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A meaning that seems to leap off the page, propelled by its own self-sufficiency, is a meaning that flows from interpretive assumptions so deeply embedded that they have become invisible.
Stanley Fish, “Still Wrong after All These Years”
THE Spring 1995 ADFL Bulletin , which is dedicated to the issue of articulation, includes a collection of papers from a conference on that topic held in Washington, DC, in December 1994. This article presents the results of an April 1996 survey on articulation between and among Japanese programs. By ADFL Bulletin standards, this project is over a year late. But the issue was not new two years ago, and it has not gone away—articulation is an ongoing problem for virtually all language programs. Work on articulation continues, and Japanese, because it is not like the so-called traditional languages, oftentimes sheds a different light on problems of language education. One goal here is to offer commentary about articulation from the perspective of Japanese and about the results of the survey just mentioned and to try to tie those results to the more general issues.
Japanese has been included over the years among “critical languages” and among “less commonly taught languages,” and since the second appellation no longer applies, Japanese now has a unique position as “one of the more commonly taught less commonly taughts.” To wit, we know we are different. Eleanor Jorden and A. Ronald Walton prefer the term “truly foreign.”
One reason for (or, perhaps, one result of) the unique status of Japanese is that problems of all sorts are brought into starker relief in Japanese than in the more commonly taught languages: the gap between students of Japanese who are adequately trained and those who are not validates Jorden and Walton's “truly foreign” nomenclature. When the student's native language and culture and his or her target language and culture are as radically different as those of the United States and Japan are, inadequate training produces a student who is a caricature of what it is to be a foreigner in the target culture. The reason, I suggest, is that such mistrained persons rely on the only intuitions they can—those they carry along from their native language and culture. Such intuitions may be of some help in, say, a Spanish-speaking country. This is not to underestimate the cultural differences between the United States and Spanish-speaking countries. The American propensity for making a joke is probably as off-putting in Madrid or Caracas as it is in Tokyo. American culture may in fact be the anomaly among the world's cultures—our instincts for how people talk and behave are ill-fitted to much of the world. Be that as it may, for speakers of English, Japanese poses extraordinary difficulties. The writing system surely bears its share of responsibility for this state of affairs. But imagine, beyond that, a language where there is no person, no grammatical gender, no singular-plural number distinction to speak of, and a mere two irregular verbs but in which it is impossible for a speaker to address or discuss anyone without making a commitment regarding the age, status, and affiliation of the speaker, addressee(s), and other referents in the speech context—in short, in which there is no neutral speech style. Imagine the student's joy (mine, at least) of discovering this language with no person, no gender, no number, and only two irregular verbs. But imagine after that flood of relief discovering that one cannot even say yes to a teacher ( hai ) in the same way that one would say yes to a peer ( ee, [u]n ), not to mention that one should use different verbs in talking about oneself and in speaking to or about anyone higher up. In other words, a legion of linguistic phenomena that demand constant monitoring of one's relationships with the people one is talking to.
Such language distinctions are not going to go away with modernization. In a study of contemporary attitudes toward polite language (honorifics), I verified that Japanese listeners continue to evaluate positively those who use these forms—so much so, in fact, that those who make errors but still try are rated more positively than either those who use the forms correctly or those who use them infrequently (Wetzel). In short, it continues to he impossible to speak Japanese without making paradigmatic, grammatically encoded choices about one's social relationship to the people one is talking to or about—their age, gender, and status. The ramifications are overwhelming, especially to the American student who is acculturated to play down difference and inequality. In Japan, one doesn't know how to talk to an interlocutor if one doesn't have the requisite social information about him or her. The language of politeness is not a static phenomenon; it is very much alive and relevant to normal daily interaction. Yes, natives make errors in usage and use honorific language to greater or lesser degrees. But they also demonstrate a measurable awareness of honorific language—the linguistic manifestation of cultural norms that are fundamentally different in Japan and the United States.
Another feature that sets Japanese apart in a practical sense is that the Japanese are extraordinarily interested in the phenomenon of their language as a new lingua franca and have been willing to support its study all over the world—including critical inquiry into the processes of language education. But a recent article by Kevin Sullivan in the Guardian Weekly comments on a trend that Japanese teachers have been sensing for the last year or so. Sullivan notes that although Japan is still an economic powerhouse, the country no longer looms as large in the American imagination as it did only a few years ago. With the decline in the Japanese economy, not to mention the precarious state of the Japanese banking industry, the Daiwa scandal, the Sumitomo copper scandal, and so on, it is the bursting of the bubble rather than the boom that draws commentary. The boom in Japanese language enrollments also looks rather precarious now. Enrollments are significantly lower than they were five years ago, and study-abroad programs are suffering. Concern on the part of colleges and universities was evident in the convocation of a roundtable discussion at the April 1996 conference of the Association of Asian Studies in Hawaii. The purpose? To discuss the bursting of the enrollment bubble and what it has meant to language and area studies programs across the Country.
Yet it is also true, as Sullivan comments, that despite declining enrollments in Japanese at American colleges, more American middle school and high school students are now studying Japanese. In Oregon, for example, Japanese language teachers are among the leaders in implementing a new set of K-12 educational guidelines that focus on English language arts, math, science, social sciences, the arts, and second languages (which have been written back into the required curriculum once again). And among popularly taught second languages in Oregon, Japanese ranks high.
Beginning in 1997, students in Oregon who meet proficiency requirements are to be admitted automatically into the second year of language study at state institutions of higher education. It has been necessary therefore for K-12 instructors and college and university faculty members to sit down and hammer out just what the second-year admission standards will be. The so-called second language content standards are defined in terms of proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and cultural awareness. The more specific benchmarks are statements of minimum expectations regarding what students should know and what they should be able to do in order to make progress toward a certificate of initial mastery, toward graduation from high school, or toward admission to a state institution of higher education ( Japanese Benchmarks ). In Oregon the details of articulation have been an ongoing topic—for some a headache—for the past three years.
The title of the 1994 Washington, DC, conference mentioned above was Achieving Consensus in Articulation in Foreign Language Education. The word consensus apparently generates a certain amount of ambivalence among teachers and scholars in the field of foreign languages. Citing the range in America of educational traditions, geographical settings, social classes, literacies, intellectual styles, research traditions, political leanings, goals, and methodologies, Claire Kramsch suggests that achieving consensus may not be the proper phrase for what we should be doing in foreign language education: “Consensus can sometimees be the death of intellectual inquiry” (6). But as Heidi Byrnes points out, while academics continue to debate articulation, it is those whom we educate, whom we ought to serve—students—who are caught in the cross fire. The college freshman who is placed in first-year Japanese after three years of high school study can hardly be blamed for feeling bitter about the ongoing arguments over establishing goals and objectives. After all, Japanese culture seeks consensus and values it for what it says about communal efforts to let all participate, to let all have a voice. June Phillips echoes this outlook: “Consensus is the result of intellectual inquiry among scholars.… [It] need not be frozen in time,…[but] it undoubtedly requires that those who seek it recognize a shared mission” (37). Phillips cites as agents of change not only the move toward national standards and school reform but also economics. Both are undoubtedly influential in the discussion of articulation in Japanese.
In response to these factors, high school and college teachers of Japanese have embarked on a national conversation through an articulation task force made up of representatives from the Association of Teachers of Japanese (ATJ) and from the National Council of Secondary Teachers of Japanese (NCSTJ). The task force convened its first meeting in March 1995 and its second in January 1996. Virtually all members agree that there is a gap in information regarding articulation and that communication at the national level is important to closing that gap. A particular problem is the paucity of hard data regarding current processes of articulation: the extent to which students successfully move from institution to institution, program to program, or level to level. The task force realized that we don't know very much, except by hearsay, about how articulation proceeds, how successful it is (or is not). The task force therefore decided to investigate processes by which institutions place students into language programs. A questionnaire sent out in April 1996 to one hundred members of the ATJ—an organization made up primarily of college and university teachers—asked how students with background are placed, how many students articulate smoothly and how many do not, what factors enter into articulation, and so on. A copy of the survey can be found in the appendix. 1 No statistical analysis of the data was planned because the sample was small, because the survey was considered a pilot project, and because the task force hoped that qualitative data would be more useful than statistics.
Twenty-four recipients responded to the survey. Twenty-one were teachers in four-year colleges or universities. The remaining three, a teacher at a private language school and two former teachers, did not fill out the questionnaire and do not figure in the results described below.
Of the programs in which respondents teach, the largest has over 1,000 students, the smallest 12. The average program size is 184 students; the median number of students is 160. Most respondents' programs offer four or more levels of Japanese language study; the lowest number of levels was two. There seems to be no correlation between program size and number of articulating students—this number may be more closely related to institutional location and student characteristics than to program or school size. My institution, for example, is in an urban setting, and most students who finish a degree started it somewhere else—as often as not, at a community college. Therefore, many students articulate or attempt to articulate into the Japanese program each year.
According to respondents' estimates, the success rates of students who come in from other programs fall at the two extremes. Five respondents estimate that over eighty percent of incoming students with background articulate smoothly; nine respondents say that less than forty percent articulate smoothly. We might ask whether these estimates are reliable. The less positive estimates might be underestimations; alternatively, they may reflect a bias against students who come in from the outside. The rosier estimates may be symptomatic of unwarranted optimisim. But assuming that the estimates are accurate, what are we to make of the differences? Do some institutions have less stringent standards than others? Do some have unreasonable expectations for incoming students? Have these tougher institutions verified that their own students could pass the assessment for articulation?
When asked how students are placed, all but one of the respondents who answered the question (18 of 19) said that they use oral interviews. Respondents use other placement tools as well: twelve use a grammar test, nine use a kanji recognition test, nine use a writing sample, seven use a listening test, two use a portfolio. The average number of testing procedures cited by respondents is three; some cite four or five tests. The results show remarkable flexibility or remarkable thoroughness, perhaps both. But surely the number of respondents who use oral interviews speaks to the importance of oral proficiency in Japanese language education in American colleges and universities. It would be interesting to know whether programs that use oral interviews to place students also use them to assess students throughout the program of study, whether these programs have proficiency-based exit requirements, and so on.
A related question that arises from responses to this survey is whether the oral proficiency movement (which I vaguely define as the move toward assessing students through something resembling an oral proficiency interview and the concurrent attempt to institute teaching methods that build the skills tested in such interviews) has percolated down to high schools. Colleges and universities are teachers of teachers. Given the current trend in language education reform, it is more and more imperative that institutions where substantial numbers of students are destined to be teachers in the K-12 classroom produce graduates who achieve proficiency as defined by ACTFL. In a study carried out in 1985–87, Phillips discovered that college students of French and Spanish in the United States do not appreciably increase their proficiency levels between the end of the second year of study and the fall of their senior year. If this circumstance is true of more commonly taught Indo-European languages, what can we imagine for languages such as Japanese? The assumption that experience in the culture of the target language remedies the situation is overly simplistic and optimistic. As Galal Walker observes, “Anyone who has learned to successfully meet the demands of living in a less-commonly-taught-language culture has spent more time gaining this ability outside formal instruction than in school.…Most learners of less-commonly-taught-languages spend the majority of their time studying on their own” (1, 4). But there is little recognition of, much less research on, the complex relation between classroom study and students' experience outside. Who bears responsibility for disabusing the general public of the notion that future high school teachers can achieve adequate proficiency in a college or university foreign language program? The message certainly has not made its way to the administrations who retool teachers of other academic subjects for languages like Japanese. A related issue concerns the proficiency level that should be required for foreign language teachers in grades K-12.
Among members of the articulation task force and respondents to the questionnaire, all these issues were of great concern, particularly discrepancies between requirements for teacher certification and for student proficiency. One respondent wrote, “The problem of the gap between proficiency requirements for students and lack of such requirements for teacher certification is a serious one.” That is, although many states, districts, and programs express requirements for students in terms of proficiency, there are no such stringent demands placed on teacher licensing. Teachers themselves are not required to demonstrate precisely those skills that they are expected to impart to students. As teachers of teachers, college and university faculty members should be profoundly interested in how students get to a particular proficiency level. It is apparent that this process has direct ties to articulation.
Survey recipients were given the following instruction: “If you receive feedback from your own students regarding their placement when they go elsewhere, please characterize what that feedback has been in the last two years.” The tenor of the responses was remarkably consistent:
Some respondents quoted students' comments on short-term programs to Japan:
One wouldn't expect a respondent to report that students came back and said that they were completely unprepared for what lay ahead, whether that was experience in Japan or continued study at some other program in the United States or Canada. Unless students have knowledge of language pedagogy and grounds for comparison, it is difficult to interpret or make meaningful use of student feedback.
There are two possible articulation scenarios—either students are prepared for the assessment and experience they face or they are not. If they are, the instruction can be counted a success; if they are not, the instructor can claim to be using an effective methodology but not to be teaching to a test or can claim to offer instruction superior to that offered elsewhere. Who among us would want to admit that all the theoretical work we do on language teaching counts for naught in practice?
More specifically, however, we might want to look at articulation and continued language study separately. What role does articulation have in arbitrating the success or failure of language training? If a student articulates successfully, what are the chances that he or she will continue language study? Or if a student does not articulate successfully and is sent back, what are the chances that he or she will continue language study? I know of no research that would answer this question.
If the success of a pilot study is measured by the number of questions it raises, this small survey of Japanese articulation can be counted a crowning achievement. It has corroborated what the ATJ-NCSTJ articulation task force believed: we don't know much about articulation—how it happens, why it is smooth or difficult, what factors affect it. Survey respondents echo the concern that the task force voiced regarding the preparation and certification of high school teachers and the perceived widening gap between expectations for students and for teachers.
On a personal note (personal because several colleagues and I have elected to research the issue), the survey has highlighted a gap in knowledge that all educators should be concerned about: Why does any student choose to continue or to drop a course of study? As I examined the results of the questionnaire, it occurred to me that it had ignored the student perspective, especially the perspective of unsuccessful articulators—students who have lost inordinate amounts of time in changing programs—and, perhaps even more important, the perspective of students who have elected to drop Japanese entirely rather than fail at articulating. What is the relation between articulation and attrition? I believe it would be invaluable to address this question head on. Once students begin the study of Japanese (or any other subject), why do they stop? How many students who have studied elsewhere manage to articulate after a fashion but lose time in the educational process? What are these students' perspectives on the articulation process? How many articulating students drop courses in frustration when their needs or expectations are not met? We all see such students regularly; we may have varying degrees of sympathy for them. But when such students drop courses, the program or institution doesn't typically ask the reason. 2 It isn't likely that the reasons could be obtained through a survey of teachers such as the one described here. But surely asking students what factors underlie attrition would give us enormous insight into why students stay and how we can improve articulation.
Articulation is a big domain. It does not have neat boundaries that would make it easy to isolate as a focus of research—it overlaps with issues of methodology, assessment, educational policy and practice, and attrition. We can only hope that the current status of articulation as a popular research topic does not pass before the problem itself is solved.
The author is Professor of Japanese in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at Portland State University. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 6–8 June 1996, in San Diego, California.
1 I am grateful to the ATJ for funding the survey and for allowing me to present the results in this forum. Needless to say, the interpretation of these results presented here reflects my own thinking, not necessarily that of the ATJ-NCSTJ articulation task force or of the ATJ membership.
2 Research does exist on the correlation between attrition and disabilities (Sparks and Ganschow) and on the correlation between attrition and learner attitude (Gardner). I know of no research that has tried to determine students' justifications or rationales for attrition.
Byrnes, Heidi. “Response to Claire Kramsch.” ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1995): 13–15. [Show Article]
Fish, Stanley. “Still Wrong after All These Years.” Doing What Comes Naturally. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. 356–57.
Gardner, Robert C. Social Psychology and Second Language Learning: The Role of Attitudes and Motivation. London: Arnold, 1985.
Japanese Benchmarks for the State of Oregon. Salem: Oregon Dept. of Educ., 1995.
Jorden, Eleanor H., and A. Ronald Walton. “Truly Foreign Languages: Instructional Challenges.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Mar. 1987: 110–24.
Kramsch, Claire. “Embracing Conflict versus Achieving Consensus in Foreign Language Education.” ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1995): 6–12. [Show Article]
Phillips, June K, “If Not Consensus, at Least Coherence and Transparency.” ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1995): 37–43. [Show Article]
Sparks, Richard L., and Leonore Ganschow. “The Impact of Native Language Learning Problems on Foreign Language Learning: Case Study Illustrations of the Linguistic Coding Deficit Hypothesis.” Modern Language Journal 77 (1993): 58–74.
Sullivan, Kevin. “Too Little Knowledge a Dangerous Thing.” Guardian Weekly 28 Apr. 1996: 23+.
Walker, Galal. Learning Less Commonly Taught Languages: An Agreement on the Bases for the Training of Teachers. Columbus: Ohio State U, 1995.
Wetzel, Patricia J. “Contemporary Japanese Attitudes toward Honorifics ( Keigo ).” Language Variation and Change 6 (1995): 113–47.
a. Do you currently teach Japanese? yes no (circle one)
b. If yes, what level?
_____ K-12: elementary (1–6)
_____ K-12: secondary (7–12)
_____ 4-year college or university
_____ community college
_____ other (please specify)
a. Do you administer a placement exam to incoming students who have background?
yes no optional (circle one)
b. If no, how are students placed?
_____ self-placing
_____ automatically placed by the registrar or other institutional mechanism
_____ recommendation from instructor(s) at previous institution
_____ other (please specify)
c. If yes, what is the nature of the placement process? (check all that apply)
_____ oral interview
_____ written test
_____ grammar
_____ kanji recognition
_____ writing sample
_____ listening test
_____ standardized test (please specify)
_____ portfolio
_____ other (please specify)
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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