This is a joint showcase with Yuka Wada, Tomoko Iwai, and Emi Murayama.
Title: Instructor
Department: East Asian Languages & Literatures
College/School: College of Arts, Language & Letters
Showcase Course: JPN101, 102, 201, 202
Email: mogasawa@hawaii.edu
“classroom teaching must include such cultural and interactive practices in addition to traditional grammar and vocabulary, and support learners to develop competence in participating effectively and appropriately in a context closely related to and reflective of their own experiences.”
Table of Contents
Teaching Philosophy
The Musubi curriculum is based on the following ideas about language. First, learning a language goes beyond putting together a grammatical sentence, but includes the knowledge and competence to participate appropriately and effectively in various interactions in the target language. It includes competence in co-constructing such social meanings as sociability, rapport, or appropriate professionalism. This competence enables learners to express their foreign language persona and identity that are consistent with what they wish to present themselves as. Second, conversation is a fluid and rich interactive process that is co-constructed between the participants on the spot. And yet, it has a predictable organization and conventions that are universal and/or culturally specific. Third, classroom teaching must include such cultural and interactive practices in addition to traditional grammar and vocabulary, and support learners to develop competence in participating effectively and appropriately in a context closely related to and reflective of their own experiences.
Teaching Practice
Our experience with instruction that utilized the most widely-used Japanese textbooks showed us it was difficult for students to develop competence in oral communication. Those textbooks present example dialogues that sound unnatural and robotic as they exist primarily to introduce new grammar and vocabulary. The dialogues also often provide no situational context with which to make sense of the purpose of an interaction. The lack of all the specifics of the context makes the interaction generic and unrealistic. For the Musubi curriculum, we developed dialogs that are based on authentic discourse, and therefore, provide students with examples of interactions that are natural and real, and are situated in Hawai‘i so that students can use the target language with a sense of reality.
The goal of the Musubi curriculum is to help students gain fluency in both oral and written Japanese so they can accomplish real-life actions using Japanese. Here, we will focus on our groundbreaking new approach of viewing language teaching from a discourse perspective, focusing on the whole conversation as action rather than teaching new grammar points and vocabulary in individual sentences. Our teaching practice helps students learn how real-life actions are done in Japanese, using dialogs that showcase how grammatical, pragmatic, lexical, and other resources are used by the participants in order to achieve an action together. Then, students go through a series of practice from grammar and vocabulary usage and guided conversational practice, to actually engage in their own conversation with their partners on the spot. The whole teaching practice aims to foster students’ competence in participating in a given conversation with their own unique contribution while using the resources they learned from the dialog. Our approach is two-fold as described below.
First, our approach rests heavily on the dialogs we created based on authentic conversations. They include features of natural conversational discourse such as conversational structure, pragmatic strategies, pragmatic resources, grammatical structures and vocabulary. The dialogs differ in goal, tone and content depending on the kind of talk. Some are small talk, some are goal-oriented talk that involves decision-making, some are more information-focused, and others are pure transactional talk. At first, students need to know what kind of talk they are going to engage in. Then, they learn how the conversation unfolds by learning turn-taking strategies while learning the content of the talk. The conversational structures may seem unpredictable to a layperson. However, we know from research that there is certain predictability in conversation, such as turn-taking systems, conversational strategies, and the kind of resources (grammatical, lexical, pragmatic, etc.) that are used. The turn-taking system includes listening strategies that play a crucial role in conversation as well. By learning this information explicitly, students gain a framework on which to build their own participation in a given conversation. Most widely-used Japanese textbooks use dialogs to teach new grammar items and vocabulary, but do not use dialogs to actually teach how conversation is accomplished by participants. Further, our dialogs cover a wide range of emotions such as happiness, alignment, empathy, surprise, bewilderment, disappointment, etc., not just by vocabulary but through various resources and strategies. This gives students resources to express themselves and engage in a conversation fully. This innovative teaching practice on conversation is truly groundbreaking.
Further, dialogs also showcase cultural aspects of talk. Cultural aspects of talk are abundant in everyday conversation. Lack of knowledge about the cultural nature of talk often presents pitfalls to foreign speakers in interaction with Japanese people. This is not fully addressed by most widely-used textbooks, and teachers are often not trained in this aspect of language. Our curriculum emphasizes cultural appropriateness with explicit descriptions of Japanese cultural practices so that the students are equipped with the knowledge necessary to navigate through intercultural encounters. The explicit explanation also helps teachers with less experience who may not be aware of the importance of some of the cultural practices.
Another feature of our curriculum is that we use Hawai‘i settings and Hawai‘i-related topics for interactions, enabling students to use Japanese in their daily lives in Hawai‘i. It also gives students opportunities to deepen their awareness of Hawai‘i regarding its geography, history and cultural practices. This theme culminates toward the end of two-years where students talk about their own family history, their ethnic background, and explore their own identity as a young person in Hawai‘i (or where they are from).
Secondly, in addition to the content of the dialog, the other pillar of our teaching practice is how to use the wealth of information in the dialogs in order to help students develop competence in participating in real conversations, and accomplish real-life tasks. Classroom activities are strategically created in steps toward this end goal. The first activities involve students practicing mechanical aspects of the resources, e.g., pragmatic (turn-taking, affect-building, strategies for certain actions, etc.), grammatical, or lexical. The target for learning is isolated from the dialog and practiced in short drills or exchanges. After this, students use them in context, usually in short guided exchanges that are consistent with the target conversation. After they gain fluency in short exchanges, they actually perform the target conversation with their partners as if they were in a real situation. This third step is the heart of our teaching practice. Here, students bring their own life into the activity, talking as themselves in performing the given action. The teachers’ job here is to be by their side and help them through this process. Students are reminded that this is a conversation, not practicing grammar and vocabulary in order to foster an orientation that their end goal is communication. To help them with this goal, we also teach troubleshooting strategies to elicit help from their conversation partner. Throughout the various stages of practice, teachers give feedback not only on the correctness of their talk but also on the appropriateness or the robustness of their interaction.
With the use of dialogs and the ensuing oral practices, our teaching practice helps develop students’ competence in participating in unscripted interactions with Japanese people naturally and effectively.
Impact
We conduct unscripted oral tests twice in each semester to measure students’ progress in their oral communication skills. The oral tests are conducted one on one with an instructor to control performance variability. All oral tests are done in a role-play format with realistic tasks that students must achieve in a given conversation. The students must co-construct the conversation with the teacher on the spot. The vast majority of the students pass these tests. From our oral tests, we observed that students have consistently developed their ability to interact in Japanese in a given situation. We have especially noticed improvements in the naturalness of their interaction, their ability to engage and sustain the conversation, and their ability to co-construct their conversation with a partner in a pleasant and culturally appropriate interaction. We showed the video clips of our students’ performance in a workshop to colleagues from other institutions in and out of Hawaii, and many of them also commented on the active engagement and the natural delivery by our students and attributed their success to the Musubi curriculum. Many of the workshop participants stated that they would adopt our approach as part of their own curriculum. Our textbooks are available in the Open Educational Resource (OER) depository at UH. We offer a cost-free pdf of our textbook to the students to ensure that all students have access to the textbook. Students also have a choice to purchase a printed version from MaPS. So far, the US Naval Academy, the University of Hawaii-Hilo, and Maui College have adopted our textbooks.
On the writing side, semester-final writing projects in the Musubi curriculum also showed positive results as to students’ writing competence. Through the strategically progressing series of topics from “self-introduction” in 101, “family” in 102, “favorite town” in 201 to “family history” in 202, students successfully learned to write according to the purpose and audience of the task, and learned writing-specific conventions in Japanese alongside the importance of effective revisions.
The course evaluations by the students also confirm the effectiveness of our teaching approach with positive comments on our curriculum/textbook. The following are excerpts of actual student voices:
“I believe that Lesson 15 where we talked about Hawai’i History and Culture in Japanese was really important lesson for me. It allowed me to build off from what I learned in a history class I took last semester (ES330 Japanese in Hawaii). In addition, this specific lesson allowed me to learn more about myself and my family background through the class project. I never would have thought I would be able to talk about my family background in Japanese.
“The textbook was really helpful. It has a lot of dialogue examples … I also really appreciate the listening videos. They show what a real conversation would be like, demonstrating the appropriate mannerisms and gestures.”
“Improving my speaking skills in Japanese, the course was more directed toward actual speech rather than the writing. This is more applicable toward real life situations and helped out students who have part time jobs where they encounter Japanese tourist.”
“I found the dialogues most valuable …, so being able to read dialogues helped me understand the conversation flow so that it was easier to actually listen and talk.”
“I liked how many of the topics correlated to living in Hawai’i …”