Incorporating Literature into the Japanese Language Curriculum
by Joan E. Ericson, The Colorado College
I must note that Colorado College's "block plan" presents a special challenge: students take (and faculty teach) one three-and-a-half-week long course at a time, with eight blocks constituting the academic year. Classes are intensive and scheduling flexible. I typically meet with language students every day from 9 to 11 a.m., and then again from 1 to 2:30 p.m., although adjustments in the schedule and special events are frequent. In each block, we cover one semester's work.
As a form of review and incentive to students at the end of their "first year" (two blocks) of Japanese, I have used a list of sentences from a variety of literary texts to show them that they can read beyond the textbook. One problem that I have encountered with this exercise is that there are actually few literary texts which can be used after seven weeks of intensive instruction since, at the very least, my students are not yet comfortable with complex sentences employing long modifiers. I cull literary texts to find sentences or sections which are accessible to the students' level of grammar. Examples of sentences which I use from Natsume Soseki's Sanshiro include the following: "Sanshiro wa ichinensei dakara shoko e hairu kenri ga nai."; "Futari wa isshoni toshokan o deta. Sono toki Yojiro ga hanashita."; or "Hamuretto wa kekkon shitakunakattan daro." I give the students the text in Japanese, providing kana pronunciation of the kanji. After the first few weeks of class, I also bring in examples of Japanese children's literature and have students practice reading and isolating vocabulary words to look up. The grammar of these often conversational texts is usually more advanced than what we have covered up to that point, but students gain confidence in being able to read and identify sentence patterns.
I employ three models for incorporating Japanese literature at higher levels in our liberal arts environment: Advanced Japanese (beyond our basic "two year" sequence), Independent Studies, and Language Across the Curriculum, where the option to read some material in Japanese is offered in courses otherwise entirely taught in English.
In my Advanced Japanese course (one block of a third-year-level course, offered as an "extended format" meeting three times a month over the whole year), we read a variety of materials, including short stories from Yoshimoto Banana's Tokage. Students find the grammar accessible and learn how to use specialized dictionaries to look up onomatopoeic expressions. Reader interest is sustained through the unexpected. Challenges include identifying literature at the appropriate level of difficulty and deciding how much to assist students with vocabulary lists and grammatical help, both in the daily assignments and with the final project. One anthropology major, who was very interested in postmodern literary theory, chose to read and translate the article "Hihyo to posuto modan" by Kono Kensuke on the critic Karatani Kojin. The text proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated, and points of grammar as elusive as the analytical assertions.
Independent Studies for reading in Japanese are an ever-increasing need at my institution, especially given the rising proportion of students now entering with secondary school background in the language or those returning from an array of programs in Japan. However, like most instructors at small liberal arts colleges, the lack of sufficient consistent demand for a fourth-year Japanese language course means that I take on students under an Independent Studies rubric, spending several hours a week reading texts together. Unfortunately, my college, like most, does not recognize this time commitment as part of the regular teaching load. So I shoulder this overload as an opportunity to catch up on my own reading, as well as to learn how to teach new texts, especially those texts that students should be familiar with as part of a basic cultural literacy. I have used a variety of short stories by women authors, such as Tamura Toshiko's "Ikichi" (1911) to introduce advanced students to the difficulty of old kanji and kana usage and to the rich vocabulary of colors, or Masuda Mizuko's "Anata e" (1981) to read a more contemporary work grounded in an alternate reality that offers a similar degree of difficulty.
The third approach I have implemented during the past two years at Colorado College follows the idea of "language across the curriculum" that has been adopted at other liberal arts institutions, such as in history courses at St. Olaf. In my Japanese literature and culture courses, where all the assigned reading is in English (albeit often in translation), I offer the option of doing several reading assignments in Japanese. Students meet with me outside of class in addition to the regular class time, and receive upper-division credit for the course.
In my recent new course "Childhood in Japanese Culture," two students opted to do extra reading in Japanese. The previous summer, I had received college funding to hire a student to scan Japanese texts and make up vocabulary lists from articles on children's literature for use in this new course on the history of childhood in Japan. Since the two students were at different reading levels, I met with them separately for two hours a week each (equivalent to a half hour per week on a twelve-week semester system). One student spent the entire time reading several old tales written in modern Japanese, as well as a section of a serialized story from "Akai tori". The other student, who had learned conversational Japanese at home, read through the stories quickly and moved on to read an article about children's literature and nationalism, for which I offered an extensive vocabulary list.
My goals of incorporating literature into the Japanese language curriculum at Colorado College revolve around the teaching of reading first and literary analysis second. Rarely am I lucky enough to have an advanced student who can move beyond parsing the basic printed text to appreciating the rhythm of the language and the intricacies of the narrative structure. But I am committed to the process of teaching and learning, and ultimately of opening up to students the enjoyment and satisfaction of reading Japanese literature at any level.