Call for papers: "Language and Gender" Award

The "Kotoba to Jendaa" Shoo ("Language and Gender" Award), in honor of the late Professor Jugaku Akiko, will be given to the paper that best deals with the current issues concerning language and gender from a new and innovative perspective. The award provides ¥100,000 and publication in the journal Kotoba (if the paper has not been published elsewhere). The deadline for submission of papers (in Japanese only) is March 31, 2008. Details on applying can be found at www.geocities.jp/enchan06/. More information: Prof. Endo Orie (BXI05557@nifty.com).

The 15th Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum will take place on the campus of Princeton University May 3–4, 2008. The PJPF will feature sessions with a focus on various issues related to Japanese language education. The special focus will be on "Corpus Linguistics: Its Applications to Japanese Pedagogy." Submissions are invited on any aspect of Corpus Linguistics itself or its applications to pre-college and college-level Japanese language education, as well as on topics related to Japanese language education in general, including second language acquisition, linguistics, and heritage learning, among others. The keynote speaker will be Professor Atsushi Fukada of Purdue University. His topic is to be announced. Individual papers are 20 minutes long with an additional 10 minutes for discussion. An abstract for an individual paper should be no more than 300 words in English or 700 characters in Japanese. Please do not write your name on the abstract, and submit a separate page on which you have typed your name in romaji alone or in both romaji and kanji (if you are Japanese), the title of your paper, your affiliation, and your email address. Submissions should be sent by email attachment to Professor Seiichi Makino (smakino@princeton.edu). Submission deadline: March 15, 2008. The announcement of accepted papers will be made around March 30. The accepted papers will be printed in a Proceedings. Registration fee: $40.00, which will include two breakfasts, one lunch, and printed materials.

The results of surveys conducted in fall 2006 by two organizations, released within the past month, show that interest in Japanese language continues to be very strong at the post-secondary level in the United States. The Modern Language Association's rigorous survey, released November 13, shows that enrollments in Japanese language courses in U.S. colleges and universities rose by 27.5% over the previous survey (conducted in 2002); the total number of students reported enrolled in fall 2006 was 66,605. Japanese was the sixth most commonly taught language at the post-secondary level. The survey further noted that Japanese has one of the more favorable ratios of students who continue beyond the second year of language study. Both a summary and the full report of the MLA 2006 survey can be found online at www.mla.org.

The Japan Foundation's triennial survey of Japanese language study worldwide paints a slightly more mixed picture for the United States. It shows that college-level enrollments rose by 7% over the previous survey (conducted in 2003). The number of teachers at the post-secondary level also increased, by 7%. At the same time, the number of post-secondary institutions reporting to the Japan Foundation that they have Japanese language courses declined slightly (by 3%) from the previous survey. At the K-12 level, the Japan Foundation survey shows a decrease in the number of students, of teachers, and of institutions teaching Japanese since 2002. When the data from post-secondary, K-12, and other schools (e.g., heritage or community-based language schools) are combined, overall enrollments in Japanese in the U.S. declined at 15% from 2002 to 2006. Worldwide, however, Japanese language study has increased dramatically. A summary of the Japan Foundation's Japanese language education survey can be found online at www.jpf.go.jp/e/japan/news/0711/11_01.html (English) and www.jpf.go.jp/j/japan_j/news/0711/11-01.html (Japanese). PDF files of the full data set can be downloaded from both of those websites.

The 20th Annual Conference of the Central Association of Teachers of Japanese (CATJ 20) will take place at the Universit of Wisconsin-Madison on May 31-June 1, 2008. the Central theme of this conference is "Toward Advanced Japanese Language Proficiency." http://imp.lss.wisc.edu/catj2008.