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President’s Address/Greetings: Traditional Japanese Culture, Changing Japanese Culture in Japan, and Japanese Language LearningI hope you had enjoyable summer holidays. I assume some of you visited Japan and discovered something different from the past. Did you find the changed Japanese culture fascinating? Or did you feel it incompatible? Recently, I attended Mr. Baisho Matsumoto’s Shamisen concert held in the Consulate General of Japan at San Francisco. It was supposed to be a traditional Japanese cultural performance; however, Mr. Matumoto performed not only Japanese songs but also Western songs using Tsugaru Shamisen, Akita Shamisen, and Japanese flute. His performance was so energetic and exciting and his lecture was so interesting that I was completely overwhelmed. He continuously conducts Shamisen performances overseas dedicating himself in introducing Japanese culture to school–age children. When he came to the United States for the first time, he believed that Japanese people abroad and Japanese Americans must have hardship and tough lives. However, he found those Japanese and Japanese Americans have cheerful and positive attitudes. He said he was given amazing ‘energy and confidence ’ from them. In San Francisco State University, I teach graduate-level linguistics courses: (1) a
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A comparison of Japanese persuasive writing: The writings of Japanese as Foreign Language students in the NSW HSC examination and Japanese Native Speaking students in high school in JapanThis study uses a functional model of language to examine the 2005 Japanese HSC examination persuasive essays to investigate the language features of the exposition genre, which students produce during the examination. The exam scripts are compared to the essays which were written by Japanese native speaking (JNS) high school students answering the same question. This study seeks to answer two questions: “How successful Japanese persuasive essays are constructed in the HSC Japanese Examination?”, and “To what extent a successful HSC exam model matches the native speaker equivalent?”. The methodology used in this study is Generic Structure Potential (GSP) (Hasan, 1996), which will identify the elements of structure and the language features within each element. GSP will be applied to both the Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) and Japanese Native Speakers (JNS) students’ texts to ascertain the extent to which they share commonality in terms of elements of structure. Based on the analysis, all of the JFL students employed a deductive structure while some of the JNS students used an inductive structure, however, the majority of the JNS students also employed a deductive structure in their essays. This suggests that to answer the essay question in the exam situation, to use of a deductive structure in their persuasive essays is acceptable for both JFL and JNS writers.