Search

This paper considers whether an inductive, collaborative information and communication technology-based approach to learning promotional language may help non-native English speakers produc...

The importance of e-governance in Japan has grown parallel with the need for municipalities to provide multilingual services and translation for newcomer immigrants. Few studies have examined the content of official translated online materials in the context of immigrants’ actual experiences using such materials. The present study seeks to discover how international residents of Setagaya Ward in Tokyo access and navigate the foreign language information on the ward’s official website, in particular looking at issues of comprehension of both human and machine-translated content. Results of a survey of self-selected respondents (n＝52) indicate that such content is viewed as important and useful by international residents, though difficulties in locating and comprehending needed information were common. Implications of these results for official translation policy are considered in the context of notions of domestic internationalization and multicultural coexistence.

The use of authentic text has been argued to increase learner awareness of lexical form, function, and meaning (for example, Willis 1990; Johns 1994). The Web provides ready-made material and tools for both learner-centred reading and vocabulary tasks. This study reports on the results of a project in which Japanese university EFL students made use of the Web as a living corpus to investigate the specific contexts and collocative properties of lexis. Using an online database, students created a communal dictionary composed of lexis and example sentences culled from web sources, along with examples of their own devising. The language database was then used to facilitate peer teaching of lexis. Work produced indicates that learners paid attention to lexical form, function, and meaning when composing.