My journey from Japanese learner to teacher began the moment I almost died of embarrassment after a videotaped teaching practicum that was the culmination of a six-month Japanese teaching course offered through the JET Program. Although I was pretty confident in my language ability, having studied and worked in Japan for nearly four years by then, I realized I was horribly unprepared to transfer this expertise onto others. That was nearly a decade ago, and fortunately, I feel that I’ve come a long way as a teacher since then.
My teaching focuses on having learners perform in Japanese, which requires awareness of both the setting and participants in an interaction, as well as attention to accurate language usage. Japanese is both linguistically, and in many ways culturally, distant from English. For example, if we imagine the setting of a lesson being a busy Japanese office, and two students were assigned the roles of employees from separate companies, how would they make, and respond to, a phone call asking if their supervisor was in? The in-group/out-group relationship between the two conversants would require that each student make (at least) three linguistic choices they may not be accustomed to doing: 1) to use different verbs (irassyaimasu—orimasu) to refer to the supervisor’s being in the office 2) whether or not to add the honorific suffix (sama—san) after the supervisor’s name and 3) to maintain appropriate distance by speaking in a polite register (masu—desu). So, for English-speaking JFL learners, this brief, everyday interaction is not so simple to perform authentically. I believe that a balance of these types of in-class Japanese performances combined with linguistic training, conducted in English at the lower proficiency levels, is vital for developing confident—and culturally appropriate—language users.
Teaching demos:
Here are the links to a couple of sample Japanese lessons I’ve taught. The first is a clip of the one-on-one Individualized Instruction course I am currently teaching, and the second is a standard classroom lesson.
1st-year Japanese (Individualized Instruction) 1101.51
1st-year classroom Japanese 103.01
Courses taught:
Japanese 1101, 1102, 1103 (First & Second year Japanese)
Japanese 509 (Third year Japanese)
Japanese 1101.51, 1102.51, 1103.51 (First year Individualized Instruction)
Japanese 1104.51 (Second year Individualized Instruction)
Coordination experience:
Japanese Individualized Instruction (1101.51-1104.51)
Study abroad:
Teaching Assistant on OSU Quarter in Kobe Program (Shoin Joshi Daigaku)