Teaching Japanese Pragmatics: ne, yo, and yone in Italian University Classrooms

This dissertation addresses a persistent challenge in Japanese as a Foreign Language: the acquisition and teaching of interactional particles ne, yo, and yone, which are crucial for pragmatic nuance in everyday talk. Despite their centrality in interaction, textbooks often reduce them to simplified, prescriptive meanings, leaving learners with incomplete understandings. The study adopts the Place of Negotiation framework (Maynard, 2002) to conceptualize these particles across three interrelated “places” of meaning-making: cognitive (information management and epistemic positioning), emotive (affective stance and empathy), and interactional (participation management and sequential organization). Building on this tripartite model, the dissertation designs and implements a corpus-informed, noticing-oriented instructional intervention using pedagogically mediated video extracts and transcripts from the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation (CEJC), combined with a translanguaging-informed classroom pedagogy. Conducted as a single-session intervention with two MA-level Japanese language classes at the University of Naples L’Orientale, the research examines (1) how learners’ perceptions of ne/yo/yone shift before and after the lesson, and (2) how learners position themselves ideologically between native-speakerist views of competence and a translanguaging-informed perspective. Data include pre- and post-lesson questionnaires, classroom recordings, and semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate meaningful development in learners’ metapragmatic awareness, with learners moving toward more context-sensitive interpretations of the particles along the cognitive, emotive, and interactional dimensions, while also revealing tensions around managing translanguaging so that it supports reflection without displacing the target language. The study contributes methodological and pedagogical insights for teaching pragmatics through authentic spoken data while foregrounding learner perspectives and language ideologies.