I've been away from the site for awhile, working toward finishing graduate school and looking for a job. I'm applying to teach Japanese at the college level, and I'm making up some sample syllabi to show what I'd do in class and what I'd cover in a semester. I know you all have lots of opinions about what one should and shouldn't do to master Japanese, so I'd like to ask your advice. I'd be very thankful for good ideas.

What would your dream Japanese class be like?

But now, realistically, what would that class be like if it had to be a normal American college course with grades and textbooks and a non-native teacher?

What textbooks (Nakama? Genki? Yookoso? Japanese the Spoken Language?) and study materials would you use? What kinds of activities would you want to have in class or for homework? What would be the most effective way to grade so as to get folks motivated to actually achieve fluency in the long run (ie. could you work in some great software and self-study stuff as a legitimate part of the class)? What about ways to connect long-distance with native speakers? How would you want to have kanji taught -- could you use _Remembering the Kanji_ somehow? Are there goals on smart.fm that would be especially helpful?

I personally find the Genki textbooks to be the best resource for teaching elementary Japanese classrooms. If you're looking for activities to supplement the course then reading "80 Communication Games for Japanese Language Teachers" might be useful. It's written by one of the authors of Genki.

I think that using penpals is a fantastic resource in classrooms. My personal suggestion is to have students create accounts at the japan-guide.com forums, and for each grammar point they learn in the class, send a message to one of the Japanese classifieds utilizing that grammar point. It demonstrates they know the grammar, as well as allowing them to use it with actual Japanese people. Getting them talking to penpals is also a great way to boost their motivation, and they'll have an easy tool to practice as much Japanese as they want. Of course their conversations with their penpals remain private, and they only have to show their teacher the initial post using the grammar point.

Thank you, Aijin! I'll look for the book and check out japan-guide.com.

I really can't see classroom learning with the standard 30:1 ratio. But, as for contacting native speakers, I use lang-8.com a lot. I enjoy correcting others', and when I post, I get a lot of good corrections. I really need to post more, though.

lang-8.com looks nice. I haven't made an account, yet, but I'll try it out sometime.

I know there are negative aspects to learning in a big classroom, but a lot of learners start out that way. I did, too. But, if I'd only had the high school and college classes, I wouldn't have gotten all that far with it. I guess I'm looking for some way to incorporate/motivate self-study in a way that can be tested so as to give grades in a fair way. I could assign RTK or anki or smart.fm, but since those adapt to the individual learner, I don't know how they'd work in connection with a class. I guess you could assign a set of vocabulary, suggest study methods, and test. But, if the vocab is different than in the textbook or translated differently, it could be confusing.

Aijin Wrote:My personal suggestion is to have students create accounts at the japan-guide.com forums, and for each grammar point they learn in the class, send a message to one of the Japanese classifieds utilizing that grammar point.....

I'm still thinking about how this would work. I guess it would be part of a homework grade? It seems like it could be great as an exercise, assuming there are enough Japanese speakers on those forums to respond to the whole class for every grammar point.

My suggestion would be to count it as homework, in the same way that the workbook sheets for grammar points are counted. If I remember correctly there are literally dozens of new classifieds every single day on japan-guide.com, so there should be more than enough natives for the students to contact. Alternatively, if a student already has Japanese penpals, then it seems more than fair to allow them to practice the grammar point with them, and just copy and paste it from MSN/e-mail/Facebook/Skype/whatever.

Self-study for classrooms is a tricky thing, as for elementary classes the majority of students usually aren't all that inspired to learn the language. Most are either taking it for GE, or have a general interest inspired by anime/manga, and won't be willing to put in many hours outside of the classroom, and it may even make them resent you and the language. Introducing self-study ideas is important to help along those more passionate and dedicated students, and for the others to use if they feel like advancing more. The reality is, though, that very few students that enroll in an elementary class will continue learning the language in the years to come.

Another idea is to offer prizes for the best scores on finals/mid-terms, as it not only motivates students to study more, but for the students who are really passionate and dedicated to Japanese, will give them a lot of gratification to see them succeed, as well as giving them materials to further their own studies. A volume of CoroCoro comics, or Doraemon, or even a simple kid's book, are great prizes. And if you have a lot of materials you used during your learning, and no longer need, then it's a perfect chance to give 'em away

All in all, just try to make the class fun as possible, and hopefully inspire them to keep learning Japanese! Try to provide them with as many suitable media sources as possible, as textbooks alone can be pretty dry. What I do is, whenever I'm reading something and come across a grammar point my students are learning, I photocopy, make a vocabulary list for unknown words, and then use those as examples. When students realize they're reading REAL resources, like segments of manga and books, they feel a lot more accomplishment than just using the textbook stuff.

Of course there are copyright issues, but nobody is going to care if you photocopy a page of a manga or book

When doing intro classes most people don't care enough to study because they are mainly taking those classes for GEs. But, you should still give them the resources to learn. So give them sites likes Anki,lang-8,etc.... Also if I would start over again I would not start with a book at all. I would just get books like all about the particles,japanese verbs made easy, japanese basic grammar dictionary, and maybe the furigana dictionary. The reason I say this is that the kids will not focus only on learning words from text book. They will go out and try to read real material and learn how to get through it on their own.

Hope this helps and just a quick question how did you get this job because i one day might want to teach.

Get Kana out of the way within the first week or two. No reason to put it off. I'm not sure how my dream lessons for Kanji would be but I'd want to be taught something about them. I wouldn't want them ignored. But I think RTK is more of a go at your own pace type "course". I suppose you could attempt RTK Lite, as it would be more useful then the base set, but I have no idea how best to go about it in a class setting.

I feel audio is very important. Your voice shouldn't be the only Japanese they hear, so be sure your students get to listen to some native spoken source each class. Be it some bit from Assimil or a random YouTube clip.

Encourage students to study on their own. Tell them to watch native material. Make them aware of SRS but don't force them to use it.

1） Make attendance a huge part of the grade -- not just the classroom but with reviewing/practice. For example, you could require 10-20 min. of Smartfm and 1 journal in lang-8 a week. Inspire them to use Japanese everyday by creating "graded assignments" that are mainly attendance.

2) I hated kanji quizes!!! They usually test onyomi and not that is susch a bad thing but we never actually learned practical Japanese that way. Now, "Write とうきょう“ kind of quizes are easier, because real words are easier to understand than abstract readings, and also more practical.

3) Find a varied bunch of movies, artists and books (or a list with samples or something) and make it available to students. There was one school that lent out a different manga every week to students. That's motivating!

4) I learned to read ひらがな and カタカナ before I spoke Japanese. I teach Japanese at my HS for a semester program. (My homeroom teacher really went out of her way to make it possible.) In my Japanese classroom I went immediately to ひらがな and then to basic Japanese and then カタカナ. (So they would solidify their understand of how Japanese writing/phonetics works ) Now they may not be college students but I'm really proud of their development -- we, in roughly 1 month, learned the equivilent of Genki 1 (without kanji) and with good pronunciation too! I have a bunch of material if you are interested.

5) We use languages to speak to each other, right? In every class I have ever taken they completely ignore this "consept" that languages are socail. The teacher gave lectures and answered questions -- except if you asked too many like me. Maybe a chat/game time would be a great way to fix this?

Be confident, if you are not confident in yourself then neither will your students.
頑張ってくださいね！！

Edit]
"Get Kana out of the way within the first week or two. No reason to put it off."
This is exactly what I think and did and it seems to work. (Abeit, a bit slow in the first 5 lessons.)

Aijin Wrote:My suggestion would be to count it as homework...

Self-study for classrooms is a tricky thing....

Another idea is to offer prizes for the best scores on finals/mid-terms....

All in all, just try to make the class fun as possible, and hopefully inspire them to keep learning Japanese! Try to provide them with as many suitable media sources as possible...

Thank you, Aijin! Sounds like you are a very sensible but fun teacher. This gives me a lot to think about.

andres9888 Wrote:. . . The reason I say this is that the kids will not focus only on learning words from text book. They will go out and try to read real material and learn how to get through it on their own.

Hope this helps and just a quick question how did you get this job because i one day might want to teach.

Thank you, Andres. Using a variety of materials does sound good.

For teaching language at the college level, you'd probably want a PhD in Japanese language, literature, or linguistics. A master's degree and some experience would also work, especially for high school teaching.

You could look at http://deall.osu.edu/programs/summerPrgm...m#teaching or http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ealac/japanese/pedagogy.html

Daichi Wrote:Get Kana out of the way within the first week or two. No reason to put it off. I'm not sure how my dream lessons for Kanji would be but I'd want to be taught something about them....
I feel audio is very important. Your voice shouldn't be the only Japanese they hear, so be sure your students get to listen to some native spoken source each class. ...

Encourage students to study on their own. Tell them to watch native material. Make them aware of SRS but don't force them to use it.

Thank you, Daichi. Yes, I wouldn't want students to only hear my voice. I think kana should come as early as possible, but I have heard arguments for using romanization at the beginning.

gyuujuice Wrote:1） Make attendance a huge part of the grade -- not just the classroom but with reviewing/practice. For example, you could require 10-20 min. of Smartfm and 1 journal in lang-8 a week. Inspire them to use Japanese everyday by creating "graded assignments" that are mainly attendance.

2) I hated kanji quizes!!! They usually test onyomi and not that is susch a bad thing but we never actually learned practical Japanese that way. Now, "Write とうきょう“ kind of quizes are easier, because real words are easier to understand than abstract readings, and also more practical.

3) Find a varied bunch of movies, artists and books (or a list with samples or something) and make it available to students. There was one school that lent out a different manga every week to students. That's motivating!

4) I learned to read ひらがな and カタカナ before I spoke Japanese. I teach Japanese at my HS for a semester program. (My homeroom teacher really went out of her way to make it possible.) In my Japanese classroom I went immediately to ひらがな and then to basic Japanese and then カタカナ. (So they would solidify their understand of how Japanese writing/phonetics works ) Now they may not be college students but I'm really proud of their development -- we, in roughly 1 month, learned the equivilent of Genki 1 (without kanji) and with good pronunciation too! I have a bunch of material if you are interested.

5) We use languages to speak to each other, right? In every class I have ever taken they completely ignore this "concept" that languages are social. The teacher gave lectures and answered questions -- except if you asked too many like me. Maybe a chat/game time would be a great way to fix this?

Be confident, if you are not confident in yourself then neither will your students.
頑張ってくださいね！！

Edit]
"Get Kana out of the way within the first week or two. No reason to put it off."
This is exactly what I think and did and it seems to work. (Abeit, a bit slow in the first 5 lessons.)

Lots of good ideas, Gyuujuice! Thank you. Alas, the confidence bit may be the hardest part of your advice.

I learned kana right at the beginning, too, and I don't know why that's not more common. My first high school textbook didn't have any Romanization at all, only kana and English plus a few kanji in the later lessons. The teacher had to give us a crash course in hiragana before we could open the text.

I like the idea about incorporating online study into the participation grade. I'm not sure how I'd check it, but I guess it is possible to see someone's progress on the profile page for smart.fm. Also, maybe the sample sentences from the recommended self-study list could magically appear on exams, as long as the sentences didn't present any material not in the textbook and official homework.

Testing kanji in context rather than in isolation does make sense when you're putting in the reading. Multiple readings can be confusing.

Congratulations on accomplishing so much with your students! Did you make the class social and include chats and games? How and what?

They go over alphabet first in Spanish classes, usually. English speaking students know most of the letters already, but there are two new ones to learn and each letter sounds different.

My ideal Japanese class is where you do "What's this word or phrase thread" for basically the whole class. Obviously that won't work for beginners. I don't know how a class like that would work. Maybe like this:

Your task is to read the manga of your choice...you're tasked with writing plot summaries of each chapter in English. You meet with the teacher once per week to ask about unknown words and phrases.

Gyuujuice I think has a lot of ideas I'd like to see incorporated into the proverbial ideal Japanese class.