ウズベク人日本語学習者の文章観の変容―異文化間レトリックの知見に基づく作文教育実践―

<p>Intercultural rhetoric, which deals with problems in communication between and among individuals with different cultural backgrounds, highlights the need for writers to understand the diverse styles and values of writing, and the ability to decide their writing style to suit the situation. Therefore, a writing class is organized with the aim of “understanding one’s own style of writing and learning diverse views of good writing, by revising one’s own writing in accordance with the reader’s suggestions.” The class participants were two Japanese language learners from Uzbekistan and the activities conducted were: understanding different methods of evaluation, analyzing one’s own writing, receiving feedback from a conference with a teacher, and having an interview with foreign students. The participants also wrote an essay on their view of good writing. And an interview was conducted after the class was completed. Then, these essays and interview scripts were analyzed to examine the transformation of the learners.</p><p>As a result of the analysis, there are three transformations that were observed: 1) learners recognized that readers have different thoughts and values, and realized that the purpose of writing is to convince the reader, 2) learners became aware of the influence of elementary and secondary school education on their writing, 3) learners noticed that the writing instructions they received were based on Japanese style of writing, and sometimes Japanese language teachers mentioned that the problem in their Japanese writing is that it is stylistically different from Uzbek writing. Hence forth, it is necessary to work on educational practices in order to improve writing by regulating a balance between what the reader expects from the text and what the writer wants to write, especially once the writer has recognized that there is a variety of ways of writing and different views on what constitutes as good writing.</p>