総合的コミュニケーション能力を目指した日本語音声教育 —イタリアにおける日本語演劇活動の実践から— (Sōgōteki communication nōryoku o mezashita nihongo onsei kyōiku - itaria ni okeru nihongo engeki katudō no jissenkara -)

Theater is a communication medium consisting of two dimensions: 1) actors or actresses communicate on the stage; 2）actors or actresses on the stage communicate with a live audience by creating a drama through dialogues. Since the dawn of the communicative approach, which sets communicative competence acquisition as a learnersʼ goal, gained popularity in the late 1970s（Gilebert 2014）, drama-based activities such as skits or role-plays have been used in a language-teaching setup, based on the idea that they can encourage collaborative learning, lower learnersʼ emotional barriers（Stern 1983）, and, most importantly, provide natural contexts for communication（Hashimoto 2009). In the field of teaching Japanese as a foreign language, in 2007 the International Association of Performing Language was founded, and it has contributed to spreading the drama-based approach. As for pronunciation, Hashimoto（2009）proposed a dramatic approach to teaching pronunciation, arguing its effectiveness in teaching paralinguistic characteristics of speech fundamental for natural communication. Since 2004, I have been coordinating a Japanese language theater group, the “Gruppo di Teatro Giapponese SsenzaLiMITi”. Every year we produce a full-fledged theater piece, taking part in the multilingual theater week of the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, which started in 1992 as a student-run extracurricular activity. We have so far staged and performed twelve dramas. The majority of our performers are Italian learners of Japanese whose competence level ranges from beginning to intermediate. To reach their goal, i.e., to transform themselves into Japanese characters on the stage, they need to learn not only Japanese pronunciation, but also speech, gestures and expressions that are natural and appropriate for a certain context. In the present paper, I will describe the activities of our group, reporting contents and results of the training program employed for our performers.