User:LaurenGoff/sandbox

What I plan to do with my article:

It seems the majority of the article "Japanese language education in the United States" is history. So, I believe it would be best if I focused on the state of Japanese language education now -- e.g. number of programs in universities , classes in grade school, any growth or decline rates. Popular methods of Japanese pedagogy is also essential, and perhaps the numbers of students taking the AP Japanese test or Japanese majors, and the numbers who go on to use their degrees.

Japanese education in the U.S. today

Currently, Japanese is not a widely-available college major in the United States. 132 colleges in the United States (including U.S. territories) offer Japanese as an undergraduate major, while this number drops to 123 when excluding 2-year institutions. Comparatively, Mandarin Chinese, another East Asian language not usually taught in pre-collegiate schooling, fares better, with 129 4-year universities with Mandarin Chinese as a major. This increases to 133 when taking 2-year colleges into account. As for Japanese postgraduate programs, there are 23 in the U.S. (with 44 programs for Chinese, in comparison). This is out of the 4,726 degree-granting institutions in the United States that the National Center for Educational Statistics recorded in 2012-2013. However, according to the Modern Language Association, there has been a 10.3% increase in enrollment in Japanese classes in colleges and universities from 2006 (at 66,605 enrolled) to 2009 (at 73,434 enrolled). According to the Japan Foundation, the increase was 19.7% in the same period.

Japanese in pre-collegiate education is not seeing the same growth rates. In 2011-2012, there were 129,189 public and private primary and secondary schools in the US. Of this number, 30,861 were private and 98,328 were public (including charter schools). In 2007-2008, these numbers were 132,446, 33,740, and 98,916, respectively. In 2008, the Center for Applied Linguistics found that the number of Japanese classes taught in primary and secondary schools dropped from their numbers in 1987. The organization did not specify the exact numbers of any year in their executive summary of their national survey of foreign language teaching in U.S. schools, however. The number of foreign language classes in total dropped in this time period. Pre-collegiate institutions are increasing optional Japanese testing. The AP Test has a Japanese Language and Culture test, which had 666 secondary schools that offered AP Exams to one or more students, and 329 participating colleges in 2016. 2,481 students, from earlier than the 9th grade to the 12th graders, took the test in total, which was a 2% increase from 2015’s total of 2,431 students.

Evolution of textbook pedagogy

Dr. Eleanor Harz Jorden, the author of Beginning Japanese, Parts 1 and 2, wrote the first pedagogical grammar of Japanese written by a linguist. She also coauthored the widely-used Mastering Japanese textbook, along with the Foreign Service Language Institute, and Hamako Ito Chaplin. Colleagues in the field of Japanese pedagogy, such as Professor Mari Noda, say that Dr. Jorden was unusual in her time in that she insisted on the use of audio recordings to supplement the text-based grammar and vocabulary in her work . She considered social interaction and vocal language the focus of her research. Noda remade Mastering Japanese into Japanese: The Spoken Language, which is part of a larger series on Japanese that also focuses on other aspects such as the written language. Japanese textbook dialogues have changed since the 1970s. Dialogues from the 1970s were thought to be less natural and practical than they should be by educators like Jorden. For example, here is an excerpt from a 1970 textbook:

 1 J: Ohayoo gozaimasu.
		'Good morning.'
	2 Y: Ohayoo gozaimasu. Watashi wa Yamakawa desu. Anata wa
       gakusei desu ka.
'Good morning. I am Yamakawa. Are you a student?'
3 J: Hai, watashi wa gakusei desu. Watashi wa Jonson desu.
		'Yes, I am a student. I am Johnson.'
4 Y: Jonson-san wa igirisujin desu ka.
		'Mr. Johnson, are you British?'
5 J: Iie, watashi wa igirisujin dewa arimasen. Watashi wa amerikajin
	       desu.
		'No, I am not British. I am an American.'

In the Japanese version of this dialogue, the conjugation is ultra-formal for the context of a superior talking to an inferior, and pronouns and explicit subjects are used more often than would be natural.

After Dr. Jorden’s time, the trend of Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) has been to focus on reading, writing, and grammar chapters arranged by themes based on pragmatic, real-life situations. Some emphasis is also placed on communicative, “real” language. For instance, in each of the two Genki textbooks, published by the Japan Times, the content is split between a Dialogue and Grammar section and a Reading and Writing section. In the Dialogue and Grammar section, the chapters have themes such as “Asking for Directions” or “Finding a Part-Time Job”. The chapter has a long conversation, or two shorter ones, recorded on the accompanying CD-ROM, and a transcript and English translations of the conversation. Then, there is a vocabulary list with relevant definitions, grammatical lessons, and several problems (which may or may not have vocal narration in the CD). The Reading and Writing section has simple stories written in Japanese, comprehension questions about the stories, kanji with space provided for writing them, and some short cultural explanations.

Here is a short dialogue in a series of dialogues entitled "Burglar." They are in the beginning of Lesson 21 in Genki II, and are supposed to show the vocabulary that will be taught in the lesson in context:

 1 Jon: Ooyasan, taihen desu. Dorobou ni hairaremashita.
		'Ms. Landlady! I am in trouble. I had my room broken into.'
	2 Landlady: E. Nanika toraretan desu ka.
'Oh! Has something been taken?'
3 Jon: Pasokon to.....baito de tameta okane mo nai desu.
		'My computer and...the money that I've saved from my part-time job is gone.'
4 Landlady: Tonikaku, keisatsu ni renrakushita hou ga ii desuyo.
		'In any case, you should call the police.'

Junko Mori, Kimberly Jones, and Tsuyoshi Ono believe that use of cultural and discourse knowledge may be lacking in classrooms, making it so that students aren’t totally prepared for real-life interactions with native Japanese speakers. Mori used the example of doushite, a Japanese word for “why” that is frequently used in Japanese textbooks and exercises. It is a convenient counterpart for the English “why,” but has more forceful, negative connotations for Japanese speakers than “why” does for English speakers. The required sentence structure for answers to “why”-questions is more complicated, and requires that a creative explanation be formulated. Thus, according to her, doushite needs to be placed in social context more so than other grammatical terms, but often isn’t—the exchanges are used primarily as exchanges of information rather than social tools. In conversations between Japanese speakers that Mori compiled, doushite was rarely used at all to elicit information. A survey of dialogues in modern textbooks found that they are, on average, short and decontextualized, involve only two speakers, are contextless, arranged in neat question-answer pairs that are complete sentences, and are without many conversational linguistic devices.