ATJ Seminar in San Diego
The 2004 ATJ Seminar took place March 4 in San Diego, in conjunction with the annual Association for Asian Studies (AAS) meeting. More than 200 members attended the day-long program of concurrent sessions focusing on literature, pedagogy, linguistics, and second language acquisition.
Enclosed with this issue of the Newsletter are two publications from the Seminar. Occasional Paper #6 contains summaries of all the Seminar presentations, and a separate booklet contains the complete transcript of the Round Table discussion on translation of modern Japanese literature.
Study Abroad for Advanced Skills SIG
Sixteen people attended the SAFAS SIG meeting in San Diego. This SIG is interested in students who go on study abroad with the express desire to advance their ability to interact with Japanese people and the environment in which they find themselves, both at their home and host institutions.
Many study-abroad programs are aimed at introducing people to Japan and raising their interest levels in the Japanese language. We want to look at study abroad programs designed to take someone who has some basic facility with the language to a level that allows better integration in the Japanese society through the use of Japanese.
ATJ has presented a proposal to DOE for a project that examines the long-/short-term impact of study abroad experiences. The project, headed by Dan Dewey of the University of Pittsburg, aims to address the following questions: When is the best time to go abroad (in terms of language levels)? What personal qualities best suit a student for the study abroad experience? What activities should a student engage in during study abroad to promote greater gains in language and to facilitate cultural adaptation? What are the optimal living arrangements during study abroad (e.g., home stay, dormitories, apartments, etc.), and can this vary depending on students’ goal, attitudes, motivation, etc? What are the benefits of staying for various lengths or time (e.g., one year vs. one semester or summer?) What factors might influence smooth articulation back into a language program at home upon return? What factors might influence continued use of the language following return? How are the development of literacy and of oral fluency and/or proficiency related during time abroad?
The discussion touched on the following questions: Who are we sending? (At what level?) For how long? (1 semester? 1 year?) What do they come back to? What do they gain? How do programs deal with returnees? What kind of stories do returnees have?
Some salient points:
On preparation: 1) We need to give students "road maps" for SA. 2) We might look into U of Minnesota (Andrew Cohen)’s pre-departure training volume. 3) Having teachers from Japanese schools be aware of the way students in the US are taught is useful.
During SA: 1) Students have difficulty connecting the SA experience with what they study before going on SA. 2) A monitoring program during SA is useful in raising the students’ consciousness. 3) Students’ journal entries are useful as feedback for instructors during SA program. 4) Students experience difficulty stemming from the different mind-sets in Japanese language programs at the host institutions and at home.
On assessing impact, returnee issues are: 1) Long-term impact of SA may emerge some time after the exit point. 2) Long-term impact of SA may go beyond the short-term language gain. 3) It is difficult to quantify what students have learned in Japan. 4) There is a general expectation that students improve their fluency, but a question remains as to their proficiency. 5) Some students return from their SA experience disillusioned. 6) Individualized and/or modularized approach may work better than a regular classroom format for the returnees.
Different models of SA: 1) Transplanting the US program in Japan. 2) Appending a study abroad portion to a course. 3) Internship. 4) Combination of culture experience plus internship. 5) Institutional culture determines/colors student experiences.
SAFAS Symposium (March 19, 2004): Eight people attended the symposium. Using the presentations by seven of the attendees as the anchor points, the participants discussed issues such as research format, assessment of gain, and data collection. The individual papers and the symposium’s position paper will be published through the Ohio State University’s National East Asian Language Resource Center.
Some salient points: 1) Research findings from SA in other languages might not apply directly to SA in Japan. 3) Research on SA involves a wide range of variables, ranging from the students’ cognitive abilities to preparation at the home institution and from the social conditions of the host community that shape the individual experiences to curriculum at host institutions. We should look more closely into cognitive abilities, especially those related to perception and attention. 3) Both large-scale statistical processing of data as well as case studies that examine individual experiences are necessary. On the one hand, large-scale studies may give us better predictive power. Individual case studies, on the other hand, provide us with more holistic picture of the individual SA participants. 4) Training SA participants as ethnographers may result in positive experience and gain. 5) Bringing the outside world into the Japanese classrooms for SA students may lead to better language/culture gain than leaving it up to students to make contacts on their own. 6) A multi-dimensional approach is needed to cataloging culture gain during SA. 7) Certain grammar items and performances may be used as indicators of culture/language gain. 8) Inter-disciplinary tools, involving, for example, psychology, sociology, anthropology, theater, and sports, can help learning.
Heritage SIG Report
The Report of the first Network Conference for Saturday Japanese Schools, which was held October 24-25, 2003, has been compiled and is available from the ATJ office. Copies are available upon payment of $10 to cover printing and postage. The proceedings of the Conference include the full texts (in Japanese) of presentations by teachers and administrators from Saturday schools across the United States.
The Heritage SIG hosts an active listserv and plans to publish a refereed on-line journal of research and best practices in heritage Japanese language education. For more information, please contact Masako Douglas: masakoucla@earthlink.net.
Classical Japanese SIG Meeting in San Diego
Professor Steven Carter of Stanford University was the featured speaker at this year’s meeting of the Bungo Special Interest Group held at the AAS conference in San Diego in March. A superb translator and scholar of pre-modern Japanese "waka" and "renga," Professor Carter’s talk entitled "My Apologies: Ruminations on Teaching Pre-Modern Japanese" was eloquent, personal, and amusing. Following Professor Carter’s talk, a general discussion focused on ways to make classroom materials available to more university teachers, both those who already teach "bungo" and those who would like to incorporate "bungo" into their undergraduate program. There was also a discussion of Haruo Shirane’s new "bungo" textbook, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. This year’s talk by Professor Carter will be made available to ATJ members in an upcoming newsletter.
The Bungo SIG will be meeting at the Chicago AAS in 2005! Please join us. If you’re interested in being on the SIG’s email list, contact Stephen Miller at smillerjapan@aol.com or Stephen_Miller@Brown.Edu.
Professional Development SIG Business Meeting at AAS 2004
The ATJ Professional Development SIG business meeting took place on Friday, March 5, in Garden Salon Room 2 in Town and Country Resort in San Diego, California from 7-9 p.m. Nine SIG members were present.
1. NBPTS: National Board certification for Japanese did not generate a large enough number of applicants for the program to proceed. Currently the Japanese certification is unavailable until further notice.
2. SIG Panel at ATJ: At the March 4 ATJ seminar, the PD SIG presented a panel on professional development in the area of technology training. In the future, the SIG would like to ask for a guaranteed slot at ATJ Seminar, which could be a panel or four individual presentations, and conduct its own selection.
3. Mini-conference on Japanese TA Training: The Mini-Conference at IR/PS at the University of California, San Diego, was productive; a report on the presentations and a summary of the discussion appears below.
4. Summer Institute: AATJ and the Japan Foundation will cosponsor another summer institute for K-12 teachers this summer.
5. Next SIG Business Meeting: SIG hopes to have presentations along with a business meeting at the ACTFL conference in November in Chicago.
If you are interested in becoming a member of the Professional Development SIG, please include the following information in an email message: Name, affiliation, email address. Indicate membership: ATJ and/or NCJLT. Send to Y.-H. Tohsaku, Chair of Professional Development SIG: ytohsaku@ucsd.edu.
Report on Mini-Conference on Japanese TA Training
ATJ’s Professional Development SIG organized a Mini-Conference on Japanese TA Training on Friday, March 5, at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego. Many college-level teachers started teaching Japanese as teaching assistants while working on their degrees, and it is important to recognize the importance of this area of professional training. The morning session was a panel that included TA trainers, those who hire TA’s as faculty members, and those who underwent TA training. Professor Yasuko Ito Watt, Indiana University, and Professor Yukiko Hatasa, Iowa University, discussed the ways their institutions supervise and train teaching assistants. Professor Hiroko Kataoka of California State University, Long Beach, examined job ads posted on the ATJ website this year and analyzed the job market for Japanese teachers. Finally, Professor Eiko Ushida, University of California, San Diego, shared her personal experience while she was a TA at Carnegie Mellon University and discussed the ways in which the training has affected her teaching today.
During the panel discussion, several issues were raised concerning the training and supervision of teaching assistants. After lunch, the panelists and participants discussed these issues. The group agreed that is it important to continue the discussion on the training of Japanese teaching assistants in future SIG meetings. This topic is of great interest to institutions in Japan as well. A full report on this conference will be published by the SIG in the near future.
Report from the Association of Japanese Language Teachers in Europe (AJE)
Hello from Europe! It was a great honour and a privilege to attend the ATJ Seminar and General Membership Meeting in San Diego as the president of the Association of Japanese Language Teachers in Europe (AJE), representing Europe for the first time in an ATJ meeting. My sincere gratitude goes to Professors Seiichi Makino and Patricia Wetzel for the invitation.
The Association of Japanese Language Teachers in Europe (AJE) was established in 1995 and has 180 members from 22 different countries. Its main activities are the European Symposium on Japanese Language Education held annually in summer and the publication of its proceedings. Our 9th Symposium will be held in Lyon, France, on 26-28 August this year. In recent years we have had about 200 participants from Europe, Japan, and the USA. We have an active members’ mailing list, and the AJE Newsletter is published three times a year.
Many countries in Europe have their own associations of Japanese teachers and are very active. For example, the British Association for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language (BATJ) has about 100 members, including those from the Republic of Ireland and Japan. Its main activities are an annual conference, which will be held on 3-4 September 2004 at Oxford, and the publication of a refereed journal, BATJ Journal.
AJE plays a key role in disseminating information through Europe, and in establishing networks. We are now working on a project commissioned by the Japan Foundation called "A Survey of Japanese Language Education in Europe, with regard to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages." It is expected to be published in spring 2005.
Currently, Europe is on the move, especially regarding modern language education. There is the Bologna Process, which is the process of creating a "European higher education area" by 2010. The aim is to continue developing a system of easily "readable" and comparable degrees, based on undergraduate and postgraduate degree system, which until now varied from country to country. At the same time, more flexibility would be ensured by a course credit system (such as the European Credit Transfer System) providing for both transferability and accumulation. The other new direction is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF). This document, by the Council of Europe, provides a practical tool for setting clear standards to be attained at successive stages of learning and for evaluating outcomes in an internationally comparable manner, thus facilitating educational and occupational mobility. Using the CEF scale, the European Language Portfolio (ELP) aims to document its holder’s plurilingual language proficiency and experiences. For more information, please see the AJE website: www.e-aje.org.
I sincerely hope that this is just the beginning of a new relationship between the USA and Europe. We look forward to meeting you at Lyon and/or Oxford.
Kazumi Tanaka, AJE President
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-deductible, 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 Oasay, Ryuko Kubota, Mitsuko Miwa, Yoko Okuizumi, Cheryl Rudd, and Kyoko Suzuki. Please consider donating when you next renew your membership, or by mail at any time. For more information, contact the ATJ office.
News of the Alliance
The Alliance of Associations of Teachers of Japanese, the umbrella organization serving and representing both ATJ and our sister organization, the National Council of Japanese Language Teachers (NCJLT), has undertaken several new projects that support the advancement of the field and the professional development of our organizations’ members.
AP Japanese. As previous issues of the Newsletter have described, the College Board has announced its intention to develop an Advanced Placement program for Japanese. The Alliance is working to raise the funds needed for development and is also conveying to the College Board the views of our field on how the Japanese AP program should be constructed and administered. This issue contains an announcement and appeal from the College Board for the cooperation of ATJ members in this process.
Summer Institute for K-12 Teachers. The Alliance has been awarded a grant from the US Department of Education to conduct a one-month Language, Culture, and Technology Institute in Japan for fifteen non-native-speaking K-12 teachers of Japanese. The Institute will take place mainly at the Japan Foundation’s Urawa Japanese-Language Institute, where participants will receive intensive language instruction and training in pedagogy and classroom materials development.
Small Grants Program. The Alliance continues to accept applications for small professional development grants to individual teachers, although funds are limited. Application forms may be downloaded from the ATJ website.