英語詩を和訳することは解釈を促すのか : 英語教育における文学の在り方を探って

The three main learning objectives specified in The Course of Study for Senior High Schools (revised in 2018) are students’ acquisition of (1) knowledge and skills, (2) ability to think, make decisions and express themselves, and (3) power toward learning and humanity. The Practical Guide of the Course of Study for Senior Schools for Foreign Languages claims that“ language activities that can generate interest among students” are vital for students to acquire (3) power toward learning and humanity.
Ono, Hirakawa & Kakimoto (2016) found that interpretation of literature can enhance students’ interest. The limitation of this study lies in the fact that the interpretation was conducted by a literature professor. To use a professional interpretation in senior high schools would be impractical.
To make interpretation more accessible, this paper hypothesizes that translating English into Japanese, which is not unusual in high school English classes, would help students interpret a literary text. The use of L1 (the first language) is being reevaluated in the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom, mainly by advocates of TILT (Translation in Language Teaching). The relationship between the use of L1 and interpretation has not been examined in TILT yet. Traditionally in Japan, L1 (Japanese) has been used in English classes, especially in grammar-translation classes. The purpose, however, is for students to understand the literal meaning of English, not to interpret a certain English text.
The research question of this study is: Does translating an English poem into Japanese stimulate learners’ interpretation? To answer this question, an experiment of thirty-five minutes was conducted in a class taught by one of the authors (Akira Ono). This class was chosen because the attendants were first-year university students, close in age to the target learners (high school students) of this study. The literary text used in the experiment was “Falling in Love with Love,” a musical lyric by Lorenz Hart. This lyric is included in American Best Poems, an anthology of one hundred poems published by Iwanami Shoten. The reasons for choosing this text are its linguistic simplicity, topic familiarity, and length (just 71 words). In the experiment the twenty-two subjects were asked to: (1) underline the parts of the English lyric that caught their attention while reading and write down the reasons for underlining them; (2) write down the Japanese translation of the same lyric; and (3) underline the parts that caught their attention while translating and write down the reasons for underlining them as they did in (1). Then, they were asked to: (4) write freely about how they felt about translating the lyric.
The data collected in (4) were analyzed and categorized into five groups. Group one (five subjects) wrote that translating the lyric entailed interpretation. Group two (eleven subjects) wrote that translating the lyric made the lyric more difficult. Group three (four subjects) wrote that translating the lyric led to better understanding of the lyric. Our conclusion is that the subjects categorized into these three groups, though different in what they actually wrote, found translating the English lyric into Japanese stimulated their interpretation. This conclusion was also supported by the data collected in (2), namely, the actual translations the subjects produced.