ITADICT Project and Japanese Language Learning

Abstract

This article aims to show how the Nuclear disaster in Fukushima (3 March 2011) affected Japanese Language teaching and learning in Italy, focusing on the ITADICT Project (Marcella Mariotti, project leader, Clemente Beghi, research fellow and Alessandro Mantelli, programmer). The project intends to develop the first Japanese-Italian online database, involving more than 60 students of Japanese language interested in lexicographic research and online learning strategies and tools. A secondary undertaking of ITADICT is its Latin alphabet transliteration of Japanese words into Hepburn style. ITADICT is inspired by EDICT Japanese-English database developed by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group established in 2000 within the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. The Japanese-Italian database is evolving within the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the largest in the country and one of the main teaching centres of Japanese in Europe in terms of the number of students dedicated to it (1800) and number of Japanese language teaching hours (1002h at B.A. level, and 387h at M.A. level). In this paper we will describe how and why the project has been carried out and what the expectations are for its future development.

The trends and developments of L2 Japanese research in the 2010s

“…As the author noted, learner dictionaries are ‘conspicuously absent’ (p. 63), compared to the abundance of such resources available for learners of English. Compilation of Japanese learner dictionaries in other languages, including Italian (Mariotti & Mantelli, 2012) and Slovene (Sangawa & Erjavec, 2012), was also reported, indicating the shortage of such resources for learners of Japanese across the world.…”

JALEA: an authentic and personal path to JApaneseLEArning

“…JALEA is the natural evolution of an earlier project BunpoHyDict (Mariotti 2008(Mariotti , 2011, which basically addressed the problems mentioned above but is tackling 3 critical issues:…”

10 | 1 | 2021 Educazione Linguistica e tecnologie

“…Web 2.0 refers to websites and applications where multiple users can collaborate to insert and update new contents, "delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources" (O'Reilly 2007, 17). Several studies point out the advantages of using Web 2.0 applications for language learning because they support a constructivist processes of knowledge building and individual creativity (Ullrich 2008) support students' collaborative processes and monitor collaborators' work (Mariotti, Mantelli 2012), and allow a better embodiment with the digital interface by improving data retrieval and display time through AJAX 20 (Mantelli 2020). However, Web Applications may be slow if they are built using a traditional approach to data retrieval and display -an approach where each response with new data from the server requires the page to fully reload.…”