Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

An interactive approach to advanced Japanese.

Article Excerpt
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...