Tracking the Features of Japanese Interview through Audiovisual Materials: A Pragmatic Proposal

Dialogue is a communicative genre that is conditioned by culture. As already described in conversation analysis studies, the rules that underpin it imply not only linguistic abilities in the foreign language, but also an intercultural knowledge that can be cumulatively defined as sociopragmatic competence. Nowadays, a great deal of sociopragmatic contents necessary to foreign language learners are deduced from the observation of feature films and fiction. In this study, we want to emphasise the way this observation develops always on two parallel, though never disjointed, tracks, that is: specific language observation (grammatical, syntactic and lexical features) and the observation of sociocultural conventions as well as of extra- and paralinguistic ones. The overall analysis of such sociopragmatic attitudes turns out to be of fundamental importance for Italian learners, as it clearly reveals how the Japanese speech often acquires characteristics of "complementarity," a spoken word that is often evocative and not always complete from the grammatical/syntactic point of view. In particular, in the case of Japanese dialogue observed through audiovisual sources, learners have the chance to absorb an operational framework that leads them to interact through spiral structures based on new chronemic strategies which compel them to utilize well defined turn-takings and precise feedback strategies.