小林 めぐみ

調査・実践報告This report examines the role and use of concept mapping, a method of sorting and connecting key concepts in a graphical representation, in Finnish education. Our assessment is based primarily on an interview with an educator who uses concept mapping and a type of extensive reading program in teaching business in Finland. In Japan, it is often reported that mapping is an integral part of Finnish education and is instrumental in enhancing reading comprehension skills and abilities to think critically as well as creatively. The aim of our study is to determine the extent to which mapping actually plays a role in Finnish education and assess how we can incorporate it in teaching English in Japanese universities with an extensive reading program. The interview validated that mapping is indeed widely recognized and utilized as one of the most effective tools in Finnish education, and also credited inquirybased learning approach as the basis to foster critical readers and autonomous learners. Finally, our preliminary results of pre-class and during-class questionnaires administered to Japanese university students indicated positive effects of concept mapping that are consistent with the interview report.

This study investigated both the extent of accentual paradigm (analogical) leveling observed in adjectives in Tokyo Japanese and the factors influencing the change based on spoken data from 36 speakers in their late teens, 20s, 30s, and 40s. Multivariate analyses showed that adjective accent variation was strongly conditioned by grammatical factors (e.g., inflectional forms, the following grammatical elements, and word frequency) and moderately affected by phonetic factors (e.g., the sonority hierarchy of the consonant of the syllable on which the accent falls, stem length, and vowel devoicing). In contrast, extralinguistic factors played almost no role in predicting the variation.