Innovation in Language Learning

The purpose of this presentation is to outline a Japanese-Finnish e-learning pilot project implemented in Japanese and Finnish language courses in Finland and Japan respectively. Collaborating university language courses, a Japanese course in Finland and a Finnish course in Japan and their instructors will be involved in planning and coordinating learning tasks, which the course participants will be expected to tackle in tandem, Finnish-speaking learners of Japanese in Finland collaborating with their Japanese-speaking peers and learners of Finnish in Japan.

This presentation pays particular attention to a variety of tasks, which both target groups could be expected to benefit from while learning their respective languages, paying particular attention to questions pertaining to socio-pragmatic aspects. Tasks will range from simple email or discussion forum questions on preselected topics (e.g. naming practices, to be supported by existing online statistical information) to mini-surveys, interview projects, and collection, presentation and simple analysis of online examples of language use (e.g. related to the pragmatics of pitch accent and intonation or to age-specific language use, including collection of data from online forums centering on various representations of Japanese pop culture in both target languages).

Although the language of online communication in beginners’ or intermediate level courses may partially have to be restricted to the common lingua franca, English, it is expected that the kinds of tasks outlined in the presentation will contribute to the learners’ socio-pragmatic knowledge and understanding of the target language and culture and thus function as bridges to more ‘academic’ approaches to sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.