TEACHER EXPLORATION OF FEMINIST/CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN A BEGINNING JAPANESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASS

Yumiko Ohara, Scott Saft, and Graham Crookes

University of Hawai'i at Manoa

(Paper presentation 3/22/2000, Dept of ESL, UHM)

 

INTRODUCTION

The relationship of the foreign language teacher to the culture(s) of the language s/he is teaching and the related matter of the interface between culture and language instruction has received a growing amount of research attention in recent years, from a number of perspectives. One approach to this relationship in the teaching of Japanese is to treat culture as something relayed to students implicitly through the use of the target language (as addressed recently in this journal; Falsgraf & Majors, 1995; Rounds, Falsgraf & Seya 1998). Besides enabling students to absorb culture implictly, language teachers may also encourage students to explicitly reflect on the cultural context of the language they are learning, as in approaches coming under the heading 'critical pedagogy'. Originally developed by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator concerned with first language literacy, these ideas have been developed for the foreign language (FL) community in the US by Crawford-Lange (Crawford, 1978; Crawford-Lange, 1981) and have also been pursued for the second language teaching of English to immigrants to the US (Auerbach, 1992; Auerbach & Wallerstein, 1987; cf Freire, 1994; Macedo 1994). Parallel developments for other subject areas and curriculum orientations have occurred as educators with critical perspectives on society (feminists, anti-racist educators, gay and lesbian scholars, critical linguists) have asked themselves the question, "How should I teach and develop curriculum, given my perspective on society?" (Benesch 1998; Ng, Staton, & Scane 1995; Vandrick 1994; Weiler 1991).

Our exploration of critical pedagogy in a Japanese as a Forieign Lamguage (JFL) classroom follows from our critical and feminist position on/ view of Japanese society. We [fn.1] asked ourselves "How can a teacher of Japanese as a foreign language who is concerned about the oppression of women in Japan present the Japanese language and culture to learners in such a way that allows them to think critically about linguistic differences and culturally-derived gender inequities in Japanese society?". In this paper, we first give a brief overview of a critical/feminist position on the Japanese language and society, followed by some background on critical pedagogy. We then describe our attempts to explore the feasibility of some aspects of a critical pedagogy for JFL, which took place in a beginning Japanese class at a large university in the Western area of the US; and we report tentative findings. The investigation was very small scale and preliminary, and we present it as an example of teacher research. We hope that it will serve to introduce some of the issues involved in the application of a critical pedagogy to the JFL classroom and deepen understandings of the role of culture in actual classroom instruction.

BACKGROUND

Feminist perspectives and Japanese language & culture

Feminism, for us, involves the position that society is hierarchically structured by gender, that this is not natural and is unethical, and is the product of men and women's conceptions and actions (de Beauvoir, 1953; Rosaldo 1974). The projection of specific roles and identities with regard to gender unfairly constrains both men and women, but is particularly oppressive to women, since they are provided with roles that are defined as subordinate to those of men. In addition, the kinds of behaviors that are consistent with the role of "woman" as defined in most societies prevents women from challenging or altering their status. Female subordination where women have fewer powers and prerogatives and are excluded from certain prestigious activities, is a "universal fact of human social life" (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974) and Japanese culture is no exception. In fact, it is generally maintained that sexual asymmetry in Japan is more salient than in Western cultures (c.f. Lebra 1984, Pharr 1976, Reynolds 1985). The salience of sexual asymmetry is evident in all of Japan’s social institutions, including the family (Edwards 1989, Kameda 1995), education (Fujimura-Fanselow 1995, Lebra 1984, McVeigh 1996), business (Kawashima 1995, Lebra 1984, Roberts 1994, Saso 1990), and politics (Iwao 1993, Kubo and Gelb 1994). According to certain theorists (e.g. Cameron 1990, 1992. Talbot 1998; cf. Aries 1997), language, and the language appropriate to genders plays an important role in the maintenance of such structure.

Japanese Language and Gender

That an assymetry exists in Japanese expectations about language use is well-documented. Descriptive grammars as well as feminist work on the Japanese language notes that there are significant differences in the syntax, morphology, phonology, lexicon, and levels of politeness used by men and women (i.e. Haig 1990, Ide 1990, Reynolds 1985, Shibamoto 1985). For example, two differences frequently reported are (1) sentence final particles, where traditionally women have not supposed to make use of rougher sounding emphatic sentence-final particles such as ze and zo, but have been to known to make use of the gentler-sounding sentence-final particle wa; and (2), that women in general are expected to use politer linguistic forms than men are. It has been argued that lack of access to linguistic forms that allow a person to be assertive and forceful poses problems for Japanese women trying to break out of traditional roles and make advances in the professional world (Reynolds 1990, Smith 1992a and 1992b). For instance, in research that has examined the naturally occurring speech, especially the directives, used by women in managerial positions, Sunaoshi (1994) and Smith (1992b) have revealed that women resort to techniques such as asking instead of ordering or using language appropriate to the role of a mother when attempting to exercise authority over their employees. (These are termed "motherese strategy" and "passive power strategy" by Sunaoshi (1994) and Smith (1992b) respectively.) Instead of having the ability to directly manifest power in their language, they use techniques (which include a combination of the sentence final particle ne, repetition, softening phrases, backchannels, and intonation patterns) to create rapport so that managerial directives, while lacking in assertive force, will still produce the desired results, namely, to distribute orders to employees and prompt them to carry out their work smoothly and effectively.

Recent research, however, indicates that some women are starting to rebel against linguistic tradition—in particular, women in their 20's are starting to use many more "male" linguistic forms (Okamoto and Sato 1992, Okamoto 1994, 1996). This finding has been used to claim a convergence of male and female language in younger generation Japanese, but Reynolds (1984) suggests that this phenomenon occurs only when younger females converse amongst themselves. She further states that the norms and expectations about male and female language are so strongly ingrained in both male and female Japanese that as soon as a younger Japanese woman either gets married or joins the work force, she modifies her speech to conform to societal expectations. Thus, according to Reynolds, the finding that younger women are using more male forms has no significant effect on the overall status of women or women’s use of language in the long run.

Whether we believe that the fact that younger Japanese women are using more male forms indicates change is occurring or whether we believe as Reynolds does that no significant change is on the horizon, we do need to at least recognize that the situation concerning women, men, and language is not as clear-cut as most descriptive grammars and most Japanese language textbooks make it out to be. Take, for example, a commonly used beginning Japanese language textbook such as Situational Functional Japanese (Tsukuba Language Group, 1991, 1995). This uses symbols in the text, a little figure shaped like a man and one like a woman—in other words, a shape with or without a dress—to inform students which linguistic forms are supposed to be used only by men and which are supposed to be used only by women. It offers no commentary whatsoever about the status of women and men in Japan or about the language that they use. For example, the female symbol is attached to the sentence-final particle wa when it is introduced in a lesson even though in certain dialects this form is frequently used by men. Perhaps the prosodic quality of men's use of sentence-final wa makes it sound more forceful than when women use it, but the fact that this aspect is completely ignored by the textbook means that students are never even afforded the opportunity to even consider the convergences and divergences of this particle wa.

Of course, the problem of lack of commentary can be overcome if the teacher supplements the textbook with outside sources and classroom dialogue about the subject. However, in informal discussions with many of our teaching colleagues, we learned that none of them make any effort to provide further details to their students about the issue of gender inequality in the Japanese language and in society in general. In our experience, it is common practice among teachers to correct their male students for using feminine speech and their female students for employing male marked forms. This is also supported in studies such as Siegal (1994, 1996; cf. Ogulnic, 1998). Siegal documents the resistance of US women learners of Japanese to the language forms stereotypically associated with femininity in mainstream JFL syllabuses. So it seems that often students are obliged to follow their teacher's directives concening gender-related language and may be given no reason to suspect this might be a problem worthy of further thought. What curricular and pedagogical alternatives are there to such an approach?

Critical Pedagogy

In Freire’s philosophy of education, human beings are treated as actors whose vocation is to "act on perceived reality in order to change it for the improvement of life conditions" (Crawford-Lange 1981: 258). What action, if any, a person comes to take on that perceived reality depends on her/his ability to reflect on the world, a process described as the "distancing oneself from, describing, and interpreting a perceived reality" (ibid). Education, as a process of human development, is necessarily entwined in the construction of perceived realities. Education can foster a "critical" reflection of the world that supports and even encourages human beings’ efforts to improve life conditions. Or, education can be a vehicle for instilling in people a sense of the world that leads them to accept it as it is, or as it is presented to them, thereby deterring them from seeing the need to take action to alter or improve it. In this analysis, education is thus never neutral; "it always implies a specific interpretation of human beings and their world" (ibid).

The type of education that breeds acceptance of the world as it is has been linked metaphorically to the depositing of money in a bank, and was termed by Freire the "banking" concept of education (1970: 53). In "banking education", students are taught to accept their teachers as pillars of knowledge. Teachers deposit this knowledge in the students and never suggest students question the knowledge being bestowed on them—the banking approach to education "will never propose to students that they critically consider reality" (ibid: 55). It is perhaps true that "banking" gives students the chance to build up a stock of knowledge, but at the same time communication about how this knowledge relates to the issues and dilemmas that students are faced with in their own lives that might involve any questioning of the existing order does not occur. As Freire states, "The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them" (ibid:54). If our objective as teachers who care about society is to give human beings the opportunity to critically reflect on and act on their position within society, then the banking concept of education has to be rejected outright.

As an alternative, Freire advocates a problem-posing education, where, rather than instilling a sense of the world into the students, humans, through a dialogue between teachers and students, "develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in progress, in transformation" (ibid: 64). A problem-posing education "strives for the emergence of consciousness" (ibid: 62), whereby teachers and students become "jointly responsible for a process in which all grow" (ibid) and develop the kind of consciousness that will allow them to take the actions necessary to improve their life conditions.

A critical pedagogy in or of a foreign language would require that teachers engage students in dialogue that will give them the opportunity to understand how use of the language being studied contributes to the oppression of women, minorities, or classes. As teachers, we would have to have an ability to comunicate with students about the society and culture they are learning about such they can come to reflect critically about the various aspects of the culture they are studying about and preparing to enter into. This way, the students themselves can determine through their reflection the type of actions, if any, that they can and are willing to take as participants in the target culture that can contribute to the improvement of the people and of the culture.

Freire’s critical pedagogy has been criticized by some, especially by feminist pedagogues, on the ground that it ignores issues of gender asymmetry (Vandrick 1994, Weiler 1991). However, both critical and feminist pedagogy share a fundamental goal: "to emancipate and educate all people, regardless of gender, class, race, ethnic origin, wealth, etc" (Vandrick 1994). In addition, some sympathetic critics have pointed out that there is a large and understandable overlap in the classroom practices and activities which are used by each (Gore, 1998). Both modes of pedagogy (if indeed they can be distinguished) strongly encourage teachers to develop an ability to communicate with students that will foster critical reflection about the various aspects of the culture they are studying about and, in many cases, preparing to enter into. This way, the students themselves can determine, through their reflection, the type of actions, if any, that they can and are willing to take, as participants in the target culture, to contribute to the improvement of the life conditions of oppressed people throughout the world.

THE STUDY

Setting

At the time of this study, Yumiko and Scott taught in a JFL program in a large state in the Western USA. Like many such programs, it placed a high priority on students' memorization and subsequent acccurate production of grammatical patterns on discrete point tests. Teachers were not actively discouraged from teaching about Japanese society and culture, but with the curricular priorities just mentioned and the large quantities of linguistic material to be covered, few teachers were able to give much attention to the general cultural context of the language. [fn. 2] In order to maintain a high degree of continuity within the program, all teachers of a certain level were expected to follow the same syllabus and give the same tests. The teaching style was for the most part left to the discretion of each individual teacher, but this type of overall curricular structure meant that all teachers of a given level were expected to teach the same material at approximately the same time and test the students on that same material against predetermined standards. Even though it was a beginning level class, we knew that this curricular structure did not change much in the higher level Japanese classes. We knew that students who went through and passed Scott’s class went move up the higher levels and more of the same kind of structured curriculum. Thus, we had to ultimately decide, based on our study of critical pedagogy, whether we wanted to merely continue to ascribe to the banking method of education or whether we wanted to attempt to give the students the opportunity to actually reflect on and think critically about the material they were learning.

However, it was clear that we were not in a position to move all at once to a more explicitly critical or feminist pedagogy. Institutional constraints were considerable, even if we had had full confidence in our command either of the slightly different instructional techniques and curricular emphases that might be required or how students might respond to them. Accordingly, we decided to explore this area via a small-scale intervention within the existing curriculum and institutional structure (in line with an understanding of teacher research that would advocate teachers engaging in such small-scale, local explorations; Crookes, 1993). We devoted four regular class meetings in succession to a course module constructed from a critical pedagogy point of view which focused on gender-related differences in JFL. This intervention was implemented in Scott’s beginning level Japanese class, which consisted of seventeen students, 11 males and 6 females. [fn. 3] All students were between the ages of 18 and 21, and, as is common in many Japanese language classes in the Western part of the US, there were a significant number of students of Japanese heritage.

We used a set of four videotaped Japanese TV commercials that we felt displayed Japanese women and men in mostly stereotypical ways with a few nontraditional twists (see Suzuki 1995 for analysis of commercials produced in Japan). Commercials have been used in FL classes because of the variety of cultural information they contain (e.g. Martinez-Gibson 1998); we also chose these specific examples because they featured young people (in their twenties). We felt this aspect would allow us as well as the students to focus on gender differentiation without having to worry about age and associated statust differences. The four were as follows: First, an advertisement for a chocolate bar, featuring a popular young female singer. The commercial is mostly devoted to showing her in a short dress and it provides at the end a close-up of her lips when she actually eats the product. Second, a pie ad; it features three young females in a living room having tea and dessert (the pie). At the end of the ad, they say that a woman's happiness rests on having three essential things: money, a man, and the pie. Commercial three promotes instant soup. A young man (in real life a popular singer and actor) is urging someone off camera to make the instant soup for him. The soup is served, he eats it, and is happy. The last commercial, which also features a popular young actor, is for a vitamin drink. It shows a man driving a car at high speed. He lets out a scream because of having to go so fast, but then he drinks the vitamin drink and becomes visibly relaxed.

The instructional sequence was as follows:

Day 1

Introduce topic, begin discussion of topic, assign reading

Day 2

Discuss reading, distribute transcripts of commericials, work through transcripts in groups, show commercials and discuss them if time permits

Day 3

Show commercials again, stop after each commercial for discussion, break students into groups to make on their own commercials, have students perform commercials

Day 4

Discuss grammar point that is to be used as part of a role-play, divide students into pairs for role play, perform role plays, assign wrap-up questions as homework

To help facilitate discussion about the topic, Yumiko attended the last three days and sat with the students. Yumiko had attended Scott’s class before, so the students were familiar with her. All four classes were audiotaped and subsequently transcribed. A brief open-ended questionnaire was completed by the students at the end of the module. We reviewed this data shortly after the course as a whole was finished, and analyzed it according our own questions and concerns about the feasibility of the idea, the ability of ourselves and our students to handle this approach (the first four subsections below), and in accordance with other themes which emerged as we reviewed the data and reflected on the experience. [fn.

FINDINGS

Would dialogue in any sense be possible?

Central to the concept of critical pedagogy is the idea of dialogue between students and teacher. Even in comparatively non-hierarchical cultures like the US, this is not always common in classrooms. However, we found that this group of students were willing to engage in dialogue with their teachers on this topic. [fn. 4] For example, on the first day, Scott related an anecdote from his time in Japan: he told students that when he visited a school as part of his job, it was always men who would greet him and engage him in conversation while women would shuffle in and of the room to serve tea and a snack. Scott’s anecdote was responded to and matched by a student, who related his own anecdote about his mother, a Japanese woman who, despite being very strong and domineering at home, had, when the student observed her in her predominately Japanese workplace, been passively bringing tea and snacks to other male employees and customers.

Dialogue became more elaborate on the second day. Students discussed the short reading passage that had been assigned as homework. This was a two-page overview of language and gender from Loveday (1986) which contained brief discussion of the social meanings of high and low-pitched voices in Japanese. One student began the discussion by saying he noticed that many young Japanese females used a very high-pitched voice, and that he found it annoying. Several other students agreed with his comments. Yumiko responded that she had found in one of her studies that Japanese women with a high-pitched voice were rated by other Japanese as being more likely to be attractive, young, likely to marry a desirable male, and have a less prestigious job while women with low-pitched voices were perceived as older, having a higher chance of remaining single for life, and having a prestigious job such as a lawyer, doctor, or university professor (Ohara 1997). Yumiko, who happens to have a fairly low-pitched voice for a Japanese female, also told of a few occasions on the telephone where she was mistakenly taken to be a man. Students asked why this mistake might have been made. Yumiko remarked that it was because Japanese society puts pressure on women to be feminine and that sounding young and cute constitutes a major part of the Japanese image of femininity. She presented her response as a personal opinion and not as some objective piece of knowledge that students were to accept without question. In the discussion that ensued, teacher, visitor, and students further explored what femininity meant in a Japanese context. A good portion of the discussion did proceed with the students asking questions and Yumiko and Scott giving their opinions but some students also gave their opinions about how they felt about the image of femininity in Japan. One of the notable aspects of the dialogue that developed was the proportion of students who involved themselves in the discussion. Although it was generally the case that in Scott’s class some students were willing to raise their hands and ask questions about the material being learned, such participation had, prior to the module, been primarily limited to about five of the seventeen students. In contrast, by the third day of our module, at least two-thirds of the students had contributed to the discussion, with most of them offering more than just one comment or question. In fact, two of the students who took the initiative in the early stages of our module to offer comments—the student who produced the anecdote about his mother and the student who noted his annoyance at young females with high pitched voices—had not been among those inclined to freely volunteer questions prior to our four-day investigation.

Would our students have any kind of critical perspective on Japanese?

As the class began viewing and discussing the Japanese commercials on the second day and extending into the third day, students displayed an ability to voice critical comments. In fact, when the students viewed the first commercial, which showed a scantily clad young woman advertizing chocolate, they questioned some of the information we, the teachers, had given them. Pointing out that the woman in the commericial had a low-pitched voice, the students remarked that the image contrasted sharply with what Yumiko had told them about voice pitch and cultural images of femininity. Students had a similar reaction to the third commercial, which showed a Japanese man eating soup. They noted that the man’s voice was quite high. In responding to these comments, Yumiko told students that what she had presented in class were the results of one study and were not meant to be the definitive answers on the topic. In class discussion, students brought up the idea that a low-pitched voice on the part of young Japanese women may conjure up images of sexiness and second the possibility that there was no real social stigma attached in Japanese society to a male with a high-pitched voice. As part of this discussion, one student, a female, remarked that despite the male’s high-pitched voice, the commercial was still sexist because it was a male eating soup that had been prepared by a female.

Students’ comments on the second and fourth commercials were not simply accepting. Many students, especially females, expressed disbelief and even outrage at the dialogue betweeen the three young women in the second commercial who used the punchline that a woman is happy if she has money, men, and a "choco-pie". Most of the students found the fourth commercial, which showed a screaming and frantic Japanese businessman drinking a vitamin drink to revalitize himself for more work, very humorous. Scott told them that the commercial was supposed to be appealing to Japanese businessmen, but many of the students questioned its appeal, while others, drawing on their knowledge of the long hours put in by Japanese businessmen, felt that it reflected the pressure that must be felt by Japanese businessmen. In the ensuing discussion, a few students were quite critical of Japanese business practices which lead to neglect of the male workers’ spouses and children.

As this discussion continued, the students did not always agree with each other and they were not afraid to point out to us inconsistencies that existed between our explanations and what they were seeing in the authentic materials. This is exactly what we were striving for. The students showed the ability to relate what they were learning to their own experiences and feelings, and just as importantly, to express this while participating in a classroom discussion about certain aspects of the target culture.

Was there room for language practice in a critical discussion?

Although the discussions of our four-day topic occurred in English, taking class time for these discussions did not prevent us from offering students opportunities to practice the target language. Prior to the four days of experimental class procedures, Scott had used primarily drills of grammatical patterns, role plays, and short skits in class to prompt students to use the target language, and even with the addition of classroom dialogue, Scott was still able in the four days to incorporate role plays and short skits into the class agenda. On the third day, after students had already discussed the commercials, Scott brought with him to class a set of actual products, including wasabi, cologne, lipstick, toothpase, musubi mix, and curry mix, and after having the students divide themselves into five groups of three or four students, had students make their own commercials. On the fourth day, students broke into pairs and engaged in an "open" role play. That is, besides stipulating that students were to use the target language to construct and act out a dialogue, no constraints were placed on the roles they were to take. Some of the pairs made husband-wife dialogues, some constructed dialogues between friends, and some groups put themselves in the role of business associates.

A flexible approach to gender-related language

In the main part of the course (prior to our module), students had become familiar with the use of role plays and short skits as a means of practicing grammatical patterns and vocabulary that appeared in the textbook and on the tests. In our module, students included in their skits gender-marked lingusitic items, which they handled in an active and playful manner. For example, one group consisting of two males and one female used wasabi as their product in creating a commercial where one male was challenging the other male how much of it he could put on his food. The male doing the challenging used the sentence dono gurai taberu ka? (how much can you eat?). The form of this sentence is very direct, almost rough-sounding and typical of the kind of language men would use with each other. After the challenged male took a bite, the other male challenged him once again using the very direct and straightforward motto! motto! (More! More!). The student stressed the emphatic sense of this expression by pounding on the desk. Before the male could answer this second challenge, the woman in the group issued the warning totemo karai desu yo (it is very hot), which, although a warning, possesses a more polite linguistic form than the utterances of the males, thereby conforming to the stereotype that women are to speak in a more polite manner than men. Also in an apparent effort to make her character more feminine, the woman raised the pitch of her voice to a point that was recognizably higher than her normal speaking voice. However, despite her warning, the challenged male went on to pretend to eat his "spicy" food and after he took a bite, he turned to the (imaginary) camera, lowered his voice even more, and, in a phrase that captured the mood of their commercial, growled Otoko no wasabi (man’s wasabi).

However, not all of the groups conformed to cultural gender stereotypes. In fact, based on the way they constructed and acted out their skits, it was apparent that for at least some students, their understanding of gender-marked linguistic items was not as a strict dichotomy of female vs. male language but rather as a set of resources that could be used by either gender to highlight certain aspects of the identities they were trying to project. In one group in which gendered stereotypes were apparently being challenged, the students reversed gender roles by having two females visit the apartment of a male with the intent of getting him to cook for them. Upon being allowed to enter the male’s residence, one of the females uttered in a very direct, not-polite form onaka suita yo (I am hungry), and then the other made a very direct question nani o tsukuru (What will you make?). The male then responded by holding up the product and saying in the formal, more polite form musubi o tsukurimasu (I will make riceballs). He then proceeded to pretend to make rice balls and upon finishing them he said dekimashita. Hai, tabete kudasai (they are ready, please eat them), an utterance that is also a formal, polite form. Upon taking a pretend bite, the females simultaneously exclaimed oishii (delicious), once again using a very direct and not-polite linguistic form.

The students’ awareness of sociopragmatic aspects of language was also clear in the role-play on the fourth day. In gender-marking their speech, students especially made use of sentence-final particles, with students playing male roles making frequent use of zo and ze and students playing female roles using the sentence-final particle wa. In pairs which played against stereotypes, that some males meant to take on female roles and some females male roles was evident in their choice of sentence-final particles. In addition, students also tried to alter the pitch of their voice according to their role, with males even willing to raise the pitch of their voice to play a female role. The students’ purposeful and experimental use of these aspects of the Japanese language suggested that they were becoming aware of the relation between language and one important aspect of identity, namely gender (cf. Siegal, 1994, 1996).

The Utility of Authentic Materials

Authentic materials were important for this intervention.[ fn. 5] Of course, communicative approaches to language pedagogy have long recognized the usefulness of authentic materials in the foreign language classroom, while criticizing published materials for their lack of authenticity (e.g Duda Laurens & Remy 1973, Cathcart 1989, Makino 1988. cf. Clark, 1998). For us, however, instead of just being tools to facilitate language learning, authentic materials in a critical pedagogy lesson plan become texts representative of the culture that are to be scrutinized by the students and serve as the basis for discussion and critical reflection of the culture. The television commercials we used did provide students with a model of the way the target language is actually used and Scott took the time in class to read through transcripts of the commercials with the students before showing the video, with the hope that students would be exposed to and learn some new vocabulary and sentence structures. Yet the utility of these commercials hardly stopped there. They provided Scott with a basis for facilitating active discussion on the way gender was expressed in Japanese, and they likewise served as the basis for the students to begin to seriously reflect on an important sociocultural aspect of the Japanese language.

Resistance or Change

At the end of our module we had students complete a questionnaire consisting of the following three open-ended questions:

1) What do you feel you have learned in the past few days of class?

2) How do you feel about what you have learned? (i.e., do you like the image being portrayed in Japanese commercials?)

3) Do you think anything needs to be done to change the image?

In their answers to question 1 all of the students wrote that they had learned about gender differences in the way the Japanese people use their language, and most of the students made remarks about the culural stereotypes and expectations placed on women in their actions and use of language. For question 2, most of the students expressed either their dislike of the images of women being displayed or their amusement at the images. It is perhaps not surprising that in expressing their dislike, many of the female students referred to Japan as a sexist society. For example, one female wrote, "I thought Japan was kind of a sexist society but never realized it was this bad", and another wrote, "I am amazed at how sexist Japan is, even the language is sexist". It was mostly the men who wrote that they found the commercials funny and enjoyable.

The answers that were given for question 3 fell into the following four categories:

(a) feel no need for change

(b) feel there should be change, but have no thoughts on how to change it

(c) feel there should be change, but feel the change has to be initiated by Japanese women themselves

(d) feel there should be change and offer some potential ways to change it

For example, one male wrote explicitly, "I don’t think anything needs to be changed." Another male student commented that he did not want the image to change because, "I pretty much felt comfortable with what was given". Their comments, together with their responses to question 2 (that the commercials were funny and enjoyable) can be seen as a sign of "male resistance to female issues" (Benesch 1998).

On the other hand, three of the 15 responses fell into category (d), and they were all written by female students. One suggested that people should participate in awareness-raising activities similar to the ones the engaged in by the students themselves in class. She wrote,

I feel that by raising an awareness there is more of a choice involved in how people act. Just like how we watched the commercials and analyzed them, similar activities can aid people in seeing the various actions and behaviors of a society and expected by society to be used (especially by advertisers since they are trying to design a commercial that will play upon people’s feelings and entice them to buy their product/service).

Another female student suggested that the change has to be initiated by Japanese women themselves. She wrote the following.

I can understand why women would feel inferior to men. Because men control business and government and most of the other important parts of society, I can understand why women feel the need to serve them tea and to use gentler, more polite language. But I also think that women help contribute to their inferior status by agreeing to serve men. If they want to bring change, they have to try not to treat men as being so superior. Maybe changing their use of language to make it closer to that of men would only be a small change, but it would serve as a sign to men that women wanted to change society.

Of course, the fact that only three students offered thoughts about how society can be changed does not in any way mean that the other students did not critically think about the issue. Critical pedagogy does not stipulate that students have to arrive at any one conclusion. That a variety of opinions was found in the questionnaire responses suggests we had not forced our own opinions on the students.

CONCLUSION

In this report we have presented an account of a small, teacher-generated and implemented intervention which explored the practicality of a critical perspective on language and language teaching within an established JFL university course. This was, obviously, a very small-scale exploration, and no claims are made which go beyond the specific circumstances reported. We have to recognize, too, that although our insider status has enabled us to give a well-informed account of our practice, the fact that we were in a hierarchical relationship to our students may have inhibited them from fully reporting their views to us; at the same time, however, it is our position that our previously established and relatively relaxed relationship to them, not to mention the behavior they exibited during the module in sometimes challenging and questioning our opinions in discussion, contributes positively to the "trustworthiness" (in the sense of Lincoln & Guba, 1985) of this account.

Our exploration is in line with some interesting new trends in FL teaching: besides the old tradition of critical pedagogy and its near neighbor feminist pedagogy, language specialists in particular are beginning to draw on the insights of critical language awareness (e.g. Fairclough, 1992) and critical discourse analysis (e.g. Fairclough 1989, 1995) in reviewing what a language syllabus might consist of (e.g. Lancaster and Taylor 1992, Stubbs 1992).

Whether or not Japanese language and culture are changing, we feel any JFL teacher who has a feminist perspective must consider whether and to what extent teachers, as language users, contribute to perpetuating the gender stereotypes and related oppression.. Such individuals may wish to draw on some of the techniques reported above; we hope that this account will contribute to stimulating necessary explorations in this area.

Notes

1 The authors of this study had different roles and responsibilities. We will use our first names, when necessary, to clarify who did what and when.

2 A common problem, of course. Cf. Martínez-Gibson, 1998, inter alia.

3 The students who were the subjects of this study were using volume one of the previously-mentioned Situational Functional Japanese textbook.

4 At least minimally understood in terms of a two-way exchange of remarks pertinent to the matter being jointly explored. (The term has not been well-defined in this literature, but for a comprehensive analysis see Burbules, 1993).

5 Not only were they readily available—Yumiko took the commercials from some videotapes of Japanese television shows she had made during an earlier to Japan and Scott and Yumiko found the products used use for the skits either at home or in the store, but they also proved to serve as simple tools for promoting dialogue and critical reflection in the classroom.

6 Our approach to the data analysis was broadly qualitative-interpretive (cf. Davis, 1995), within a teacher-researcher perspective (e.g. Altrichter Posch & Somekh,1993).

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