An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute:
A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/
HTML Version(1997)
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II.4.1 School Children and Newspapers:
Their Approach to the Newspapers
and Their Comprehension
(Report 6, 1954. 156 pages)
This is a report on a survey made in order to find how
school children approach newspapers and how well they
comprehend them.
It is after the fourth or fifth grade that children become
interested in newspapers. Therefore, we examined children
from the fourth grade of primary school to the third grade of
junior high school in the following points:
1) Through what stages do children pass before they approach
papers?
2) What parts of papers do they read most?
3) What articles are they interested in?
4) To what degree do they understand the contents?
5) How much are they influenced by papers?
6) How much do they read papers for school children and
school bulletins?
7) How much do they come in contact with other mass
media, such as radio, movies, magazines and books, and
how much are they influenced by them?
This survey was made by the Institute, together with the
Japan Newspaper Association, from the end of 1952 to the
beginning of 1953. Through questionnaires we examined about 1,200
children and pupils in a primary school and a junior high school
in Tokyo and in two primary schools and two junior high schools in
Tiba Prefecture. The findings are as follows:
1) Children in all the districts begin with comics
and become interested in sports, advertisements,
columns for children, general news, and radio logs in that
order.
2) The higher the cultural level of the district and
home, the higher the degree of children's contact with
papers.
3) The more children are interested in papers, the more
they understand the contents.
4) There is no doubt that children come to understand the
contents more and more as they grow. Those who get the highest
grades in language, who know the most kanzi, who have the
largest vocabularies, and who read fastest, understand papers
the best.
5) The degree of children's contact with papers is
greatly related to their attitudes toward society and their
growth as human beings.
The persons concerned with the study were: IWABUTI
Etutaro~, KOSIMIZU Minoru, TAKAHASI Kazuo, ASIZAWA Setu and
MORIOKA Kenzi of the Institute; MIYAKE To~syu~, TAKASU
Masao, TANAKA Yu~zi, KAMEI Kazutuna, MIYATI Singo and
AKIYOSI Kenzi of the Japan Newspaper Association.
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