Learning Japanese through Prewar Showa Short Documentaries: A Multimedia Didactic Module Experience

Our eyes have never been as busy as they have been in recent years. In fact, the multimedia society in which we live has gradually pushed us towards images and, in particular, motion images. We simply need to look at all the laptops on our desks, the mobile phones, the television networks and the videos that on a daily basis are being shared on the Internet through sites such as YouTube. As a matter of fact, after its appearance at the end of the 20th century, the Internet has played a central role as a text-filling and diffusion platform, turning into a huge multimedia and audiovisual archive. In particular, for the new generations, the Internet represents not only a new self-expression modality, but also a useful tool to retrieve information and obtain specific cultural knowledge. As far as language learning is concerned, it would be useful to highlight the way students nowadays access and decipher independently authentic audiovisual material (be it music videos, movies, news, dramas or animation cartoons) or how they can easily undertake self-study sessions. Thanks to its multinformative dynamism, audiovisual material serves as an irreplaceable visual dictionary which can provide not only first-rate linguistic notions regarding grammar, syntax, vocabulary and phonetics, but also extralinguistic inputs that comprehends gestural and facial expressiveness together with proxemics.