows, however, native-speaker judgments generally follow our scale of directness.




TABLE 3. Hill et al. (1986) Scale of Politeness with Examples

Question kashite kuremasuka lend:NF give:POL:IMPERF:Q 'Will you give me a pen?'

ii desu ka good COP:Q 'Is it OK?'

Polite Imperative kashite kudasai lend:NF please 'Please lend me (a pen).'

Normal Imperative kashite lend:NF 'Lend it.'

To summarize, the scale of directness proposed here is sound. The scale is consistant with the criteria of iconicity, conventional indirectness, and

presumption of action. Furthermore, the distribution of sentential particles on the declarative command and native-speaker judgments of other forms

support the conclusion that this scale forms a principled basis by which to measure the relative degree of directness in the speech of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking teachers at Yujin Gakuen.

RESULTS

To reiterate, the central research question addressed here is: Do teachers'

speech forms display implicit cultural messages regarding status in Japanese culture? The basic research strategy was to analyze directives occurring in teacher speech in the Japanese- and English-speaking classrooms according to the scale of directness presented above. A higher degree of directness is taken as an indication that teachers perceive a greater status gap between themselves and the students.

The Japanese data (YG-Japanese) and English data (YG-English) from

Yujin Gakuen consist of four transcripts with a total of 5765 clauses: first

grade (GI), second grade (G2), old third and fourth (old 3/4), and new



JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE 1 15

third and fourth (new 3/4). The Sakushin Gakuin data (SG) also consist of four grade levels: first (Gi), second (G2), third (G3), and fourth (G4), with a total of 2407 clauses. The Yujin Gakuen English data (YG-English) consist of transcribed directives only. All directives in the transcripts were coded according to type and tabulated.

Table 4 summarizes the results for all three data bases and the

relationship between them.

Table 4. Comparison ofYG-Japanese, YG-English, and SG Frequenicies of Directives (percentages in parentheses).

% Q LD PI NI DC

YG-Japanese 22 (3) 48 (6) 118 (17) 413 (47) 172 (27)

YG-English 54 (13) 110 (27) 62 (15) 180 (45) 0 (0)

SG 9 (4) 27(11) 82 (34) 89 (37) 17 (7)

The relationships among the three data bases are presented graphically below in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1

50- 45--

S435 -- ENGLISH 3 35

30-- M SG 25 - 20- M YG

QUESTION LESS POLITE NORMAL DECLARATIVE DIRECT IMPERATIVE IMPERATIVE COMMAND

DIRECTIVE TYPES




This data shows that the Japanese teachers both at Yujin Gakuen and at Sakushin Gakuin in Japan are more direct than the English-speaking teachers. While all groups rely heavily on the canonical normal imperative and polite imperative forms, the Japanese teachers tend to employ the declarative command, whereas the English-speaking teachers rely more on less directs and questions.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS A chi-square test performed on these results revealed a significant

difference between the YG-Japanese and the YG-English data (chi-

square=226.49, df=4, alpha < .001), strongly supporting the claim that

Japanese teachers are more direct than English-speaking teachers. A

significant difference was also found between the SG data gathered in Japan and the YG-English data (chi-square=74.33, df=4, alpha < .001), showing that Japanese teachers addressing native-speaking children are also more direct than English-speaking teachers in the U.S. No significant difference was found between the YG-Japanese and SG data.

DISCUSSION

The results presented above clearly show that Yujin Gakuin Japanese teachers issue more direct commands than their English-speaking counterparts. As argued above, directives index the relative status and power of the speaker and the hearer. In this case, Japanese teachers index the asymmetry between their status and that of their students through their use of very direct forms of address.

To those familiar with Japanese communicative style, the claim that

Japanese teachers are more direct than their American counterparts may seem counter-intuitive. Japanese communicative style is said to be more indirect than that of American English (Jorden 1992), and research conducted in Japan suggests that mother/child interactions socialize children into this indirect communicative style (Clancy 1986).

Are Yujin Gakuen teachers socializing children into inappropriate social norms? Recall that the Sakushin Gakuin teachers in Japan were videotaped in the presence of the school principal and an unfamiliar foreigner, a context in which they should be expected to use "proper" Japanese, that is, more indirect forms. The fact that even these teachers in Japan were also

significantly more direct than the YG-English teachers demonstrates that this is the Japanese norm and that our findings are robust.

While the stereotype of indirect, "inscrutable" Japanese communicative style seems to hold true for some social situations, it apparently does not



JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE 1 17

hold true in the elementary classroom.10 Stevenson and Stigler (1992) conducted an extensive social psychological survey of student, parent, and teacher attitudes in the U.S. and Japan and found that all groups in Japan ascribe greater authority and social status to teachers than do Americans (Stevenson & Stigler 1992). Regarding native-speaking Japanese teachers in the foreign language classroom, Jorden (1992) says that they bring with them an attitude of being "supreme in the classroom," which often puts them at odds with their American students who are accustomed to

interacting with their teachers according to more egalitarian assumptions. The data presented here, therefore, are consistent with these observations of

Japanese classroom culture and the status of teachers.

While the Japanese teachers use very direct forms, interviews with

native-speaking observers and immersion school students indicate that the teachers' speech is neither inappropriate nor offensive. How is it that such direct speech is not offensive? Referring to family discourse, Blum-Kulka

(1990) finds that Israeli and American families are highly direct and informal. She claims that the informality, which addresses family members'

positive face needs, explains the non-offensiveness of direct family discourse.

We suggest that a similar phenomenon is at work in the Japanese classroom. While the teachers are asserting their status, which is consistent with both their cultural assumptions and their need to control the class,

they are also on intimate terms with the children. For example, while declarative commands would be highly improper in most contexts, in the

elementary classroom the combination of asymmetrical status and a high degree of intimacy combine to make this and other direct forms

appropriate. To summarize, it seems clear that direct speech is characteristic of

Japanese elementary classrooms and that this speech displays the implicit cultural notion of status to students. This raises the question of whether children actually acquire this aspect of implicit culture. In other words, does

culturally rich input lead to culturally rich output? A follow-up study (Rounds, Falsgraf, and Seya, forthcoming) examines student speech in two role plays. In one situation, a researcher played the role of "substitute teacher" and, in another, the role of "a new kid in school." The results show that Yujin Gakuen students begin showing sensitivity to the status

differences between teachers and students in their production of polite (?-masu) and direct

(.-u) style verbs beginning in the fourth grade. These

results substantiate the prediction of language socialization theory that




teacher speech socializes children into the language and culture of Japan. These results have profound implications for administrators, teachers,

and parents. They suggest that immersion schools not only provide an environment where language acquisition can take place, but also an environment where implicit culture can be experienced and acquired by children. For school districts and parents who wish for children to become bicultural as well as bilingual, the results reported here represent a powerful argument for immersion education. If teachers, parents, administrators, and students can come to see that sociocultural context is essential to developing communicative competence and that teachers are acting consistently and

fairly within the context of their own culture, it may improve relations

among these groups and help all involved understand the experiences children are having in their immersion classrooms.

NOTES * The authors wish to thank the administrators, teachers, and children of Yujin

Gakuen for allowing us to visit and do research at their school. We also wish to thank Patricia Rounds and Jacquelyn Schachter for guiding us through various

phases of this research project. Noriko Fujii and two anonymous reviewers

provided valuable input on previous drafts of this paper, and Hiromi Hashida assisted with data analysis. Special thanks to Vicki Shives for editorial assistance.

1. See Falsgraf (1994) for a dissertation examining this and other facets of the overall research program.

2. This name is a bilingual play on words. Yujin is the Japanese pronunciation of "Eugene," and also means "friend" in Japanese. Gakuen means "academy," so the school's name means both "Eugene Academy" and "Friends Academy."

3. A few of the children have had Japanese guests in their house or even visited Japan but, for the most part, the Japanese language classroom is their sole source of sociolinguistic input.

4. While it is not necessary to perform this additional study in order to make an action recommendation to Yujin Gakuen, some sort of control such as this is imperative if we are to make more general action recommendations to other schools or communities. Needless to say, it is also of considerable theoretical interest whether Japanese teachers direct

foreigner talk to American students.




5. This terminology does not imply, of course, that there is anything "abnormal" about other directive forms. We follow Celce-Murcea & Freeman (1983), reflecting the fact that this is the canonical imperative form. Our data show that it is indeed the most common directive in both the Japanese and English classrooms.

6. Declarative commands are very difficult to render in English. All declarative commands are in the non-past tense and syntactic subjects are

generally ellipted. 7. This is an oversimplification, of course. These sentential particles also

convey a number of affective notions in addition to the epistemic connotations mentioned here. One of those affective connotations is assertiveness, which would be consistent with our interpretation of the declarative command. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between sentence final particles in Japanese and speech act theory, see Tsuchihachi (1983) and Ohta (1993).

8. A particularly difficult, but intriguing, pragmatic complication regarding the indirect requests that did appear is that the American teachers tended to point to positive models of conduct (e.g., "I like the way J. is sitting down"), whereas Japanese teachers pointed to negative models of conduct

(e.g., "I hear S. talking," "Group 2 is not sitting down."). We find this

apparent difference fascinating and certainly worthy of further inquiry. It does not bear directly on the problem at hand, however, and will have to wait for another day.

9. Hill et al. asked for rating of politeness, not directness. While we

recognize that these two concepts are not identical, in the case of adult- adult social interaction, they should be closely aligned.

10. Although we excluded indirect requests (e.g., "It's cold in here" =

"Close the window"), the use of these as directives was more common in the YG-English classroom than the YG-Japanese classroom.

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Implicit Culture in Japanese Immersion Classroom Discourse