Teaching sound symbolism through Japanese pop culture. A response to Kawahara (2018)

This paper provides a quantitative assessment of Shigeto Kawahara’s phonetics teaching method. A senior high school class from a liceo scientifico in Scandicci (Florence) was involved in a small language awareness program. The students were taught about basic concepts concerning sound symbolism and social meaning through two lessons differing in modality of presentation, i.e., a “standard” lesson vs. a lesson containing multiple Japanese pop examples (Kawahara method). Students attending the latter performed better in an assessment test; moreover, their response accuracy grew along with the number of Japanese pop examples used to explain the related concepts. A statistical interaction between modality of presentation and student attitude towards the Florentine speech variety used to teach during the awareness program was also retrieved: students benefited from Kawahara’s method only when they manifested a positive attitude towards the teacher’s speech variety. Overall, this paper suggests a compact experimental procedure to test for the effectiveness of specific teaching methods in linguistics and beyond. Various strategies for achieving control in teaching experiments are advanced, concerning, among other factors, the evaluation of the individual student’s involvement in acquiring new knowledge, the teacher’s demeanor, and the scoring method. Lastly, future intersections between the scholarship of teaching and learning and sociophonetics are sketched out and promoted.