An interactive approach to advanced Japanese.

Abstract

In an advanced Japanese class, professors and graduate students traditionally tend to focus on grammar and translation without encouraging student interaction in Japanese. In this paper, I report how I encouraged Japanese-language interaction among students, and recommend that instructors take students' prior-knowledge and creativity into consideration and incorporate classroom activities that require students' active use of the four skills.

Introduction

In an advanced Japanese class, students generally have the advantage of interpreting literary texts under the supervision of a professor of Japanese literature or a graduate student who has reached the stage of writing a dissertation in the field of Japanese literature. However, when professors or graduate students, who supposedly know the role of readers in literary interpretation, teach advanced Japanese, they traditionally tend to ignore students' prior knowledge and creativity and focus more on grammar and translation. Without encouraging student interaction in Japanese, they tend to evaluate students' achievement based on their accurate decoding of the assigned texts. Furthermore, it is problematic that the graduate students, who have not received training in teaching advanced Japanese, are assigned to teach the course. In this paper, I report how I have promoted interaction between the students and the texts to promote their cultural literacy, and encouraged interaction among students in Japanese in order to bridge the gap between communication-oriented elementary and intermediate Japanese courses and advanced reading-oriented courses.

In order to accomplish my goals, I constructed my fourth-year Japanese course based on the recommendations of the second-language specialists of European languages. Claire Kramsch, for instance, believes in a twofold interpretation of a text: a dialogue between the text and readers and active reconstruction of meaning of the text among the readers. She supports the view of reading as an active construction process and emphasizes the role of the reader in the process of reading. She states, "Reading is the joint construction of a social reality between the reader and the text" (Kramsch 357), and considers that it is a privilege of the foreign culture reader to interpret a text from a viewpoint different from the author's. However, the professors of literature who teach an advanced foreign language class tend to discourage the reconstruction of meaning of the text by the students. When students reach the level of reading literary texts, the focus of instruction shifts from communication in the target language to the passive decoding of texts, thus discouraging the reconstruction of meaning of the text by the readers. Since Kramsch also promotes "the negotiation of the meaning of a literary text in a group discussion" (Kramsch 358), she considers that the passive decoding of texts in an advanced foreign language class is an obstacle to a group-oriented communicative approach. She implies that it is important for language teachers to continue to encourage interactive activities among students in the target language even at the advanced level.

Other foreign language specialists, Janet K. Swaffar, Katherine M. Arens and Heidi Byrnes, state that one of the goals of foreign language education is to raise students' cultural literacy through teaching literary texts:

   If our goal is cultural literacy, then our students' connections
   between the real world and the literary text must originate
   with their knowledge of history and geography on the one hand,
   and appreciation of literature as a cultural artifact on the
   other. Only after students can view a story as a cultural
   artifact can they go on to consider its contemporaneous
   relationship to seemingly-disparate phenomena. (Swaffar,
   Areas and Byrnes 219)

Since the teachers cannot assume that "students will automatically see the implications of the literature and the ways in which its messages connect with a range of related real-world phenomena" (Swaffar et al. 217), the L2 teacher needs to guide the students to connect the literary texts with the socio-historical and ideological context in which the texts were produced. Only then can students interact with the texts on a deeper level and become culturally literate.

Selection of Texts

If the instructor chooses a text slightly above the students' linguistic competency, they do not get frustrated and can easily activate and apply their reading strategy. In selecting pedagogically appropriate texts, Swaffar et al. point out the importance of taking the students' familiarity with the text and interests into consideration, because students bring their prior knowledge to the text in the reading process (Swaffar et al. 190). By associating their prior knowledge with the new information, students are able to better comprehend the meaning of the text. It is also advisable to consider student interests and motivational factors in the selection process. However, the instructor should not choose texts based solely on student interests. Instead, the instructor should expose the students to different values and beliefs beyond their limited interests. When selecting an assignment, the instructor should be wary of concentrating too much on intensive reading and decoding of the text because that could deprive the students of the joy of reading in Japanese. Therefore, it is imperative to find texts that the student can engage in both intensive and extensive reading. This way, whenever students come across sentences with complicated syntactic patterns, students can translate only that segment of the text and read the rest of the text without translating it into English.

There are instructors who simply choose canonical texts for an advanced Japanese course without considering a consistent theme for the course. However, if the instructor focuses his or her teaching based on a certain theme, the students will be able to acquire cultural and linguistic knowledge more effectively. By reading and analyzing thematically chosen texts from different genres, students could deepen their understanding of a certain issue. For example, I chose World War II and Japan as a major theme for my class because of the current issue of the Japanese government's certification of middle-school history textbooks. Based on this theme, I assigned texts in different literary styles from various genres including newspaper articles on the detonation of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two poems composed by an A-bomb survivor, an excerpt from A Trip to China by Katsuichi Honda, A Boy Called H by Kappa Seno, and an internet article on the protest against the history textbook certification.

Vocabulary List

When the students reach an advanced level, the amount of new vocabulary in an authentic text can become overwhelming which could discourage them from reading the text. Since it is not realistic to expect students to know or learn every single word, I advised my students not to look up every single unknown word but to focus on the key words. In the meantime, I provided a partial list of the vocabulary list. Because I wanted students to utilize their prior knowledge of the language, I sometimes provided the meaning of new vocabulary in Japanese. I also alleviated the students of the need to spend excessive time with a dictionary by assigning one text to a group of three or four students and instructing them to exchange the lists they compile with other groups, I also trained them to make use of an online dictionary in the computer laboratory.

Pre-Reading Activities

It is evident that prior knowledge of the topic aids students in fully comprehending a text. Therefore, if the students do not have familiarity with the content of a particular text or lack appropriate cultural knowledge for comprehension, the instructor must provide the necessary background information before the students engage in actual reading. Providing biographical information about the author or lecturing about the historical and cultural significance of the text not only helps students understand the text better but also facilitates interaction among students. For example, in my class I encouraged the students with prior knowledge of Japan and World War II to share their knowledge with the class. That helped students activate their prior knowledge on the topic and form a common ground among them (Kramsch 359). Listing vocabulary related to the topic of the text and discussing the meaning of the title also helped students predict the content of the text (Muyskens 416). Before my students read The Boy Called H, I had my students read an interview of Kappa Seno, the author of the text, and told them that the story was one of the best sellers of the year. In the interview Seno talked about why he wrote the story, what he intended to communicate, and when the story took place. This background information helped awaken the students' interests.

Activities for Decoding, Comprehension, and Interpretation

Professors of Japanese literature who teach advanced Japanese classes have focused their instruction on passive decoding of texts and discouraged students from sharing their interpretation of the text in Japanese from different perspectives. However, Kramsch states:

   Background and schema building could be done either in small groups
   or individually, the reflection that follows should be conducted
   exclusively as a whole group activity in class ... The goal of
   negotiating the meaning of a literary text is to use the multiple
   perspective and life experiences of the readers to reach an
   understanding of the multifaceted world of the narrative.
   (Kramsch 361)

Swaffar et al. also recommend that students read for a particular problem-solving activity, stating, "Unless applied to solve a problem, factual knowledge creates no direct linkage between language and meaning" (Swaffar et al. 143). Therefore, the instructor needs to have students read a text with a purpose and ask open-ended questions with multiple possible answers that would require the students from culturally different backgrounds to link their knowledge to the text.

In accordance with the advice of foreign language specialists, I assigned two poems written by the same author that were based on the bombing of Hiroshima. First, I asked the students to answer the following questions on the poem "Let the Child Be Born": What does the title of this poem mean? What are the contrasting images represented in the poem? What is the central message of the poem? At the next class meeting, I had the students first read the poem aloud and list what they understood to avoid misunderstanding of the text. Then, I instructed them to share their answers to the assigned questions. The students seemed motivated and actively participated in exchanging a variety of responses to the poem in Japanese.

Following Kramsch's statement, that "A comparison of the text with related texts on the same topic serves to illustrate the cultural and esthetic choices made by the author" (Kramsch 363), I assigned another poem on Hiroshima composed in 1972 after the Vietnam War and had the students answer the following questions: Why is the city name Hiroshima written in katakana? What is the effect of repeating the same phrase 'when we say Hiroshima'? After they read two poems, I assigned the following questions that would make the students compare and contrast the poems: Why and in what way does the content of the two poems differ? Through comparison of the historical contexts, the students' understanding of the poems deepened. I then used an in-class writing activity on the comparative study of these two poems to assess the students' overall comprehension of the poems. Reading an excerpt of The Trip to China on the atrocity committed by the Japanese in China also had a strong impact on the students, and the text also provided students with a socio-historical context for interpretation of the two poems on Hiroshima. After their reading of The Trip to China, students reread the poems once more with theft deepened understanding of the time period in which those texts were written.

For a concluding activity, students wrote a two-page essay on the Japanese history textbook certification. Later, they read their essays and had an opportunity to exchange their ideas on the issue in the class. Because there were Taiwanese, Cambodian, and Japanese American students in the class, they could approach the issue from several cultural perspectives. Since students discussed the meaning of life through the war-related texts, the transition of the topic from war to euthanasia went rather smoothly. After reading a short story called "Takasebune," the students debated the issue of human cloning. Students researched the topic through the Internet, and prepared themselves to give opinions from both sides of the spectrum. When they debated, I, as a facilitator, evaluated the students' performance based on the quality and frequency of theft opinions. Without my intervention, they freely expressed a variety of opinions in Japanese, resulting in an effective activity that encouraged active student participation in the class.

Examples of Tests

Swaffar et al. recommend reader-based tests that show how students connect textual meaning (Swaffar et al. 171). This means that the instructor cannot assess students' reading comprehension simply through multiple-choice type questions but in addition needs to require students to write a summary of a text or their opinion on a certain issue. Following the recommendation by Swaffar et al., I wrote tests that evaluate both reading and writing skills. For a vocabulary test, I gave the summary of a story with blanks, and students had to fill in the blanks with the most appropriate word rather than mechanically provide English equivalents. For in-class writing, students summarized the contents of two poems and wrote their interpretation, taking the historical contexts into consideration. I also instructed students to relate the texts and analyze how reading an excerpt of Travel to China affected their interpretation of the poems. I could also check students' comprehension by giving a quotation test in which I asked to explain in what way a respective quotation shows the speaker's belief and how a quotation was related to a theme of the text.

The Results of Student Survey

After the quarter was over, I conducted a student survey. In response to the question " Did the texts you read meet your interests and level of reading proficiency?, " the overall level of satisfaction was rather high. One of the students commented that the authentic text from the internet, Travel to China, and the short story "Takasebune" "were especially challenging, however, they were not so difficult to a degree that I had to give up reading." In response to the question "Should the fourth-year Japanese class concentrate on grammar and translation?," the answers varied. One student stated: "Grammar and translation are tedious, but it is important for accurate comprehension of the texts. I can make sure whether I understood the text or not through translation." Another student commented: "Both grammar and translation are important, but they should not be emphasized in the class. For students who want to go to Japan, it is more useful to practice speaking and learn how to communicate in Japanese." The third student stated: "In this class, it is good that we could get to discuss on the assigned texts in Japanese. Grammar should be taken care more in the second and third-year Japanese classes."

In response to the question "Should the fourth-year Japanese class include activities such as discussion, debate and in-class writing?," all of the students answered yes. One student stated: "Debate was truly enjoyable, because all the students participated and all of us interacted. It also helped to talk with the Japanese people, so we should do more debates in the class." Another student commented: "Since I mix Japanese and English all the time, it is good that I could speak only Japanese in the class and improve my speaking ability." The other student commented: "For a writing activity, I had to summarize my thoughts and express my opinions in my own words so that I felt that it was difficult. But through the challenge, I could remember more kanji compounds and improve my writing ability."

Conclusion

Students showed strong interest in interpreting assigned texts and actively exchanging their ideas and opinions through the active use of the four skills. A variety of interactive activities helped students to interact with their classmates in Japanese. Therefore, even after the students reach the advanced level, it is advisable not to concentrate on analyzing and interpreting texts in English but to encourage students' active use of Japanese through speaking and writing activities. Through reading a variety of thematically selected texts from different genres, students were able to deepen their understanding Japan and World War II, and were better able to express their opinions in Japanese. Therefore, it is recommended that one not choose texts randomly without a specific theme but rather assign texts on a specific theme. Through reading thematically related texts, students were able to easily connect textual meaning with personal interests and improve speaking and writing proficiency.

The instructor also needs to provide an environment in which students can comfortably express their opinions. As long as the instructor emphasizes passive decoding of the texts, students are unable to freely exchange their opinions in Japanese. In my class, students enjoyed debating on contemporary issues without the instructor's intervention, freely exchanged opinions among classmates from different cultural backgrounds, and learned to view a certain issue from multiple perspectives. A variety of activities in this class helped students not only improve their Japanese proficiency but also understand socio-historical and ideological contexts of assigned texts and become more culturally literate at the end of the quarter.

References

Kramsch, Claire. "Literary Texts in the Classroom: A Discourse." The Modern Language Journal 69. iv (1985): 356-65.

Muyskens, Judith A. "Teaching Second-Language Literatures: Past, Present and Future." The Modern Language Journal 67. iv (1983): 413-23.

Seno Kappa. "Shonen Homegutte." Sight 2. (2000): 6-11.

Swaffar, Janet, Katherine Arens and Heidi Byrnes. Reading for Meaning: An Integrated Approach to Language Learning. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991.

Toshiko Yokota, California State University, Los Angeles

Yokota, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Japanese