March 31, 2013

The 72nd Meeting of Mind and Activity



Saturday, April 6, 2013

3:30PM - 7:30PM
Room 1555, on the 5th floor of Main Building (Building #1)
Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo

Program

We plan to have two sessions.

3:30 PM: Eric Haurser,
"Learning and the immediate use(fulness) of a new vocabulary item"

Using data collected over a seven-month period with a Japanese adult living in Honolulu, this study looks at how this adult began and continued to use a new vocabulary item, "near," in and through interaction. At the same time, this adult did not try to use the synonym "close," in spite of the fact that it was available and often made salient in the interaction. It is argued that the learner found the word "near" immediately useful during interaction, but having learned this word, did not find the synonym to be useful.


5:00 PM: Augustin Lefebre,
Data Session: Interactions in Classroom of French as Foreign Language

In this data session I will propose the observation of interactions in classroom of French as foreign language, relying on a corpus video recorded in the French Institute (Institut Francais - Yokohama). In the video I will show, the students are Japanese learning French language at the elementary level. The teacher is also Japanese, teaching both in Japanese language and French language. Possible focuses of observation will be the doing- being teacher / student; the textbook as a resource for producing French language; the code-switching as resource for maintaining mutual understanding.





If anybody is interested in bringing their own data, analyses, observations, arguments, or whatever, to a next meeting to discuss together, please contact Aug Nishizaka at augnish(a)soc.meijigakuin.ac.jp.