| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,700,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This paper reports the result of research entitled 'A Comparative Study of English and Japanese New Discourse - A Cross-Cultural Perspective', which was conducted with the support of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (No.15520374) in the academic years 2003-4. It investigated English and Japanese newspaper discourse from the perspective of cross-cultural communication and understanding. In so doing, the paper focused specifically on the topic of whaling, which is culturally loaded and thus relevant to the purpose of the investigation.
After a general introduction to the research in Chapter 1,Chapter 2 discusses theoretical backgrounds to the study, including Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA), which is currently very influential in the analysis of news discourse. Chapter 3 introduces actual analyses of two types of discourse; firstly, Chapter 3.1 compares and contrasts news editorials on whaling in both British and Japanese newspapers and claims that editors in the respective newspapers utilize very different strategies to persuade readers for different causes. Chapter 3.2 analyses two different types of discourse on whaling and cod-fishing in a British newspaper and reports that the treatment of the topics is drastically different depending on whether they are closely related to the country's culture and economy. Chapter 4 introduces the results of two types of questionnaires which were conducted to investigate, firstly, the perception of news editorials by readers with differing cultural assumptions and knowledge on a specific topic (4.1), and secondly, how different cultural assumptions and prior knowledge on a topic affect readers' interpretations of a text (4.2). The results have shown a clear connection between the two. Chapter 5 summarizes the study and discusses its implications for language pedagogy. The paper concludes with suggestions for further investigation.
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