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SAINT Olaf College has a long and proud tradition of encouraging study abroad in all parts of the world. According to records for the 1997-98 academic year, fifty-five percent of the graduating class had studied outside the United States, and more than seventy-five percent had studied off campus. Clearly, the "global perspective" part of the college's mission statement has been taken seriously by faculty members and students alike.
Not immediately clear from the statistics is the ongoing effort to integrate study abroad into students' on-campus academic programs. In this essay I discuss two issues of integration: the specific orientation in self-managed language learning strategies for those going abroad and the deliberate linkage of foreign languages to the general education curriculum in the liberal arts college. I consider these issues from my position as associate professor of Japanese and director of Asian studies.
In orienting students to live and study abroad, we have traditionally done a great deal to help them learn intercultural communication skills, general cultural information, and functional linguistic proficiency. But what we have not done so effectively is to prepare students to learn how to learn language while abroad. Many students assume there is something magical about being in a foreign country that will transform them as a matter of course into fluent speakers within months of their arrival.
But even those who seek a truly Japanese experience have found that while the twin benefits of in-country study--immediacy and constant exposure--do have a positive effect on proficiency, they do not by themselves automatically confer true fluency on students, even sincere ones. The students tend to be too passive.
Students are sometimes surprised that the language class abroad doesn't push them hard enough or that teachers abroad approach material in unfamiliar ways. Students fail to see themselves as being in charge of their own learning or to see that they control their own progress. They don't grasp the fact that they could be active about their learning.
In addition, our immersion programs in Japanese are independent of us, and since the receiving sites take students from numerous colleges, they have to take general aim with the level and pace of their language offerings. Our students need to learn how to make the best use of classroom instruction available to them, especially since the concept of individualized instruction is not part of the expectations in the Japanese classroom setting.
Our students should have a clear sense of their goals before leaving for Japan and a clear strategy that allows them to learn and to keep learning, whether in the classroom or not, whether in the foreign country or not. Further, our students need to develop an "internal monitor" (see Krashen).
To help students achieve this kind of independence, I developed with John Knapp, a colleague of mine when we both worked at Macalester College, a program called Self-Managed Japanese.1 We developed a set of strategies to help students learn how to learn language and to integrate their study-abroad experiential learning into the rest of their academic program. We saw in our program a way of leading students into situations where they could begin to rely on their internal monitors and could be less dependent on correction by others.
There were psychological reasons, as well, for the development of the program. Students who go abroad are often at the end of two years of Japanese language study. This is a low point, psychologically. They often feel overwhelmed because they have a clear sense of the amount of work required to become truly proficient in Japanese. Once abroad, students may find it daunting to keep putting themselves in situations in which they don't understand all that is going on (sometimes, a great deal of what is going on), or they find it difficult to take the initiative in making contact with Japanese people or getting access to the Japanese people and culture that surround them. Some students give in to the natural impulse to become passive or to withdraw into the comfort of English-speaking friends. Learning strategies to cope with these problems helps them keep their attention on their goals and gives them a plan of action, which reduces their anxiety.
Self-Managed Japanese is a set of workbook exercises for use as a supplement outside the classroom. The exercises, twelve in all, are meant to suggest the kind of thing students can do to begin a program of self-initiated language learning. Implementing each exercise requires only a task, a mentor, and a notebook.
After choosing an exercise, a student follows these guidelines:
Students are given suggestions about choosing a mentor. The mentor might be one of the classroom teachers, but more typically the mentor would be someone with whom the student is personally compatible, someone with shared interests, perhaps someone about the same age. The mentor should have patience, a sense of humor, general knowledge of the culture and language, and a willingness to experiment.
Below are two typical workbook exercises, "Food Hall" and "Watching TV."
Food Hall
Overview
In this exercise you will visit one of the immense food halls that are common in the basements of Japanese department stores. Your task will include locating a department store that has a good food hall, locating the areas within the food hall where you can buy certain kinds of Japanese foodstuffs, finding out the names and prices of different foodstuffs, observing how Japanese customers talk to salespeople about the foodstuffs in one area of the hall, and talking to a salesperson yourself about a particular foodstuff.
Anticipation
Enactment
Reflection
Watching TV
Overview
In this exercise you will learn about TV programming. Your tasks will include finding the TV listings in your local Japanese newspaper, learning how to glean information you need from the listings, and watching a TV program and recording your observations on its content.
Anticipation
Enactment
Reflection
While Self-Managed Japanese helps students integrate their experiential learning into their academic program and goals, a new program at Saint Olaf College called Asian Conversations, developed with the help of grants from the United States Department of Education and ASIANetwork, aims to integrate language learning with cultural studies courses in the first two years of students' college careers and to give students the option of fulfilling a cluster of general education requirements within an Asian framework.2 The program is built around the idea of conversations, emphasizing the plural. Students listen to Asians talking about the relation between their modern lives and the traditions from which they come and between their countries and the West, particularly the United States. Students join this conversation by interacting with the materials they read in their sequence of courses; talking with class members, faculty members, and Asian people; and studying an Asian language.
We have developed four cultural studies courses that link Chinese and Japanese language classes. Students in their first semester on campus take a course entitled Family and Self in East Asia, which uses contemporary novels, autobiographies, and short stories that describe the struggles between traditional ideals and modern pressures as East Asians try to define themselves within families.
The second course in the sequence, The West and East Asia, is offered in the spring semester and focuses on the historical impact that the West and East Asia have had on each other from the beginning of sustained contact in the sixteenth century to the end of World War II. Students read about and discuss the impact of Christian missionaries, the economic role of trade, and the political and military challenges posed by both Western and Asian expansionism.
Taken in the fall semester of the second year, the third course in the sequence, an interdisciplinary case study called Rice and Identity in East Asia, considers the meaning of rice symbolism in Chinese and Japanese literature and ritual traditions, the economic role of rice, and how modernization has changed the meaning of rice. The course uses rice as a way of accessing regional political and economic relations.
The fourth course is a travel-study interim offered in January. A Saint Olaf faculty member takes students to China (Shanghai and Beijing) and to Japan (Nagasaki, Kyoto, and Nara). The course has a dual focus: readings in English and activities in the foreign country on the themes of constructions of national identity and mutual perceptions of the other, both between the West and Asia and within Asia, and carefully designed language-based activities at the sites with Japanese and Chinese university students. Students work in the same pairs for the entire month: one student in each pair has a background in Japanese and one has a background in Chinese. Additionally, we focus on schools as the primary agents of socialization, visiting a nursery school in each country and one secondary school. En route, students read and discuss several books and a packet of essays on the themes of the course. Throughout the interim students keep response journals in English; but while in the country of the language they have studied, students write each day in their Asian language. Specific instructions are given for all the entries in the response journals, since the journal is a very important tool for integrating reading, perception, experience, reflection, and linguistic and cultural information.
In the Chinese and Japanese language classes that students take in conjunction with a cultural studies course each semester, we link content to the cultural studies by expanding on the themes outlined above, providing necessary vocabulary and developing exercises that allow students to use language to access vital cultural information. We plan to shift gradually to a content-based instructional model, from the beginning levels through the advanced.
In our Japanese courses, we are developing Web-based instructional materials, devising ways of using the Internet effectively in Japanese, and planning for the implementation of e-mail connections in the target language with students and faculty members on our own campus and at other campuses in the United States and with students in Japan.3
In the fall semester preceding the January travel-study interim, students in the language classes design several questionnaires in the target language to elicit the kind of information they want from their university student contacts in Asia, and they learn the vocabulary and grammatical and social expressions that will facilitate their interactions in the foreign country. The students also work independently in language pairs on tasks they will perform in the foreign country. These tasks are based on the model of Self-Managed Japanese and are keyed specifically to the program of readings in English. In other words, we use the language exercises to extend and complicate the students' learning from print sources.
The Asian Conversations program is a two-year project that is just getting under way. We are undertaking the project in the expectation that the greater the degree of integration of language learning into the content of the college's general studies program, the more clearly students will recognize the importance of language for accessing knowledge of a culture, the higher the students' motivation will be for continued language study, and the higher the level of language proficiency they will achieve. This integration rests on the careful design of a content-based curriculum in Chinese and Japanese; the thoughtful linkage of language, cultural studies, and study-abroad experiences; and instruction in language learning strategies. In carrying out this project, we think we can provide a new and significant depth to the global perspective we value for our graduates.
The author is Associate Professor of Japanese and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Saint Olaf College. This paper is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 25-27 June 1998, Victoria, British Columbia.
1This program was developed in 1993 with the help of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kraus-Anderson Construction Company, and the Mary Livingston Griggs and Mary Griggs Burke Foundation.
2The general education requirements at Saint Olaf College that are pertinent to our project are a first-year seminar emphasizing writing, three courses in an Asian language (but four in the traditionally taught European languages), one course in historical studies in Western culture, and one course in studies in human behavior and society.
3All three of these initiatives are being underwritten by a 1998 Ameritech Distance Collaboration Grant received through the Foundation for Independent Higher Education. The e-mail project builds on a program called Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections, developed and monitored by Craig Rice, in the Academic Computing Center at Saint Olaf College, and two psychology professors, Bruce Roberts and Howard Thorsheim. Since its inception in 1992, this program has facilitated electronic connections for more than 7,300 teachers in approximately seventy-three countries. More information about this program is available at <http://www.iecc.org>.
Krashen, Stephen D. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. New York: Pergamon, 1982.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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