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Exchanges: The Online Journal of Teaching and Learning in the CSU Japanese Language Across the CurriculumMasako O. DouglasDepartment of Asian and Asian American Studies
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| Skills | Courses | Language | Resource Persons | Foreign language Portion | Credits |
| Reading with varied degrees of oral Japanese | Introduction to Japanese Linguistics | Japanese | Faculty of the target content & graduate student with experience teaching advanced Japanese | 15% of all reading materials added as Japanese materials | No credit |
Prior to the quarter when the course with JLAC was offered, we distributed a flyer to explain the course (see Appendix A). To prepare the course materials, which required digitizing Japanese reading materials and making study guides, a quarter-time (25%, 110 total working hours) research assistant (RA) was hired. Table 2 shows a breakdown of the RA's job.
| Jobs | Hours |
|---|---|
| Scanning materials and up-loading them to the course web site | 30 |
| Preparation of study guides | 15 |
| Tutoring | 60 |
| Preparation of survey form | 5 |
The RA's first job was to scan all Japanese reading materials into a computer and up-load them to a course Web site. All reading materials were digitized so that the students could use an on-line dictionary and other functions in JWPce2, a Japanese software program designed to assist their study. As the breakdown of the workload shows, it was time consuming to scan a non-alphabetic language and manually correct errors: 27% of total hours were used for digitizing material.
As a pilot study, a Japanese track was added to Introduction to Japanese Linguistics, an upper-division elective course. Participants read 15% of the reading materials in the original Japanese in addition to all assigned materials in English. This approach ensures content coverage by all students enrolled in this course and enhances the content by including additional reading in Japanese by the participants in the JLAC track. Students were given an option to take either the Japanese track or a regular course in which all materials were read in English. Students who had taken Japanese language courses for more than one year had the option to decide which track they preferred. By the end of the 3rd week, students had to choose the Japanese track or the regular non-Japanese track. No extra credit was given to participants in the Japanese track.
Thirty-nine students enrolled in the course, and eight of them participated in the Japanese track. Thirteen students did not participate but read some of the materials in Japanese, and the remaining 18 students neither participated in the track nor read the texts in Japanese. Of the eight participating students, two had previously finished Intermediate Japanese, two had finished Advanced Japanese, three were Japanese heritage speakers, and one was a Japanese native speaker who had finished high school in Japan.
A course instructor selected the two categories of materials with content related to weekly topics in the course. One category contained mandatory reading materials, which all Japanese track participants were required to read, and the second category contained optional reading materials, which could challenge students with more advanced reading skills (see Appendix B). Since all reading materials were digitized, a computer workshop was provided at the beginning of the course for the students to familiarize themselves with the software programs. In addition, a hard copy of the reading materials was also distributed to the students.
The content-area instructor in this study was a native speaker of Japanese who taught both Japanese and linguistics. However, the approach does not require the instructor to be fluent in an oral language. The content-area instructor's primary role is to select reading materials written in the target language that are connected to the course content.
There were six one-hour study-group tutorial sessions every week handled by a graduate student. Due to the variations in the learners' reading abilities and their schedules, four sections were offered as individual tutorials and two other sections had two students. The graduate student was experienced at teaching advanced levels. She offered the tutorials completely in Japanese or partially in English, depending on the learner's oral competence, to help students understand the Japanese reading materials and relate them to the content of the course as a whole. She prepared study guides that were distributed to the participants one week in advance of the lecture. The guides consisted of vocabulary lists, reading comprehension questions, and discussion questions. Using these guides and with her help, students read the materials in tutorial sessions. She informally assessed if students read the assigned texts while she helped students learn how to read academic texts.
In order to examine the outcomes of this study, we conducted a survey and interviewed the participants at the end of the course. The survey was administered to the participants in the Japanese track and to those who did not choose that track but who read some Japanese materials. We asked them about whether the readings in the course helped their learning of vocabulary, kanji (Chinese characters), grammar, course-related content knowledge, and their reading skills. All eight participants in the Japanese track were interviewed individually at the end of the course.
The survey results are listed in Table 3 and show that the Japanese track participants evaluated their learning experience positively with respect to the readings and associated tutorials in this course. The mean scores reported are from a Likert scale where 1 = not effective and 5 = very helpful.
| Questions: Were the readings helpful for you to . . . | N = 8 (JLAC participants) | N = 13 (No-participants in JLAC) |
|---|---|---|
| increase your vocabulary in Japanese? | 4.63 | N/A |
| enhance your knowledge of kanji? | 4.5 | N/A |
| enhance your knowledge of Japanese grammar? | 4.25 | N/A 3 |
| enhance your overall Japanese reading skills? | 4.5 | 3.17 |
| understand the points covered in lectures? | 4.5 | 3.25 |
The average score ranges between 4.25 and 4.63 on the Likert scale. The responses by the learners who did not participate in the Japanese track are lower in two categories than those of the Japanese track participants; there was a 3.17 increase of reading skills and a 3.25 increase of course content knowledge. This difference is worth noting and will be discussed later.
What follows are some comments on results from other questions on the survey. Question 2, "How often have you attended the Japanese Track reading sessions?" showed that the attendance rate for the discussion sessions was very high: 75% of the participants attended more than 80% of the sessions. In response to question 11, the participants rated the helpfulness of the research assistant as very high (4.75). Question 10, quoted in Table 4, produced an unexpected surprise in that five out of eight students (62.5%) reported that they did not need extra points to motivate themselves to take the Japanese track.
| Question: Unfortunately, we cannot give you any extra credit for participating in the reading sessions. What do you think about it? If you were to receive any extra credit (e.g., extra points, or one unit), would it influence your motivation? | Number of responses (N = 8) |
|---|---|
| Yes, a participant should receive extra points or a unit; it is difficult to continue attending the reading sessions without any incentive. | 1 |
| I don't need extra points, but it was difficult to continue when I became very busy with other courses. | 1 |
| I don't need extra points; being able to practice reading Japanese was enough motivation for me. | 5 |
| Other: Explain: "Extra points would have been nice." | 1 |
Questions #13, "We would appreciate it very much if you could give us any comments regarding the reading materials in Japanese (difficulty, relevance, amount, quality of website texts, etc.)" and #14 ("What would you suggest to improve the Japanese track so that it will benefit students who take the course next year?") called for free-form answers, and these are analyzed in the following paragraphs.
Ten responses to question #13, comments about the reading materials, were categorized into four groups:
Students rated very positively the use of the technology, which enabled them to look up kanji (Chinese characters) quickly on an on-line dictionary. Students commented that the reading materials were difficult, but they considered the challenging texts to be a good learning experience and commented that they became more confident about reading academic texts. Students also responded that the relevance of the reading materials to the course was very high. One comment on the types of the materials was that the student preferred "lively" and less academic readings (e.g., an article "Manuke ja wakaranu aho-baka bunpu" in the references).
Responses to question #14 (to provide suggestions to improve the Japanese track) were grouped as follows:
Data from interviews: In interviews, students commonly stated that their reading speed had increased during the course and that they gained confidence in reading academic texts in Japanese. They spent 4-5 hours per week on reading the materials. In terms of the amount of reading, they suggested reducing the length of the materials so that they could finish reading assignments on time and gain a sense of accomplishment. One student suggested having the Japanese-track participants present the content of the materials in lecture so that they felt more involved in the course, which would further raise their motivation. The participants recommended this course to the students who completed Advanced Japanese (3rd year) or beyond. Lastly, they hoped that a Japanese track would be added to other courses, such as literature and history, for example.
Since data from both the survey and from the interviews are self-reports and no direct measurement of learning was used to measure growth in language ability, we cannot conclude from the outcomes of this study that such growth occurred using this approach. However, we can at least say that this pilot course helped the learners gain confidence in their language ability (vocabulary, kanji and grammar), reading skills, and ability to read academic texts (Table 4).
Students reported that their reading speed and the amount of reading they could complete had increased. We believe that the on-line dictionary played an important role in producing this result. kanji (Chinese characters) words, which make up 30 % of Japanese written texts, are a hurdle for learners of Japanese. Using a paper dictionary requires considerable time, skill, and experience. The more time students spend looking up words in a dictionary the more their reading is distracted.
The on-line dictionary also reduces an instructor's preparation time. Beeman et al. (1993) report that they spent 5-7 hours making vocabulary lists for each text for a total of 90 to 126 total hours for the 18 texts selected for their Japanese track. One drawback in using an on-line dictionary, however, is that not all words are available, especially those that are discipline-specific. The instructor must prepare glossaries for those words.
It is interesting that the average scores of the learners' evaluation of the increase of reading skills and content knowledge are 3.17 and 3.25 respectively in the non-Japanese track, while those in the Japanese track were 4.5 for both questions. Most of the learners (8 out of 13) in the non-Japanese track reported that they read less than 20% of the Japanese materials. The results possibly indicate that the learners should engage, as the learners in the Japanese track did, in a certain amount of reading in the target language on a regular basis in order to develop confidence in reading ability and content knowledge. Another factor that contributes to an increase of reading ability is regular attendance at tutorial sessions, which helped students comprehend the content of the reading materials.
Four factors appear to lead to the effectiveness of the model in this pilot project: the learners' high motivation, the authenticity of the task and materials, coherent team teaching between a content instructor and a language instructor, and the utilization of technology.
Although evaluation results show that students felt that the reading materials were difficult, all eight students who chose the Japanese track completed the course. The key might be found in the students' motivation and the relevant content of the reading materials. As the survey results show in Table 4, the motivation of five out of eight students who took the Japanese track was to improve Japanese reading skills, not to earn credits. If the learners' primary purpose of taking the course had been simply to earn credits, they might not have successfully completed the course. Lyon (1994) shares the same observation. Faculty members who participated in FLAC at the University of California, San Diego reported that the students in foreign language tracks were the most highly motivated students. The fact that the materials were difficult did not seem to present a problem for these students.
Students in the pilot project praised highly the relevance of the materials to the topics and stated that the materials emphasized what was covered in class and that they were interesting. For this reason, the faculty participant in the target discipline is recommended as the best person to select the material.
The success of this pilot course is strongly related to a coherent effort of the teaching staff: the content instructor and the language instructor. The pilot program was unlike other FLAC programs, almost all of which employ international graduate students who have relevant content course knowledge, but who are without any linguistic knowledge and experience of teaching the target language. We strongly recommend the hiring of graduate students who have experience in teaching the target language at advanced levels. They can provide students with specific language assistance when they encounter difficulty in reading. Most of the troubles encountered by the Japanese-track students while reading Japanese texts were linguistic problems.
>In summary, the primary purpose of this project was to examine if it was possible to implement a FLAC model in a four-year college environment and to achieve the goal of the model, that is, that learners will make meaningful use of their already developed foreign language skills in order to acquire new information in a given academic discipline. Survey and interview results provide a positive answer to this question.
This pilot study shows that the JLAC model can be implemented with a relatively small financial outlay (25% RA-ship or TA-ship), and once all the materials have been prepared for the initial course offering, it will cost even less to offer subsequent courses. The model is efficient and can be applied even if institutions have staffing and budgetary restrictions.
The JLAC model utilized in this project is quite flexible. The track of the relevant language need be offered only when the course has sufficient students who are interested. Students who are interested in the track but not sure if they can really accomplish it can try it out during the first three weeks. If they find it overwhelming, they can return to the regular English-only track.
The first step of this pilot study focused on the curriculum design with the JLAC component, implementation, and students' reaction to the approach. It did not measure the effectiveness of the approach in terms of learning. In a future study, we need to examine the effectiveness of this approach by assessing vocabulary and grammar knowledge and reading comprehension by pre- and post-tests.
This model also should be tested in other language courses where a majority of students are heritage learners. As mentioned earlier in this paper, the Japanese program offers intermediate reading and writing for heritage learners, but the course is limited to one quarter. Considering the limitations in funding and human resources experienced by all foreign language courses, it is difficult to offer upper levels of language learning for a small number of the students. Even if it were possible, it is doubtful that the learners could feel as strong a sense of language use in language courses as they seem to in FLAC courses.
In concluding, we hope that FLAC programs will be added to various college content courses so that the students with various majors and language needs can benefit from them.
We extend our heartiest gratitude to three reviewers (Dr. Alicia Muñoz Sánchez and two anonymous reviewers) for reading the first draft very carefully, providing valuable comments and suggestions, and for editing the manuscript. We also appreciate Dr. Cheryl Weigand, Managing Editor, for encouraging us to improve the first draft for publication, Dr. Patrick Kenealy, Department Editor, for editing the manuscript, and the Executive Editor for the valuable comments. Sincere thanks also goes to Dr. Mark Wiley for reading and editing the manuscript.
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Posted October 12, 2004.
Modified October 14, 2004.
All material appearing in this journal is subject to applicable copyright laws.
Publication in this journal in no way indicates the endorsement of the content by the California State University, the Institute for Teaching and Learning, or the Exchanges Editorial Board.
©2004 by Masako Douglas, Masako Tamanaha, and Shoichi Iwasaki.
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