日本語学習者の能動的な漢字能力 ―漢字教育の目標と学習成 果の評価

There are many "fictions" people belive about Japanese culture and language that differ from the "reality". In other words, these "fictions & realities" are widely misunderstood concepts that contrast sharply with the actual state of things. Both learning and teaching kanji certainly belong to this category. The Sino-Japanese characters are commonly thought to be extremely difficult to memorize and use, and as a consequence, Japanese L2 learners and their teachers both tend to consider them an obstacle to, rather than a means of, communication. Moreover, the active skill of writing kanji by hand is often regarded as obsolete and thus useless in today's digitalized world. Although there is a reason this misconception has arisen, studying kanji has an important purpose, and they can be studied more effectively. The author has developed and successfully utilized in the classroom a kanji teaching method called "kanji vocalization", which takes into account biological evidence about the dissociative reading of ideograms and phonograms. This method exchanges the visual information to be memorized (the shape of a particular character) for a phonic description of it. As visual and phonic data are stored and retrieved in different ways, this method helps students recall kanji more easily, and thus finally overcome the fiction that kanji is an obstacle for 12 learners in Japanese written communication.