Call for Proposals/Panels for ATJ Seminar 2004

The 2004 ATJ Seminar will take place at The San Diego Town & Country Resort, in San Diego, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, on Thursday, March 4, 2004. The Seminar will feature a full day of concurrent sessions with presentations by ATJ members on linguistics, literature, second-language acquisition, and pedagogy.

The Association calls for papers/ panels in the areas of Japanese Linguistics, Japanese Literature, Second Language Acquisition in Japanese, and Japanese Language Pedagogy. ATJ also welcomes session proposals from the Association’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Individual papers are 20 minutes long with an additional 5 minutes for discussion. Organized panels are 100 minutes long in total and should be limited to four active participants (four paper presenters, or three presenters and one discussant). An abstract for an individual paper should be no more than 300 words in English (or 700 characters in Japanese). For organized panels, a maximum 300-word (or 700 characters in Japanese) abstract is required from each participant, in addition to a maximum 300-word (or 700 characters in Japanese) abstract for the panel itself.

Submission of abstracts is accepted either on-line (at www.japaneseteaching.org/ATJseminar/2004/) or by mail. If submitting by mail, please send five copies of abstracts (including title and language of presentation, but not showing the name of authors) and a single 3"x5" card indicating: (1) subject area; (2) the title of the paper (along with the English title, if in Japanese); (3) author’s name; (4) author’s address; (5) phone and fax number; (6) email address; and (7) any equipment needs to the Seminar Committee Chair: Prof. Yuki Johnson, Dept. of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto, 130 St. George St. #14-087, Toronto, ON M5S-3H1, Canada by October 31, 2003.

Please note the following in submitting your abstract:

1) All presenters must be ATJ members. If you are not a member, please submit a membership form along with your abstract. Membership forms can be downloaded from the ATJ web site.

2) We reserve the right to limit each submitter to one paper in any authorship status.

3) Any information that may reveal your identity should not be included in the abstract.

4) Due to the high cost of renting AV equipment, there will be a charge for presenters who wish to give computer-based presentations using an LCD projector.

Selection of papers/panels will be made by the planning committee. Evaluation criteria will include (1) innovative ideas/theories, (2) strength of arguments, and (3) in the case of a panel, unity of the papers vis-à-vis the topic of the panel.

Information on hotel accommodations can be found at the web site of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), www.aasianst.org, whose conference is held at the same venue beginning March 4, 2004.

The full schedule for the 2004 ATJ Seminar, including times and room assignments, will be announced in January.

Call for Nominations

Each spring the ATJ membership elects three new Board members, who serve three-year terms, and a President-elect, who serves a three-year term on the Executive Committee of the Association. The Nominating Committee of the current Board is calling for nominations for these positions for the term of office beginning in Spring 2004. Information about the duties of Board members and the Executive Committee can be found in the Association's Bylaws, which are online at www.colorado.edu/ealld/atj/ATJ/bylaws.html. Please send nominations or suggestions either to the ATJ office (atj@colorado.edu) or to Sachiko Matsunaga, Chair of the Nominating Committee (smatsun@calstatela.edu). A slate of candidates will be selected by the beginning of December, and the election will be held in January and February 2004.

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 Kimiko Abramoff, Yukie Aida, Masako Hamada, Robert O. Kahn, Mitsuko Miwa, and Yoko Okuizumi. Please consider donating when you next renew your membership, or by mail at any time.

Professional Development SIG Meeting

ATJ’s Professional Development SIG is planning to have a meeting of those who are interested in professional development/teacher training during the ACTFL Annual Meeting for breakfast or at night in Philadelphia, PA, November 21-23, 2003. If you are interested in attending this meeting or joining the SIG, please send email to Y.-H. Tohsaku at ytohsaku@ucsd.edu. Details will be sent via email later as well as posted on the SIG webpage: www.colorado.edu/ealc/atj/SIG/prodev.

Framework for Post-Basic Japanese Language Curricula

Enclosed with this issue of the Newsletter is a copy of a draft version of a framework for developing curricula for advanced (or post-basic) Japanese language learners.

This document is the product of a group effort, spanning several years, by a group of ATJ members. Initial funding for the task force that developed this Framework was provided by the Ford Foundation through the National Council of Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL). Members of the task force included Atsushi Fukada, Kimberly Jones, Hiroko Kataoka, Seiichi Makino, David O. Mills, Hiroshi Miyaji, Nobuo Ogawa, Robert Ramsey, Laurel Rasplica Rodd, Robert Russell, and Ann Sherif.

Comments on this draft are welcome. A revised version will be posted at the ATJ web site and updated periodically. Please send comments to the ATJ office by mail, fax, or email: Association of Teachers of Japanese, 279 UCB, Humanities 240, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0279. Tel.: 303/492-5487, Fax: 303/492-5856. atj@colorado.edu.

News of the Alliance

Advanced Placement for Japanese

High school teachers of Japanese have for a long time hoped that the Advanced Placement (AP) program might be expanded to include Japanese language. Recently, the College Board, which administers the AP program, has expressed interest in developing a program for Japanese as well as three other "less commonly taught" languages.

The AP program is a combination of courses and examinations for students and professional development for teachers. Students who participate and are successful in the examinations are able to show that they are capable of doing college-level work in a subject; this demonstration confers benefits that vary depending on the college to which they are seeking admission, but can include advanced placement and credit at some institutions. Affiliation with AP has given a boost to many academic subjects at the high school level; the availability of an AP course of study and an examination often increases enrollments and (in the case of languages) makes it possible to offer more advanced levels of instruction.

There is no prescribed curriculum or required text for AP courses in a subject. A program course description is issued for each subject (and revised every other year) outlining the skills that will be tested in the AP examination. The exam is given once a year at participating schools; two or three exam forms are created every year for each subject included in the program. Participation in the program at the school level is open to any school that can provide test facilities and proctors and whose teachers are willing to participate in the professional development that leads to being able instruct AP-level courses. No fee is charged to the school for participating. The tests themselves are fee-based—about $70-75 per test—and those fees support the entire AP program. Both the course descriptions and the examinations are developed by task forces (appointed by the College Board in consultation with authorities in the field) and continually reviewed by similar committees.

The AP exams consist of a multiple-choice section and a free-response section. The latter are graded by human readers who meet at special summer sessions to review the submitted exams. Sixty percent of the test readers are from college teaching backgrounds; forty percent are from the high school level. Professional development for teachers is an important part of the AP program: teachers receive training in exam reading and also in developing courses and curricula.

The College Board is committed to expanding its program into several areas of international education, including languages, under a proposed World Languages and Cultures Initiative. The first wave in this initiative would include Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Italian; later waves would include other languages and several culture areas like Asian history. But the process of establishing a new subject requires time—three to five years before the tests can be actually offered in high schools—and a significant investment of money in curriculum and test development—one that the College Board cannot make on its own. The funds needed over the three-year development period for curriculum and test development and teacher training total a minimum of about $800,000.

The College Board is willing to help identify sources of funds (for example, State Department funding may be available for development work on all four of the first-wave languages in the program—though not for individual languages) and to co-apply for funding. However, each language field must be responsible for raising a significant portion of these funds. The Alliance will be working over the next few months to find funding as well as logistic support for an AP program in Japanese. More announcements will appear as the process goes forward.

Susan Schmidt,
Executive Director, Alliance