Multimedia Language Learning
An Interview with Professor Shigeru Miyagawa of MIT
Shigeru Miyagawa is Professor of Linguistics and Language at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In keeping with this issue's
combined Education/Internet themes, Computing Japan took advantage of
Professor Miyagawa's visit to Japan in late March to talk with him about
the role of multimedia and the Internet in language learning.
interviewed by Wm. Auckerman
Computing Japan: First, tell us a bit about Tanabata, the multimedia
Japanese-language learning project that you are now working on.
Shigeru Miyagawa: I brought a fellow from MIT's Media Lab, an interactive
documentary maker, to Japan in the summer of 1992 to do spontaneous street
interviews, very natural conversation, with people in Hiratsuka, in
Kanagawa prefecture. (Which happens to be my hometown. We had a very
limited budget at that time.) We have been editing and putting all this
into a graphics interface with original music and such. There is a team
of about seven people working on this, all MIT graduates: a graphics
designer, an interface designer, a film editor, a musician, and so forth.
We've gotten support from from NEH (the National Endowment for the
Humanities), the US Department of Education, ASCII, NEC, and a couple of
individual donors.
We're producing this on a Mac environment, and by the end of the
year we will market it on a CD-ROM. I want to develop a package that will
have the very best impact.
CJ: Is your Tanabata CD-ROM targeted at American students of Japanese?
Miyagawa: My sense is that the biggest market for this is not going to be
the US - it's going to be Asia. Japan has the largest number of Japanese
language learners; Australia is another big market, Korea, mainland
China....
This is educational software, but given the kind of people working
on it - one just finished directing a film in Hollywood, another does work
with MTV, another is a rock musician - it has a playfulness and a gamelike
nature to it. Our hope is that it wil l have a much wider acceptance than
just the educational market.
Another potential market is the Japanese themselves. I've demoed
the program at a number of places in the past year, and the Japanese are
fascinated with how we [Americans] represent Japan; it is slightly
different than how the Japanese would represent themselves. Some Japanese
schools have also shown an interest in using it.
CJ: What has been the general reaction in Japan from those who have seen
the demo version?
Miyagawa: I've shown it to some high-level executives, and they have two
reactions - one personal, one professional. The professional reaction, and
maybe they're just being nice, is that this is one of the most integrated
multimedia programs that they've seen. The personal reaction is that this
isn't all of Japan - that these people we interviewed don't represent
typical Japan. Which is false. These high executives live above the
clouds; when you go out in the street, to the back alleys, out of Tokyo,
these are the people that you meet.
We weren't trying to "represent" Japan, but that's a very
interesting reaction that people have to this kind of medium. In any kind
of medium, you're representing an "instantiation" of culture, society....
The question is whether people will generalize f rom that.
One of the most interesting reactions I got was from the assistant
to a US Senator. After seeing all the interviews, she said she didn't
realize that there were so many different kinds of Japanese. Which is a
typical American view, but in fact, the Japan ese have the same view of
themselves: that "the Japanese" are the same, all from the same mold. That
is one of the biggest pedagological impacts this program has had so far -
not only teaching pieces of the language, but getting people to realize
that you can't just generalize, "Japanese are X." CJ: Do you see
multimedia as changing or simply supplementing the language learning
process?
Miyagawa: I can see someone taking a traditional textbook design and
turning that into multimedia. In fact, we have a very traditional paper
textbook that we use [at MIT], just like everybody else. One semester,
students from the Media Lab decided to take a couple of lessons from the
paper Japanese textbook and turn it into a multimedia program. They put
the whole thing on a Mac, with laser disc as media, and an online
dictionary, and so forth; it was a course project.
So we said, "Let's use this to do some testing." We divided the
class in half. Some students studied the way they had always studied;
other students were able to use the multimedia stuff. We didn't do a
formal evaluation, but anecdotally the students who
went through the multimedia program said that they spent about half as
much time as when they only had the paper and pencil technology.
A lot of the time saving is obvious; everything is there on the
screen. Instead of opening up five different books and searching through
for one bit of information, you click something and "bang," it's right
there. But I also believe they were underestimating the amount of time
they were spending, because it's so much fun as opposed to paper and
pencil. In that sense, I think that multimedia, designed correctly, will
motivate students more and make learning more efficient - both of which
are really needed.
CJ: How do you rate the efficiency of the multimedia approach versus the
standard approach to language learning?
Miyagawa: This kind of project is not intended to make language learning
more efficient, or to replace the textbook. It is intended to bring
resources to the student that otherwise would not be available. Especially
for someone outside of Japan, it gives students a multifaceted experience
that they would not get otherwise: the idea of an authentic cultural
context. That's something I think is often missing in language education -
the cultural context. One factor contributing to the difficulty of
Japanese is what I term "cultural remoteness." Living in Japan, you hear a
phrase in a context, and you get it. But an American who has never spent
time in Japan lacks the cultural context in which to imagine using the
term.
Our project is also intended to bring more facets to language
learning - psychology, emotional esthetics.... Emotional esthetics is
probably the overriding factor guiding us. We all know when we see
something that's esthetically compelling. Much of educational software is
esthetically uncompelling; that's why they don't do well.
CJ: I understand that another project you're working on focuses on
language learning via the Internet.
Miyagawa: At MIT, we've just embarked on an information service called
JP-NET, which is intended to use the Internet for the teaching of Japanese
language and culture. We began this based on the work we did on our local
network, called Athena. We discover ed a couple of years ago that Athena
has Japanese language capability, and since over 95% of the students at
MIT use Athena, we decided it would be the right environment to make
learning more efficient. We have now pretty much put our entire Japanese
prog ram at MIT on the local net, including syllabus, reading assignments,
everything.
We thought this was a great thing, so we decided to go global with
a similar type of idea. JP-NET offers a framework where Japanese language
teachers around the globe can participate in this kind of information
service. Instead of having 3,000 Japanese teachers on a daily basis
produce materials that are very similar, you begin to put those materials
in one place and organize it in some fashion, in a database that is easy
to access. That will be time-saving for the teacher, and it can probably
improve th equality of teaching. We've just embarked on this, and the
first thing we've done is call on some of our peer institutions to
contribute information about their language programs - staff, course
descriptions, and course syllabi. We've got virtually all of the Ivys
now, plus Stanford, the University of Chicago, MIT, and a number of
others, including Keio University - and I think Tsukuba is coming on board
soon. All of that information will be available on JP-NET.
CJ: How useful do you see the Internet becoming as resource for language
study?
Miyagawa: I think it's going to be the single biggest source of language
learning. If you surf the Net, you find all sorts of things, both in
English and in Japanese, all kinds of information about Japan. In the same
way that libraries have traditionally been the source of information in
academics, I think the Internet is going to be the next library of
information. For our profession, we not only have to learn how to use it,
but also create what we need on the Internet ourselves.
CJ: Do you think that the Internet will reach the same level of popularity
in Japan that it has in the US?
Miyagawa: I'm interested to see how well Japan's corporate society will
adapt to the notion of networking. In some ways, it's polar opposite from
Japanese society, which is strictly hierarchical, and information flow is
dictated by hierarchy. But the Internet, or networking, when used in the
very best, most effective way, flattens hierarchy.
As a professor, I can e-mail the president of MIT, and he often
responds very quickly. This is not untypical of what is going on in
American organizations. Right now, I don't think the president of a big
Japanese corporation would be willing to get e-mail from a first year
employee. For e-mail to succeed here, I really think that Japan has to
undergo some sort of fundamental change.
Any time you use the Internet for anything beyond e-mail, then
you've got to be willing to change certain views that you've held. For
Japanese society and the Internet, a fundamental change has to take place
- to cut through the hierarchy.
When I'm in one of my moods, I say that Japan will have to undergo
another Meiji Restoration. This time, it's not Perry coming with guns and
black ships, it's the Internet that's shown up at the doorsteps.
Culturally, this is an enormous challenge for Japan.
CJ: What about the suggestion that the Internet will succeed in Japan
because it is a way to easily maintain webs of contacts, which is very
important in Japanese society.
Miyagawa: We'll have to wait and see if this electronic connection is
accepted as a form of contact. I know people who do business in such a
way that, if they need to see someone, they would get on a plane in
Tokyo, go to New York and have a two-hour meeting, and get on a plane and
come back. That's how important contact is. Now he could have got on the
phone and done exactly the same thing. But that was not appropriate or
sufficient. For that person, the Internet is not going to replace
personal contact.
Professor Miyagawa can be contacted by e-mail as miyagawa@athena.mit.edu.
For information in Japan, contact Ray Tsuchiyama, director of MIT's Japan
Office Industrial Liaison Program, at phone 03-3262-2240, fax
03-3239-4136, e-mail Tsuchiyama@twics.com.
