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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