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Does Romaji Help Beginners Learn More Words?

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Does Romaji Help Beginners Learn More Words? Yoshiko Okuyama 355 CALL Vocabulary Learning in Japanese: Does Romaji Help Beginners Learn More Words? YOSHIKO OKUYAMA University of Hawaii at Hilo ABSTRACT This study investigated the effects of using Romanized spellings on beginner- level Japanese vocabulary learning. Sixty-one first-semester students at two uni- versities in Arizona were both taught and tested on 40 Japanese content words in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) program. The primary goal of the study was to examine whether the use of Romaji—Roman alphabetic spellings of Japanese—facilitates Japanese beginners’ learning of the L2 vocabulary. The study also investigated whether certain CALL strategies positively correlate with a greater gain in L2 vocabulary. Vocabulary items were presented to students in both experimental and control groups. The items included Hiragana spellings, colored illustrations for meaning, and audio recordings for pronunciation. Only the experimental group was given the extra assistance of Romaji. The scores of the vocabulary pretests and posttests, the types of online learning strategies and questionnaire responses were collected for statistical analyses. The results of the project indicated that the use of Romaji did not facilitate the beginners’ L2 vocabulary intake. However, the more intensive use of audio recordings was found to be strongly related to a higher number of words recalled, regardless of the presence or absence of Romaji. KEYWORDS CALL, Vocabulary Learning, Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL), Romaji Script, CALL Strategies INTRODUCTION Learning a second language (L2) requires the acquisition of its lexicon. How do American college students learn basic L2 vocabulary in a CALL program? If the vocabulary is written in a nonalphabetic L2 script, such as Japanese, is it more efficient to learn the words with the assistance of more familiar Roman-alphabetic symbols? This experimental study explored these questions in the context of Japa- nese CALL vocabulary learning. CALICO Journal, 24 (2), p-p 355-379. © 2007 CALICO Journal 356 CALICO Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 Teachers of less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) are faced with a variety of issues that include lack of pedagogically sound resources and instructional ma- terials (Johnston & Janus, 2003). Although categorically an LCTL, Japanese is in fact the most commonly taught Asian language in the United States. A great chal- lenge awaits learners of this nonalphabetic language, however, because Japanese is ranked as category 4 language (highest) by the US Federal standards in terms of its difficulty for American students to acquire. While more college-level course books are being published and software programs being created, many aspects of teaching and learning Japanese still remain to be empirically investigated. One of these underresearched aspects is the effect of nonalphabetic script on word learn- ing. Japanese Orthography Japanese consists of three types of script: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. The first two are called “syllabaries” because each symbol is a syllabic unit, while Kanji characters are ideographic symbols. Japanese children have to memorize the two syllabaries, with each set made of the basic 46 syllabic units and 61 extensions, before mastering over 2,000 Kanji characters in order to master all three sets of Japanese script. This is no easy task for learners since the difficulty with the syllabaries only worsens when learners come to understand that not all symbols clearly map onto the sound units of the Japanese language (e.g., the same sound ‘e’ in oneesan ‘big sister’ and eego ‘English’ happens to be transcribed with dif- ferent hiragana symbols). Yet, the perceived difficulty in learning Kana might be relative. According to the orthographic depth hypothesis (Katz & Frost, 1992), it is easier to learn to read words written in a ‘transparent’ script than an ‘opaque’ script. Kana syllabaries are considered a transparent script, a type of orthography in which phoneme-graph- eme mappings are highly consistent, and these symbols are processed differently than Kanji characters by native speakers of Japanese (Ellis et al., 2004; Kawaka- mi, Hatta, & Kogure, 2001; Sumiyoshi et al., 2004). English, on the other hand, is called an opaque script, a type of orthography that lacks systematic sound-symbol correspondence. In English, many alphabetic letters are associated with several different sounds (particularly in the case of its five vowels), making the mapping of the letters to the sounds less predictable. Thus, unlike the English alphabet or Kanji characters, “the regularity of the symbol-sound mappings makes hiragana an exceptionally transparent orthography” (Ellis et al., 2004, p. 443). Romaji versus Japanese Script According to the ‘Standards for Japanese Language Learning’ (National Stan- dards in Foreign Language Education Project, 1999), there is an orthographic bar- rier between English and Japanese: “In order to be able to read Japanese materials written for adult native speakers, students must learn two different syllabic writing systems and approximately 2,000 Chinese characters (kanji), most of which have multiple meanings and readings” (p. 332). The complexity of the Japanese writing Yoshiko Okuyama 357 system poses a great challenge to learners of Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) especially at the beginning level. In the US, Romaji (i.e., Romanized spellings of Japanese text) is commonly used as a starter for JFL beginners. Romaji is not entirely foreign to native speakers of Japanese. The script is used on limited occasions by Japanese native speakers, such as writing their name on a passport or indicating the name of a train station to foreign visitors. However, it is not an integral part of the native orthography and is not mixed with the other scripts within the same text. Romaji does not always transcribe the spoken lan- guage in a perfect grapheme-phoneme match. Moreover, both the Hepburn sys- tem (a style of Romanization invented by a missionary in 1867) and Kunrei-shiki (a Romanization system adopted by the Japanese government in 1937) have been used in Japan (Hannas, 1997). Two varying ways to transcribe some sounds (e.g., /fu/ vs. /hu/, /zi/ vs. /ji/) cause confusion on the part of readers and writers. Con- trary to Romaji, “grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are entirely regular” in Hanyu Pinyin (meaning ‘assembling sound’), a phonetic alphabet set of 26 Ro- man letters in 13 letter groups used in addition to the traditional character system in China (Chen, Fu, Iversen, Smith, & Matthews, 2002, pp.1089-1091). Pinyin is taught to school age children in China as a phonetic assistance in learning a set of about 6,000 meaning-based characters. Like Romaji, however, Pinyin is not used as an independent written script nor mixed with the Chinese characters. Thus, it is much easier for (adult) native speakers of Japanese and Chinese to process texts entirely in the traditional orthography rather than in Romaji or Pinyin. Many textbooks for JFL learners published in the US seem to encourage the use of Romaji as an effective pedagogical aid. Books designed for self-study, such as Japanese in 10 Minutes a Day (Kershul, 1992) and Master the Basics: Japanese (Akiyama & Akiyama, 1995), are also written entirely in Romaji. An audiotape- based program, Just Listen ‘n Learn Japanese (Katao & Takada, 1994), is accom- panied with a transcription of the recordings written only in Romaji. By contrast, college-level textbooks for JFL beginners, such as Yookoso (Tohsaku, 1994) and Nakama (Makino, Y. Hatasa, & K. Hatasa, 1998), are mainly written in authentic Japanese orthography. When it comes to CALL software, existing programs lack consistency in spell- ing Japanese materials. CALL tutorials and commercially available language soft- ware vary in the degree of their use of Romaji as opposed to authentic Japanese orthography. For example, NihongoWare 1 presents vocabulary and conversa- tional materials exclusively in Romaji, while TriplePlay Plus! Japanese has these items only in Japanese script. Yet, some programs, such as Robo-Sensei (Nagata, 2004), come in two versions—Romaji only and Japanese script only—for the user to choose from. In the North American context, Romaji is assumed to be an effective learning aid particularly during the initial period of JFL learning. However, when to switch to the authentic script has been controversial among JFL practitioners (Dewey, 2004; Hatasa, 2002). Those who advocate the early introduction of kana and kanji have pedagogical philosophies quite different from those of the proponents of delayed introduction. Divided views on the use of Romaji also exist among JFL 358 CALICO Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 learners. Even if the kana syllabaries are taught in the early stages of instruction, as in most JFL classes, many students are likely to use Romaji as a quick and easy note-taking device throughout the first year. These students claim that the use of Romaji reduces their language-related anxiety and helps them overcome the chal- lenge of learning Japanese especially when their L1 is English, a Roman alpha- betic language. They may adamantly defend their Romaji transcription as a way to absorb a large amount of new words efficiently for quizzes and exams. Others may simply consider this assistive device as a crutch, inhibiting themselves from developing strong reading and writing skills in Japanese. Moreover, JFL learners’ views on Romaji may also be influenced by their teachers’ attitudes toward the script (Dewey, 2004). The question is: does the use of Romaji really ‘facilitate’ JFL beginners’ lan- guage learning? Little research has been done to test whether substituting Japanese orthography for Romaji in introductory textbooks or CALL programs is indeed an effective pedagogical tool. In the absence of empirical evidence for the value of Romaji, teachers are left to select courseware or textbooks for beginning-level students based on their experience as an L2 learner or their own instincts. The primary goal of this study is, therefore, to find empirical evidence to address the question of the pedagogical value of Romaji in CALL for JFL beginners.
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