Election of New Board Members, President

Three new members of the Board and a new President of the Association will be elected this spring. Ballots and election information were mailed to each member of ATJ in January; you should have received this mailing by the end of January.

You are asked to return your ballot by March 10 to the ATJ office, using the postpaid envelope included with the ballot. (Please note that you MUST vote by mail; you will not be able to bring ballots to the ATJ General Membership meeting in March.)

The results of the election will be announced at the General Membership meeting on March 29, at which time the new Board members will assume their duties. As stipulated in the Bylaws, the newly elected President will serve for an initial year as President-elect, working with President Patricia Wetzel and Past President Laurel Rasplica Rodd as an Executive Committee to govern the Association.

Important note: The ATJ office staff made a procedural mistake on the envelopes in which the ballot will be returned. There is a line for your signature and the date on the back of the envelopes marked “BALLOT” in which the ballot should be placed and sealed. For reasons of privacy and security, this signature block should have appeared on the back of the postpaid envelope, not the BALLOT envelope. We apologize for the mistake. ATJ will accept ballots which have been signed EITHER on the inner secrecy envelope OR on the outer mailing envelope. In order to ensure the anonymity of your vote, we will deliver the ballots unopened to our accounting firm and ask them to open and tally the votes; in this way no one who is connected with ATJ will be able to connect the signature with the contents of the ballot.

ATJ Exhibit at AAS—Booth 3071

For the first time this year ATJ will have a booth in the Exhibit Hall at the AAS conference. The booth number is 3071. We will have membership information, copies of the journal Japanese Language and Literature, pamphlets and literature from Nihongo Kyoiku Gakkai, information on professional development projects and the Bridging Project for Study Abroad in Japan, and small gifts for visitors. Please stop by!

Report on National Standards Collaborative Project Executive Board Meeting

The executive board of the National Standards Collaborative Project met in Salt Lake City during the ACTFL Annual Meeting.

• The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) is a professional accrediting body of schools, colleges, and departments of education. The Foreign Language NCATE standards were accepted by the NCATE board in October 2002. The accreditation of teacher preparation programs based on the new standards will start in eighteen months. Recognizing that the NCATE standards play a key role in improving the quality of pre-service teacher training in foreign languages, the board decided to continue to be an NCATE member. The membership fee has been funded by the sales of the National Standards book. (Professors Ryuko Kubota of University of North Carolina and Yasuko Ito Watt of Indiana University are currently on the review team.)

• The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) is a consortium of state education agencies, national educational organizations, and other groups dedicated to the reform of teacher preparation and teacher licensing. The Foreign Language Standards Committee, funded by ACTFL and nominated by the National Standards Collaborative Project, recently finished a draft standards document, and it has been circulated for comments. (Lynn Sessler-Schmaling was a committee member.) This document represents the standards for entry-level foreign language teachers. It can be downloaded at www.ccsso.org/intaspub.html. Please send comments to Kathleen Paliokas, Council of Chief State School Officers, One Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 700, Washington DC 20001-1431.

• The Public Relations Task Force of the Joint National Committee on Languages is planning a media campaign to promoting language learning. The Collaborative executive board decided to provide $40,000 seed money for the campaign.

• The Collaborative Project has been working hard to encourage ETS and the College Board to make Praxis, AP, CLEP, and SAT II more standards-based. The College Board is interested in expanding its AP offerings to less-commonly-taught languages, including Japanese. They expect individual language organizations to fund the examination development, which costs approximately $250,000 to $300,000.

• The executive board decided to ask each individual language organization to edit and publish “5 C’s in Action,” a collection of learning scenarios to illustrate how to implement the National Standards in the classroom. Hiroko Kataoka and Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku have been editing the Japanese edition of “5 C’s in Action.” It will be published later this year by AATJ. If you would like to contribute your learning scenarios, please contact Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku at ytohsaku@ucsd.edu as soon as possible.

Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku
NCJLT/ATJ representative
to the National Standards
Collaborative Project Executive Board

ATJ SIG Websites

ATJ has established several Special Interest Groups (SIGs) through which members can discuss and explore specific topics in greater depth than is possible in the Newsletter. The Japanese as a Heritage Language (JHL) SIG and Professional Development SIG are active and maintain web pages within the ATJ website.

The JHL SIG site aims to provide a home base for collecting and disseminating research findings in the field and for promoting JHL education. The SIG also provides a forum for discussing JHL issues through its e-mail listserv, JHL-L. The ATJ Professional Development Special Interest Group SIG site aims to provide a forum for the discussion and information exchange of professional development in the field of Japanese language education. It also serves as the base for an e-mail listserv, JPD-L. Instructions for signing up for both listservs can be found on the websites.

Recent additions to the JHL SIG web site include paper and poster presentation abstracts from the 2nd National Conference on Heritage Languages in America, held October 18-20, 2002, in Tysons Corner, Virginia. The site contains papers from 2001 and 2002 ATJ seminar panel sessions on heritage issues as well as links to a Faculty Report on Heritage Japanese Programs from The Japan Foundation Los Angeles Language Center.

The Professional Development SIG web site describes the goals and objectives of the SIG and its recent activities. The “Standards for Teachers and Teacher Educators” section of the web site has detailed information about NBPTS (National Board for Professional Teaching Standards) certification. It includes a letter from Jaci Collins to encourage teachers to apply for the certification and testimonials from Patricia Thornton of University of Minnesota with a “Sidebar” that serves as an overview of the process.

Please use the links below to find out about the SIGs and to participate in discussions and access information.

• ATJ: www.colorado.edu/ealld/atj/

• SIGs: www.colorado.edu/ealld/atj/SIG/

• Japanese as a Heritage Language (JHL) SIG: www.colorado.edu/ealld/atj/SIG/heritage

• Professional Development SIG: www.colorado.edu/ealld/atj/SIG/prodev/

• Standards for Teachers and Teacher Educators: www.colorado.edu/ealld/atj/SIG/prodev/standards

ATJ Professional Development SIG Meeting

The ATJ Professional Development Special Interest Group (SIG) had its business meeting at Marriott Salt Lake City on November 24, 2002. The minutes of the meeting are available at www.colorado.edu/ealld/atj/SIG/prodev/business/actfl02minutes.html. The next meeting will be from 7-11 p.m. on Friday, March 28, 2003, at Murray Hill B, New York Hilton. This meeting will include paper presentations on professional development. A call for papers was sent through the new SIG mailing list and other lists. The agenda and presentation schedule will be posted at the SIG web site at www.colorado.edu/ealld/atj/SIG/prodev/index.html. If you are interested in joining the SIG, please send e-mail to ytohsaku@ucsd.edu.

Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku

Chair, Professional Development SIG

ATJ Journal Now Available Online

ATJ is pleased to announce that back issues of its journal, beginning with the first issue published in 1965, are now available on-line through the JSTOR digital archive. Through a special arrangement with JSTOR we are offering ATJ members access to the back issues online. Members will be able to browse and conduct full-text searches of all issues of the Journal, from its original inception as The Journal-Newsletter in 1965, excluding the three most recent years.

In 2001, the Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese was renamed Japanese Language and Literature. The volumes under the current title will become available online through JSTOR in 2005. For participation information, which will be by password-protected access, please contact ATJ member services.

If your institution’s library is a subscriber to JSTOR's Language & Literature group of journals, you will be able to access the JATJ archives immediately through your library’s on-line catalog, along with 46 other journals that are included in the collection.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization whose mission is to create a trusted archive of scholarly journals and to increase access to those journals as widely as possible. Information regarding JSTOR is available at www.jstor.org. The most recent journal collection, Language & Literature, of which JATJ is a part, is a compendium of 47 titles spanning the literary cultures of many nations, including Japan, China, Germany, Egypt, and the U.S. The Language & Literature Collection adds 1.4 million new pages to JSTOR’s electronic archive of important scholarly journals, bringing the total number of pages in the archive to over 11 million.

The Language & Literature Collection was developed in conjunction with the Modern Language Association (MLA), through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The MLA assembled a group of specialists to aid in the selection process. The resulting collection offers valuable insight into linguistics, comparative literature, and literary history, theory, analysis, and scholarship, and it is representative of the diversity of scholarship in these fields. Through this collection, scholars will be able to research topics such as Arab Cinematics in Alif, find essays reviewing the major scholarship in Romantic and Victorian literature in SEL, and learn about the literary traditions of Argentina in Hispania. In over 100 years of PMLA and over 70 years of New England Quarterly, scholars will be able to trace the history of literary studies and investigate the intersections between history and literature. Many of the journals in the collection are multidisciplinary in nature.

With the release of the Language & Literature Collection, JSTOR introduced a new enhanced language feature. Some articles in this collection contain content in non-Roman, non-ASCII alphabets, such as Japanese and Chinese. Users are now able to choose whether to view the citations for this content in the original alphabet or in a transliterated format.

The Language & Literature Collection expands upon 13 language and literature titles that are already available to JSTOR participants through the Arts & Sciences I Collection; 34 of the titles are completely new to the JSTOR archive. (A complete list of titles is available at www.jstor.org/about/langlit.list.html.) To date, over 250 libraries are participating in Language & Literature. JSTOR now contains the back runs of 275 journals and is available at nearly 1,500 libraries in 70 countries.

Journal Invites Submissions

Japanese Language and Literature, the ATJ’s newly renamed journal, seeks articles in the fields of literature, linguistics, and pedagogy. Literature articles are particularly needed. The journal is refereed, and back issues are now on-line through the JSTOR archive (see preceding article), which will bring the JLL to even greater prominence in the field. Please submit your work to the appropriate editor (see page 20 for a list of editors); encourage new faculty members and graduate students to submit their research.

ATJ Endowment Is Growing

ATJ has joined the ranks of other non-profit organizations in establishing an endowment fund. Contributions of any amount to this fund, which are tax-dedictible, will help to ensure that the Association can continue to provide services to members in the future. Contributions have recently been made to the Endowment by Pauline H. Oasay, Masako Hamada, Midori S. Burton, Shigemitsu Matsui, Marilyn Bolles, Yukie Aida, and Patricia Thornton. Please consider donating when you next renew your membership, or by mail at any time. For more information, contact the ATJ office.