著者

立木 徹 伏見 陽児

出版者

茨城キリスト教大学

雑誌

茨城キリスト教大学紀要. II, 社会・自然科学 (ISSN:13426370)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.38, pp.159-173, 2004-12-25

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Nankichi Niimi's literary masterpiece, Gongitsune< serves as standard educational materical for the teaching of language within many Japanese primary scholls. The protagonist is a little fox names "Gon" who lives on the outskirts of a village and who plays different kinds of pranks on the villagers. One day Gon releases fish from a net set by "Hyoju", a villager, and steals Hyoju's eels. After Hyoju's mother passes away, Gon realized Hyoju caught the eels for his ailing mother, subsequnetly regrets stealing the eels, and then returns under cover to Hyoju's house with chestnuts and mushurooms for Hyoju in order to atone for his misdeed. When Gon sneaks into Hyoju's house however, Hyoju, misunderstanding Gon7s intent, shoots Gon. Finding the chestnuts soon after, Hyoju realizes Gon's gifts were for him, and the narrative closes with Hyoju exclaiming, "Gon, was it you who always brought chestnuts for me?" Not a few readers think that Hyoju is able to understand Gon's intention of impensation for depriving Hyoju's mother of he eels. Read properly, it is clear that Hyoju does not understand Gon's intention and feelings, but the aforementioned misunderstanding nevertheless occurs. The purpose of this study was to reconfirm the erroneous interpretation by university students and attempt to correct the misinterpretation. To that end, readers needed to be made aware that there is no narrative evidence supporting Hyoju's understanding of Gon's feelings and intentions. Investigations conducted three experiments. A total of fifty university students were the subjects for 3 experiments: 16 students participated in Experiment I; 17 students participated in eachof Experiment II and Experiment III. A question booklet was distrubuted to every subjet after an examiner had read aloud the story while subjects simultaneously read the sotry silently to themselves. On page 1 of the question booklet, subjects were asked to answer 3 questions, without referring to the text, about whether or not Gon's feelings and intentions were understood by Hyoju, ranking their responses by six degrees of understanding: 1= very well understood not understood at all. The next page of the question booklet was different for each of the three experiments. In Experiment I, subjects were then assigned speccific passages of the story to read and answered 8 questions ('yes' or 'no') to confirm what was written in the story. In Enperiment 2, subjects were asked to search for evidence which showed the fact that Gon's feelings and intentions were understood by Hyoju. In Experiment 3, subjects answered 8 questions as in Experiment I, and searched for evidence as in Experiment 2. Next, subjects were permitted to refer the next, and they again answered the same questions as on page 1, regarding Hyoju's understanding of Gon's feelings and intentions. Finally, subjects were told that they had answered the same questions twice, and that if their responses had changed, subjects were asked to describe, in their own words, how and why their responses had changed. Results suggested, however, that althogh many students correctly answered the 8 plot confirmation questions on gape 2 of the qustion booklet, but could not find evidence which showed the fact that Gon7s feelings and intentions were understood by Hyoju, they still asnwered that Hyoju understood Gon's compensatory intention and his feelings. Even with evidence to the contrary, the subjects' erroneous in terpretation of Gongitsune did not improve and was not corrected. Investigators determined subjects' misreading of the text to be the result of readers both having a strong identigication with, and a sympathetic affinity for, the protagonist, Gon.