Students engage in a wide variety of CMC practices in Japanese and English. These practices mostly centered around the use of applications on their smartphones. Local CMC practices mirrored the reported and observable practices of youth across Japan in the same age bracket, and affirmed a broader societal discourse of keitai nativity—a highly multimodal fluency with mobile CMC.
My data on students' foreign language media literacy practices revealed that participants engage in a variety of digital media language practices, mostly centered around the use of their smartphones. Two sub-themes emerged from the data:
1. Most participants reported that a significant change in their CMC practices took place after they transitioned from high school to college.
2. Participants reported using a wide variety of different ICT tools for different purposes that overlapped among their academic, social, and work lives (e.g. their part-time jobs).
Regarding the change in ICT practices between high school and college, 16 of 20 respondents (80%) indicated that significant changes occurred in their ICT-
enabled communication practices after their transition from high school to university. Some examples of how participants expressed this follow:
Concerning the use of ICT during high school I mostly did not use ICT to
take classes, hand in homework, contact my teachers, etc. However, at
university classes involving video conferencing, submitting assignments
by email, doing (internet) research, interacting with my professor(s) using ICT and the like are common. (N1)
Concerning the use of ICT during high school it consisted of using email
and snapping and sending photos. However, at university I have begun to interact with foreign friends on Facebook, to play game applications, and to use the net to quickly research things I don't know about. (N2)
Concerning the use of ICT during high school it was normal to email my
friends and use the Internet. However, at university I have come to use the internet mostly as a means of collecting the information I need, with interacting with friends becoming a secondary activity. (N5)
Concerning the use of ICT during high school (I used it) for presentations and research for presentations. However, at university I used ICT to prepare for presentations etc. However, at university, I visit auction sites and sites that introduce presentations, and in my classes I have had opportunities to use Edmodo and other applications to interact with other students and my professor(s). (N6)
Concerning the use of ICT during high school I used a "Galapagos-style" (garake, ) phone3. However, at university I bought a smartphone and started to use an application called LINE, contacting a variety of people. (N19)
Concerning the use of ICT during high school I emailed my friends, read
my friend’s diaries (blogs) on Mixi, etc. However, at university I myself started posting information on Twitter and Facebook. (N16)
The nature of the survey instrument meant that answers varied in their level of specificity, and as the selection of quotations above indicates, different participants chose to interpret the prompt in slightly different ways. As noted in Chapter Three and Chapter Four, such differing interpretation is not seen as a “problem” to be solved by further negotiation of meaning or explication, but rather a rich data point that speaks to perceived practices—interpretations of practice in the participants’ own terms.
The main divide between the student responses in this area was in their binary choice of two opposing conjunction choices provided in the narrative frame. The
3 This term refers to mobile phones that were developed within Japan for domestic use only, and were thus mostly incompatible with foreign phones and other communication devices. These phones included a rich variety of features, many of which have been incorporated into modern “smartphones.” While young people favor globally compatible smartphones, many people in older generations (including this author) still use garake.
samples of narrative frame texts excerpted above come from students who contrasted their experience with ICT in their high school days to their present (university) experience by choosing the Japanese word shikashi , which translates as "however" in English. The other conjunction option was dōyō ni which means “similarly” or “likewise” (as I translated it in the narrative frame) in English. Though six student participants chose this conjunction to continue their narratives, two of these students nevertheless indicated changes in their practices after entering university. They also highlighted various significant changes, as can be seen in my translations of these two students’ comments here:
Concerning the use of ICT during high school I used ICT to contact friends, and exchange information with my club members. Likewise, at university I use ICT to confirm whether or not there is homework, for contact with my part-time job employer, and for contacting friends who live far away in real-time. (N17)
Concerning the use of ICT during high school (I used it) to contact friends and family. Likewise, at university (I’ve) come to use SNS more broadly, contacting friends who are not (living) nearby. I have thus become able to check in on their situation (what's new with them). (N14)
Throughout the narrative frame that was used (see Appendix Five for the English translation), there were also prompts which offered students opportunities to input information about the specific applications and sites they
associated with their CMC practices. For example, the first portion of the narrative frame contained the following narrative prompts which tended to encourage students to note and/or describe specific ICT tools and practices they associate with these tools (ellipses indicate longer lined spaces where students input text):
Basically, using ICT in Japanese for communication . . . ( likewise / however) using ICT in English for communication . . . Using ICT to contact friend(s), I mostly use . . . because. . .
In response to these prompts, and others throughout the narrative frame, students referred to different types of hardware, and also to specific software applications as communication tools. Most respondents referred to these separately, though one respondent (N3) seemed to conflate the two, writing: "(I use my) smartphone and SNS.”
Despite the narrative frame being written in Japanese, most respondents wrote the names of software applications using the English alphabet. The few that were not rendered this way were (temporarily) converted from Katakana (the Japanese phonetic script used for foreign loan words) to English. A word-count query in Nvivo indicated the frequency of references to different software applications, websites, and hardware. Rendered as a word-cloud, the most common references to applications such as Facebook, LINE, and Twitter are readily apparent (the most frequent terms appear in the largest fonts):
Figure 6.1. Word cloud of ICT tools mentioned in student narrative frame data.
Facebook, the globally dominant social network platform and the popular Asian messaging application, LINE, were both mentioned frequently by participants. Both discourage anonymity—Facebook as a matter of policy, and LINE as a design characteristic of being directly connected to users’ mobile device numbers and mobile email addresses.
Students who had studied abroad in an English-speaking country frequently referenced their use of Facebook, whereas students who had not studied abroad referenced the platform less often in their narrative frames. As would be expected, the popular Asia-based messaging application, LINE, tended to be mentioned by participants irrespective of whether they had studied abroad.
The prominence of Facebook in the data is indicative of the platform’s increased market share in Japan and worldwide. But a closer look at student narrative data reveals that the platform represents just one of a variety of channels for communicating with different people in different ways. My second finding further elucidates some of this variety in CMC practices at the research site.