Technology-Supported Learning In and Out of the Japanese Language Classroom

Advances in Pedagogy, Teaching and Research

Erica Zimmerman, Abigail McMeekin

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788923521
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book addresses several pressing concerns of teachers and researchers who are looking for ways to integrate technology use in and out of their classrooms and assess its usefulness in the learning process. It provides an up-to-date examination of technology-supported pedagogy and language acquisition in a variety of Japanese as a foreign or second language contexts. It equips readers with practical pedagogical information, including methods of implementation and learning assessment, and ideas for how technology can be applied to achieve a wide range of learning objectives. The topics examined include cultural learning, identity construction, speaking, reading, writing, pronunciation, collaborative online learning, digital and 3D virtual reality games, online text analysis, and participation in online communities. In addition, different e-learning configurations such as flipped, online, and distance learning classrooms are explored. Studies examine various current technologies (e.g. blogs, synchronous/asynchronous telecollaboration, corpus analysis software, modern pronunciation tools) and will have both direct and indirect consequences for teaching and learning a second/foreign language with technology across all languages.

1Technology Past and Present: The History of CALL and Technology for Learning Japanese

Erica Zimmerman and Abigail McMeekin

Preface

According to the latest survey by the Japan Foundation (2015: 8), the number of learners studying Japanese in second language (L2) classrooms was over 3.6 million worldwide. In addition to those learning in formal contexts, the accompanying report suggests that there is a rapidly growing cohort of learners who self-study Japanese language and culture using technology. Indeed, the dramatic increase and improvement in technological developments, the rise in popularity of Japanese pop culture, along with the increase in internet access and the boom of Japanese internet content, have created opportunities for learning and interaction in the Japanese language for both in- and out-of-class learners. The availability of authentic resources and relative ease of use of technology to study Japanese is a decidedly recent state of affairs that has not characterized previous generations. Prior to this decade, Japanese instructors struggled to incorporate technology into their teaching, dealing with issues such as poorly designed input methods for the myriad of Japanese orthographies, little to no support for Japanese word processing (remember EGWord, MacWrite II, Nisus?) and glitchy, proprietarily designed language learning software programs that were expensive and difficult to use and install. Most instructors have incorporated some level of technology in their classrooms, but did not have the time, patience, funding or expertise to create materials to use in classrooms until recently. We have come a long way since then. In fact, we now have the opposite problem. We are inundated with Japanese apps, language learning programs and websites, as well as Web 2.0 applications, all available as resources to enhance Japanese language learning/teaching. A cursory search on Google Play (August 2018) revealed more than 140 apps (many of them free) for learning various aspects of Japanese (e.g. kanji, hiragana, katakana, grammar, vocabulary, simple phrases), not to mention full language learning programs such as Rosetta Stone and the recent (long-awaited) Japanese version of Duolingo. The problem now is certainly not the lack of easy-to-use resources. It is that we are overwhelmed by the sheer number and variety of resources and do not have sufficient pedagogical and practical know-how to incorporate them into our classrooms. This volume came about as a result of being motivated to use best practices when integrating technology into our Japanese language teaching. One editor received two grants to create internet reading tasks as well as online tutorial videos to supplement in-class learning, while the other has always integrated technology into her teaching. Since the field of Japanese computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has overcome some difficult hurdles and reached a new stage of evolution, both editors were motivated to search for the newest information on best practices and learning outcomes that have been found in the research for learners of Japanese.

Having found that current Japanese CALL research offered little help in achieving our goals, we sought to help alleviate some of the unknown for not only Japanese, but all less commonly taught languages (LCTL) teachers and scholars who might be in the same situation. This edited volume thus provides examples of how recent technology is being used in acquiring, learning and teaching Japanese in and out of Japanese as a second or foreign language (JFL/JSL) classrooms. The goal is to cover the latest in technology use for a broad range of teaching objectives from the linguistic (e.g. pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar) to the social (e.g. identity, humor, communities of practice). We also aimed to provide practical advice on implementation, pedagogical methods and outcome assessment that might help someone else achieve their goals of using technology in and out of the language classroom.

Introduction

Harnessing technology to promote in- and out-of-class opportunities for learning has never been easy. It requires thoughtful reflection on the technology itself, instructional objectives, appropriate pedagogical methods and the goals of the learners. As such, CALL has attracted enormous interest in second language acquisition for the past 30 years with a noticeably dramatic increase in the last decade. Reflecting on the past 20 years of publications for Language, Learning and Technology (2016, Special Edition), Chun notes:

As Bax (2003, 2011) has proposed for CALL, I suggest that both the fields of CALL and SLA are moving in the direction of so-called normalization. Normalization for CALL refers to a state where technology is fully integrated into second language teaching and learning and is no longer special or unusual, in the way that books, pencils, and blackboards were in traditional classrooms. (Chun, 2016: 107)

This normalization of the use of technology for language learning, while usual for commonly taught languages (CTLs), is still lagging behind for less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) such as Japanese. Godwin Jones (2013: 9) aptly suggests that there are main considerations for LCTLs that teachers should include when using technology:

LCTL students early on should, for example, gain familiarity with such basics as online dictionaries (and how to use them effectively), translation services (and their limitations), keyboard layouts/input methods, and spell/grammar checkers. Important as well in the early stages of language learning are concepts which get short shrift in textbooks but which are important as foundations for longer-term learning, particularly of languages radically different from English. These include language variation (so important in many LCTLs, especially Arabic), language registers (an important cultural as well as linguistic phenomenon), and pragmatics (including sociolinguistic areas such as politeness formulas).

In the past, students who chose to study Japanese inevitably had less access to linguistic and cultural resources (whether technology-based or not) than those who studied CTLs (Blake, 2013; Godwin-Jones, 2013). In the last decade, however, better technology (Web 2.0), a boom in available materials and wider internet access in general has leveled the learning field considerably. Moreover, Japanese educators report being strongly motivated to incorporate technology use into their teaching to facilitate learning (Wiebe & Kabata, 2010). This motivation is strong, likely because Japanese, a Category IV language (US Foreign Service Institute, 2015), takes learners approximately four times longer than a Category I (e.g. Spanish, French) language to reach the same level of proficiency and technology can help to alleviate this gap. Despite the availability and sophistication of current technology as well as the motivation to use it, research that examines technology use and its effect on language learning in Japanese language classrooms is behind compared to the research conducted on more commonly taught languages. In fact, a review of learning and instruction of Japanese spanning 10 years, 2000–2010 (Mori & Mori, 2011), mentioned the use of computer-mediated instruction only once in the entire article even though this area of study has been growing slowly but steadily since 2002. More recently, major reviews of technology use in second language teaching/learning (see Golonka et al., 2014; Grgurović et al., 2013; Li & Swanson, 2014; Nagata, 2002a; Sauro, 2016; Wang & Vásquez, 2012) argue that more studies are needed on LCTLs such as Japanese and that much of the available research lacks substantive findings (Godwin-Jones, 2013; Ward, 2018).

Although certain factors (discussed below) have caused unavoidable delays in technology implementation and subsequent research in Japanese L2 classrooms, as the field has somewhat leveled, we have reached a time to stop and reflect, offer a status-quo update and suggest future directions for technology use for learning Japanese. This volume thus presents a current snapshot of how technology is being utilized both in and out of the Japanese language classroom. More importantly, it shows how current directions are breaking new ground, moving beyond the drill-based, repetitive, behaviorist/structural approach (Warschauer, 2004) of previous decades into areas of inquiry that focus on more integrative and even ecological approaches to technology use.

To this end, the authors in this volume have used both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine a broad range of technologies used in and out of the Japanese L2 classroom. The chapters cover a broad spectrum of pedagogical objectives, several of which are currently underrepresented in the Japanese L2 CALL literature, including cultural learning, interactional competence and identity construction. Different e-learning configurations are also included among the chapters such as flipped, online and distance learning classrooms. In the end, our goal was to show how different types of technology could be used as a means to enhance Japanese L2 learning (rather than replace the instructor) and meet the needs of modern students, many of whom have grown up as ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001, 2010). Understanding the difficulty and complexity surrounding the implementation of new technologies in the Japanese L2 classroom, we have also endeavored to provide specific suggestions for pedagogical implementation and analysis of learning outcomes throughout the volume.

As an introduction to this volume, this chapter first gives an overview of Japanese CALL in terms of how the history of technology combined with features of the Japanese language has affected technology use in the L2 classroom. Next, pedagogical approaches in CALL in the wider field of second language acquisition (SLA) and how Japanese CALL research has fitted into these approaches are discussed. And finally, the studies in this volume are introduced.

Japanese and Asian LCTLs: Features of Language

While there are many commonalities and important features that need careful attention when teaching an LCTL (Godwin-Jones, 2013; Ward, 2018), there are some specific features of Asian languages that have contributed to difficulties/challenges in incorporating technology in the classroom. The most common of the Asian LCTLs, Chinese, Korean and Japanese, are challenging for most native speakers of English (US Foreign Service Institute, 2015). For all three languages, one of the greatest challenges is learning the writing system. They are all written in non-alphabetic scripts but differ greatly from each other. Chinese writing consists of hanzi, characters that individually represent a word but can be combin...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1. Technology Past and Present: The History of CALL and Technology for Learning Japanese
• Part 1: Technology for Writing and Reading
• Part 2: Collaborative Online Learning
• Part 3: Creation and Analysis of CALL Programs for Learning Japanese
• Part 4: Learning Through Online Games
• Part 5: Technology Beyond the Physical Classroom
• Epilogue
• Index