|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
SERIOUS efforts to teach the Japanese language in college began in the 1940s for military and strategic purposes. The instruction was not really part of the regular college curriculum; it was sponsored by the federal government. Linguists (structuralists), not language teachers, developed and conducted the classes.
After the war, the emphasis shifted away from mastery of the language. Language instruction began to be incorporated into East Asian studies within the regular university offerings, and it was subordinate to the study of literature and other scholarly disciplines. It was considered a prerequisite to the study of literature, political science, history, arts, religious studies, and so on.
In the 1960s and 1970s Japanese language instruction continued to be considered mechanical, a no-brainer for teachers. Native speakers who happened to be around, including students, were given quick pedagogical training on the assumption that any educated native speaker could at least try to teach the language. Not until the 1980s did Japanese-language instructors begin to develop professional group awareness. By then people who had studied language pedagogy, and Japanese-language pedagogy in particular, in graduate schools in the United States in the 1970s were working as professional language teachers. Many of them had good cross-cultural understanding as well.
In the past two decades the enrollment in Japanese language courses has exploded, and Japanese is no longer a less commonly taught language as far as the numbers are concerned. It shares the fourth spot with Italian and Russian after Spanish, French, and German. At the precollege level in 1985 200 high schools offered Japanese; in 1995 more than 1,000 did, and there were 40,000 students and 600 teachers of Japanese. Just as in the United States, Japanese as a Second or Foreign Language has become a legitimate field of study and a huge growth industry in Japan. Thus opportunities for professional development abound, language schools for students and teacher wanna-bes flourish in Japan, and literature on Japanese-language pedagogy overflows the shelves of bookstores and of teachers and researchers. Major textbook companies in the United States are competing to get into the mainstream market with comprehensive textbooks for high school and college.
And there is something about the people in Japanese-language pedagogy; their energy for developing and electronically disseminating literature on their field is astounding. We were in one of the first less commonly taught languages to develop language-specific ACTFL proficiency guidelines, and we have trained many testers. For about a decade, United States educators in Japanese have been assembling resources nationally to strengthen precollege Japanese programs. One such effort, A Framework for Introductory Japanese Language Curricula in American High Schools and Colleges, put out by the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, DC, in 1993, became the basis for the 1994 State of Washington publication A Communicative Framework for Introductory Japanese Language Curricula in Washington State High Schools. In addition, Oregon and Wisconsin have been working for several years on articulating Japanese instruction at the secondary level. Grassroots efforts got a boost when the Standards for Japanese Language Learning: Draft came out in 1997. The standards project is now in its second phase, in which a variety of programs across the country are implementing the standards in specific contexts and situations. I represent a local effort that intends to develop curriculum and assessment guidelines to bridge secondary and college-level Japanese instruction in the state of Colorado, which I discuss below.
Given the amount and quality of resources and opportunities, one might think that we will have no problem moving into the next century. Wrong. With the success have come challenges. Many programs, college and precollege, are anything but stable, liable to cancellation if they lose outside financial support or the individual teachers who built them. In many places "inessentials" such as foreign languages are the first to be cut, and administrators feel it is less painful to eliminate Japanese than German, for instance. Many Japanese courses have been created because of administrator's whim or just because there was an educated native speaker available and willing to teach. Once the administrator or the teacher is gone, the program goes with her or him. Japanese is still perceived as a less commonly taught language. Recently, in a school district near me where standards-based instruction and assessment have been mandated, the only certified Japanese teacher was not included in the district's assessment training. He was not deliberately left off the list; it simply didn't occur to the administrators to include him.
Many teachers are untrained and uncertified--employed as "emergency" hires. This problem is closely tied to the history of Japanese language instruction in the United States. As I mention above, Japanese language instructors did not constitute a professional group at college level until the 1980s. When the demand far exceeded the supply, anyone who was standing around was mobilized to teach. I, for one, was trained in TESOL, but seventeen years ago I was hired for one semester to teach only a beginning-level evening Japanese course because students petitioned to have a class. There is even less professionalism in high school teacher training and retention. Many schools and school boards do not even know how to evaluate teacher candidates. Until recently the University of Colorado, Boulder, was the only institution in Colorado that had a postbaccalaureate teacher-certification program in Japanese, and its program was run very unevenly. The university is now the only school in Colorado that has an MA program in which students may opt to specialize in Japanese (and Chinese) language pedagogy and civilization.
More than a dozen two- and four-year Colorado colleges and universities offer Japanese in some form, and twelve high schools and one middle school offer Japanese for one level to four levels. Often one teacher teaches one course of mixed levels or all levels.
Untrained teachers and unstable programs result in frequent turnover of teachers, which demoralizes teachers and administrators and hurts students. Programs are fragmented. Students who begin in elementary school may not be able to continue in junior high school; it is hard to find the long sequences of courses needed to develop real competence in the language. College Japanese programs come in all shapes and sizes also. Established schools have not felt the need to articulate with other programs, let alone with high schools.
Japanese is known as a group 4 language, on the basis of the classifications issued by the Foreign Service Institute in 1973. Their findings show that it takes roughly three times as long for an average native speaker of English to reach the same level in Japanese as he or she would in Spanish, a group 1 language. The implication is that the conventional college curriculum, in which novices are supposed to learn the basics the first year, take intermediate courses in the second, and do advanced study the third, is inappropriate to Japanese. We need two solid years to get through the basics, especially if we are serious about the acquisition of all language skills and not just exposure. A junior year abroad ought to be required, but for various reasons it has not been.
This situation argues for a longer sequence of K-16 courses that would enable a college Japanese program to deal mostly with content, critical thinking, and professional competency. The Japanese language community needs to recognize that it is responsible for developing and implementing curricula for Japanese for specific purposes.
I come from an educational system in which students officially begin learning a foreign language in seventh grade and continue through college, if they choose to take language electives in college. In a college freshmen English reading course, we were reading Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. I hardly think that it is appropriate material for a college freshman class, but at least we had the fluency to handle it.
Although technology now has a significant part in Japanese instruction, Japanese teachers still struggle with basic everyday obstacles to using technology. Where I work, I have access to the Internet and e-mail in Japanese, but some of my counterparts in other institutions are not so lucky. Even a big university such as mine does not understand the special needs that nonalphabetic languages create. Japanese teachers tend to feel alienated at language teachers' conferences, because most of the time the wonderful technological things we hear about are pie in the sky for us.
So what can and should we do, and where do we want to go from here? I would like to propose serious work in three areas: curriculum renovation at the top, articulation (and networking), and rigorous teacher training and professional development. The first and second areas are closely related, but universities can and should start totally revamping university (four-year and beyond) Japanese language programs. As Heidi Byrnes, a professor of German at Georgetown University, puts it nicely, the way to go is "content from the beginning, and language instruction to the very end." In a language such as Japanese, this approach is crucial if we want our students to graduate with a working proficiency in the language. Universities would be most effective if they offered courses that are at the true intermediate level or above--content-based courses and an intensive, individualized remedial language track.
That need is linked to the second area: to make such a curriculum effective requires close work with precollege programs. And since a program is only as good as the people who run it, it is most important that we involve teachers and administrators at all levels in all institutions in articulating programs. Unstable and unsupported programs, and the resulting demoralization, are caused by lack of understanding and communication between those who make decisions and those who go into the classroom every day. I represent the only Japanese project chosen as one of the eight startup projects in the High School to College initiative sponsored by the MLA and the Coalition of Foreign Language Organizations. High School to College is a two-year project promoting articulation between high school and college foreign language programs, and has three goals: to bring together leaders of ongoing local, state, and regional articulation projects to learn from one another; to disseminate information about articulation, providing foreign language professionals with descriptions of the variety and similarity of models, philosophies, and applications; and to support new sites for articulation through mentoring and modest funding. A national conference was held in February 1998 to bring together ongoing projects, startup teams, and experts in the field.
We were attracted to this project because of its emphasis on localism and networking. Each new project team consists of six members, a mix of administrators and teachers. Our team has one university administrator, one high school administrator, two college instructors, and two high school teachers. We chose non-native-speaking high school teachers in order to support and encourage training and retention of nonnative teachers. Each startup team receives the assistance of a mentor. The project sounded almost exactly like what we had been looking for in Colorado for the past three years.
Our project in Colorado is only a fledgling, but we have been trying to get the discussion on articulation going in our state since 1995. The Colorado Japanese Language Education Association, a statewide teachers' organization, has over forty members. Just about everyone who teaches Japanese in some capacity in the state of Colorado is a member. It is a slow process because everyone must come to an agreement on the goals and the means to achieve them. I would like to follow the "people-first principle" prominent in the Collaborative Articulation and Assessment Project of Ohio. Some Colorado teachers of Japanese have learned that the most important thing and the hardest to achieve is trust among the people involved. In the High School to College project we have identified four areas to work in: giving an orientation with our mentor, writing curriculum and assessment models, talking with everyone who has a stake in Japanese programs in Colorado, and organizing ongoing miniworkshops by experts on related issues such as standards-based instruction and assessment. We were given until December 1998 to come up with some results and until December 1999 to reach the objectives we set out at the beginning.
Thanks to the MLA project, we brought out our mentor, Paul Sandrock from the Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction, in October 1997. We held a half-day workshop with him where members of the Colorado Japanese Language Education Association discussed and began drawing up learning scenarios and assessment rubrics in Japanese and we set an action plan for the next few months.
Japanese teachers everywhere come from diverse backgrounds. Typically there is one teacher in each school who generates her or his own teaching materials and receives little technical support. Many teachers have to spend unnecessary effort developing everything from scratch. There has not been much networking or mentoring among teachers. Teachers may be reluctant to talk to others because they don't feel they are professional enough to discuss their programs or because they do not want to be scrutinized and criticized.
Colorado teachers as a group understand intellectually that articulation has to be our highest priority. However, individual teachers are not always willing to share their thoughts and feelings about the issue. Nor are they open to discussing problems and concerns about their own programs. Everyone feels her or his situation is unique. There is a definite division between precollege and college teachers, like the chasm between language instructors and literature professors, and I do not sense genuine trust between these groups. In our effort to articulate I do not want universities again to impose something on others without considering their situations. Articulation will not happen unless we build trust among ourselves first.
But curricula do not mean anything unless they are implemented, and that will require work in the third area, training and development. The project team will not be writing curricula and developing assessment tools without involving classroom teachers at every step. We have plenty of models, such as those developed by the states of Washington, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Writing up another curriculum in a vacuum is not a big deal. However, teachers have to decide to change and grow, open their vistas and embrace the wider profession. We must implement effective teacher training and ensure ongoing professional development, but we cannot impose them on teachers who are not willing to recognize the need for them. I see a long, winding road ahead.
The workshop Paul Sandrock conducted served at least two purposes. First, collectively, we have begun to work on lesson plans to take back to our own classrooms. Fourteen secondary and postsecondary teachers participated and have formed three subgroups to develop and field-test lesson plans. Each group will communicate and exchange data among its members and come together for a joint presentation at the state language teachers' conference in February. We will meet twice more, in the late spring and the summer of 1999, to advance the project.
Second, it was good to have a neutral expert to lay out a big picture of Japanese instruction nationwide and to encourage local teachers to work to improve their own situations. All the participants, at least in theory, had the same status, and we will continue to work as colleagues.
Finally, I would like to mention one cultural issue that may be unique to Japanese. Many native-speaking teachers and other native speakers of Japanese are stuck on the notion that a teacher must speak Japanese perfectly in order to teach it. As a consequence, some do not believe that a non-native speaker can be trained to become a Japanese teacher. Alas, they tend not to say it out loud, and since Japanese culture discourages clarification of such matters through focused, intense, issue-oriented discussion (let alone argument and confrontation), especially among women, such fundamental matters are difficult to bring up, debate, and resolve. Silence on these issues impedes progress. I believe that training non-native-speaking teachers is crucial for successful programs, especially in high schools. I would like to reach individual teachers as part of our articulation efforts, gain two-way trust, and begin discussing real issues like this one.
The author is Senior Instructor of Japanese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 25-27 June 1998, in Victoria, British Columbia.
Brockett, Chris, et al. A Communicative Framework for Introductory Japanese Language Curricula in Washington State High Schools. Washington State Japanese Lang. Curriculum Guidelines Committee, 1994.
Byrnes, Heidi. Address. Conf. on High School to Coll. in Foreign Lang. Programs. Albuquerque. 6-8 Feb. 1998.
Foreign Service Institute. Expected Levels of Absolute Speaking Proficiency in Languages Taught at the Foreign Service Institute (Revised). Washington: Foreign Service Inst., 1973.
Japanese National Standards Task Force. Standards for Japanese Language Learning: Draft. N.p.: n.p., 1997.
Unger, J. Marshall, Fred C. Lorish, Mari Noda, and Yasuko Wada. A Framework for Introductory Japanese Language Curricula in American High Schools and Colleges. Washington: Natl. Foreign Lang. Center, 1993.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
