This article uses the Japanese television anime series "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" (2011) as a case study through which to problematise the relationship between two prominent traditions within children's literature criticism: narratology, with its vocabulary of implied readers and textual address; and reception studies, which typically…

Film or television documentary can serve a unique role in the curriculum and teaching of courses in political science and history where the complexity of the human element such as interaction, motive, identity and ethical position require analysis. The documentary "Sugihara, Conspiracy of Kindness," a film by Kirk and Vicari, first…

The Multimedia Principle (Fletcher & Tobias, 2005) states that people learn better and comprehend more when words and pictures are presented together. The potential for English language learners to increase their comprehension of video through the use of captions, which graphically display the same language as the spoken dialogue, has been…

This article analyzes stylized pronunciations of English by Japanese speakers on televised variety shows in Japan. Research on style and mocking has done much to reveal how linguistic forms are utilized in interaction as resources of identity construction that can oftentimes subvert hegemonic discourse (Chun 2004). Within this research area,…

The purpose of this study is to use the Analytic Hierarchy Process in order to identify how frequency of media use in daily life affects decision-making in media choice. 276 university students took part in this research, They were asked to prioritize their ways of obtaining information about current affairs using sets of media such as TV, books,…

This paper explores how referent honorifics contribute to identity construction on a Japanese TV shopping channel program. Drawing on Ochs' twostep model of indexicality (1993, 1996) and Agah's proposal (1993) that honorifics are not directly linked to social status but index a "relative position within events of discursive interaction"…

This practical paper discusses the effect of explicit instruction to raise Japanese EFL learners' pragmatic awareness using online discourse completion tasks. The five-part tasks developed by the authors use American TV drama scenes depicting particular speech acts and include explicit instruction in these speech acts. 46 Japanese EFL college…

This article describes how Japanese TV programs adopting a consultation framework construct different realities for women and men concerning a specific social phenomenon, namely adultery. To do so, two perspectives, the theory of metaphor promoted by George Lakoff and membership category analysis, are combined toward a discursive analysis which…

Although technology was once viewed literally as a means of bringing about utopian society, its means to that end was exhausted in the minds of many when it fostered the nuclear attacks on Japan in 1945. Since then, not only has technology lost its utopian verve, but it also has been viewed by some quite pessimistically. Nevertheless, technology…

The aim of this study is three-fold: (1) to examine the similarities and differences between instructor and peer assessments of EFL group presentations; (2) to understand the utility of peer assessment for discriminating each group member's contribution to group presentations in college EFL classrooms; and (3) to investigate the relationship…

The results of a comparison of television programming for children in the United States, Canada, Japan, and the democracies of Western Europe are presented. It was found that: in European countries no advertiser is allowed to sponsor a children's program, almost none of these programs carries commercials, and except in Italy, no host of a…

The results of a comparison of television programming for children in the United States, Canada, Japan, and the democracies of Western Eruope are presented. It was found that: in European countries no advertiser is allowed to sponsor a children's program, almost none of these programs carries commercials, and except in Italy, no host of a…

Examines the differences between Japanese and U.S. television in portrayal of violence. Concludes that while the amount of violence on Japanese television does not differ noticeably from that on American television, the nature of Japanese violence differs with much greater emphasis on suffering and the consequences of violence. (JMF)

This study examines how English speakers address, and are addressed by, their Japanese colleagues in Japan, and the deciding factors and motivation for the choice of address-forms in a given context. The local norms of English and Japanese are also examined through interviews with 15 British and 15 Japanese office workers in their home countries,…

A survey was made in 1967 concerning children's viewing of television in Shizuoka, Japan. Although this survey was a follow-up to one made from 1957 through 1959, no comparisons are made between the two in this booklet. Third, fifth, and seventh graders, preschool children, and mothers of children in school were asked about: how they spent their…