"National Foreign Language Week "March 7-13, 2016. This year, the week of March 7 – 11 is designated as Foreign Language Week. This year's theme is "Language Enriches the Mind." We decided to celebrate it by creating T-shirts with the theme phrase on the back in Japanese, Spanish, and English, since those are the languages offered in our district. This amazing idea came from our middle school Japanese teacher, Tanya Schubert, who told me that she had it at her high school when she was a student and it really grew each year. We held a design contest and the middle school students submitted designs which would go on the front of the T-shirt. We then worked to get the "Language Enriches the Mind." phrase on the back in Japanese and Spanish. Language Enriches the Mind 言語習得は知性を豊かにする El lenguaje alimenta la mente Finally, we promoted the t-shirt sales with this form: They sold like crazy! Who wouldn't want a $6 t-shirt!? We all wore them today and this whole week we had various announcements and about bilinguals and language learning as a benefit to our students and society! The shirts were made by 3 B Graphics. Check them out! I definitely suggest doing this with your students as a fun way to spread the word on language learning, advocate, and most of all create a sense of unity and membership as a language learning community! Check out our photos, as well as this language poster from Middlebury!
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This past summer we were in the process of searching for a Japanese Teacher for our middle school position. This teacher would be in charge of teaching Japanese 1 at the 8th grade level, as well as developing a brand new 7th grade exploratory program, which would rotate students about every 10 weeks or so. As you can imagine, the pool of applicants was quite small, since having a Japanese K-12 licensure is quite uncommon. We ended up interviewing only two applicants; one over the phone, and one in person. During the interview I asked certain questions which would tell me more about the applicants teaching philosophy, focus in the classroom, understanding of proficiency, as well as their thoughts on assessment. We also talked about possible ideas for the 7th grade exploratory curriculum and its connection to the Japanese program overall. In the end we hired Tanya Schubert, a graduate of University of Findlay, and that was the best decision ever. In my previous blog I briefly discussed the success of our Japanese program, and how collaborating with one's coworkers to build a comprehensive language curriculum is crucial to its success. We work together to make sure that not only are our Japanese classes fun, engaging, and relevant at every level, but also to set the proficiency expectation bar high from the beginning. Our students learn about proficiency from the first day,whether in Tanya's middle school classes, or in my high school ones. We show examples of the ACTFL proficiency OPI's with learners of English, and use the SUSHI TALK I created based on Sarah Cottrell's TACO TALK. Our students know our expectations at the middle and high school level, and most importantly, the middle school classes serve as a introduction and connection to the overall program. It is so important to build interest at the lower grades for non-commonly taught languages, or all languages for that matter, so that students can anticipate taking the language for a longer period of time, and look forward to all the things they will be able to say in the future! Tanya does amazing things in her classroom to promote our program, and to teach with proficiency in mind. She speaks in the target language 90% of the time. Can you imagine having a year or two of a language class with maybe 10-20% target language spoken, and then switching teachers and going to 90%-100%? You'd have to relearn how to listen. You'd have to relearn how to process. Most of all, the students' affective filter would be so high at the beginning. You'd spend a long time just trying to break that barrier down. Using the target language as the vehicle of her instruction, Tanya not only insures that her students are comprehensibly immersed in the language, but she also sets the bar for the high school courses, insuring that our program is connected and on the same page. Tanya also does amazing things to ADVOCATE for our program. Her positivity is contagious. Her students think she's crazy and fun. This is KEY. She set up a display in the glass cases at our middle school titled "Study Japanese!" She filled it full of Japanese artifacts we had, such as fans, chopsticks, dolls, maps, etc., The middle school students pass this display daily, and this way, they can learn a little something about Japan and maybe become interested in taking the language? She has also brought up National Foreign Language Week, in which she participated in as a high school student, and how we can bring this to our students here. I am very excited for this. Lastly, she is working together with our sister city Yorii, Japan which also has a HONDA plant, to set up a successful junior high school student exchange. Last summer 6 students and 2 teachers spent about 2 weeks in Japan visiting our sister city, schools, and staying with host families as well as touring Tokyo. This summer it's our turn to host, and about 18 students are coming to stay with us in Marysville, Ohio! We are so excited for this opportunity of cultural exchange! Tanya and her invaluable experience working as a translator/interpreter and administrative assistant, working alongside Japanese employees, as well as her experience setting things up for her university exchange students, really helps bring this project to life. Having a fellow teacher like this as a coworker is an amazing asset. Stay away from the negativity. If you find one like this, cherish them, support them, mentor them, praise them, and most of all hold on to them and don't let them go!!! You can read more about Schubert Sensei by reading her self-into in our fall 2015 newsletter here. I am releasing this amazing image of both of us, in cartoon form, with our dogs. Enjoy. copyright CJ Nemastil 2015
In November I decided to do a project with my Japanese 2 students where they had to use their interpersonal speaking skills as well as their presentational speaking skills. I came upon this amazing idea accidentally, when I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and saw the following post: "OFLA Tech @OFLATech Nov 6 Have students survey one another in the TL and report results in an infographic with http://piktochart.com It's a free infograhic maker." I was in the process of teaching a unit on preferences, and students had been practicing and utilizing ways to compare things and activities, as well as give opinions on items, choices, classes, hobbies, teachers, you name it. At first I went back and forth in my head about the possible topics I could assign, or what questions I could have the students ask each other. But then I quickly realized that I did not want to sit thorough 90 presentations on the SAME SURVEY. PLUS, this was not very student-centered. I really wanted this project to be student-driven, and like the focus of my class, I wanted students to have autonomy on choosing the topic they wanted to survey. Here are my instructions for this project: I had amazing results. The students had the chance to create their own sets of questions and this led to 90 very different presentations of students' opinions, likes and dislikes, free time activities, etc. It was personalized to what the students cared about, as well as utilized fun and accessible technology, and was a new format of presentation instead of the usual PowerPoint or Prezi. I loved that the piktochart website allowed for Japanese fonts and typing capabilities and for the most part was pretty user-friendly. Mostly, this project allowed students to practice language, as well as create with language, and give feedback to others. After gathering their survey data, they compiled it into an easy-to read format with small graphs and charts, and then used those visuals to GUIDE LANGUAGE PRODUCTION. Here is a link to an inforgaphic one of my students made. If you look at the infographic, there is very little text, and no full sentences. Now, of course not all of my students' work was like this example, but I really think that this format encouraged preparation at home, as well as using the visuals just as a guide instead of the typical READING ENTIRELY OFF THE POWERPOINT SLIDE ( like they do in other subjects as well.... am I right?) Here is a short snip bit of the same student presenting his infographic: My takeaways from this idea are this:
About two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend and be a panelist at The Ohio-Japan Alumni Network event held at The Ohio State University. This event has been in the works for quite some time, as Janet Stucky from OSU has been diligently working together with various Alumni from all over the state to put it together. She has done all kind of great work related to Japan and Japanese in Ohio and you should definitely check out her work here. The goal of this program was to connect Alumni from the state of Ohio who have studied Japanese and use it in their careers with students, educators, and other alumni. Many universities from all over Ohio were represented at this event including OSU, Denison University and University of Findlay. The alumni who spoke at this event showed possible career paths with Japanese, offered job opportunities and networking, and were able to serve as mentors to future professionals in the field. They not only spoke about their journey as students, but were also able to showcase the steps they took and how they got to different places in their careers. It was really cool to hear other people’s paths and journeys with Japanese, and how all of us had various interests along the way. We all used Japanese as a tool to get to where we are today. We had various travel and study experiences, and none of us really had a straight path to the careers we have currently. It was the unique combination of experiences and studies which we shared that differentiated us from our peers. This event was a great networking opportunity among alumni as well as a helpful mini career fair for current students and individuals looking for career ideas. The alumni and panelists met during lunch and brainstormed various ideas for growing our network, as well as subdividing the state of Ohio into smaller areas and defining ways to reach out and connect within the universities of that area. The link to the OH-JAN webpage is here. Please visit for more upcoming events and contact information for the panelists. Videos from the event and interviews of the Alumni with their stories can be found here. They are being uploaded currently, so stay tuned. If you are an Ohio Alumni and are interested in contributing with your story, please submit information and a video of how your career is related to Japan here. More photos from the event can be found here. My big takeaway from this is stay connected, network, network, network, and continue your Japanese studies. You never know where they will take you! States where studying Japanese is prevalent, you should definitely think about creating your own alumni group as a way to stay connected and to see what your graduates are doing! Since we began offering Japanese at Marysville High School last year, we have also created a Japanese culture club. We meet weekly on Tuesdays after school and discuss various aspects of Japanese culture, history, food, etc. The students take turns researching topics they are interested in, and creating presentations while leading discussions with their classmates. This has been pretty efficient and students end up taking their research to the next level and applying it to their classroom learning.
My husband and I are active members of the Japan America Society of Central Ohio JASCO, and we regularly attend their History Club monthly meetings and other fun events related to Japan. About a month ago, at one of our History Club meetings, I met Chie Schuller, from THK Manufacturing, who exchanged her contact information with me. She reached out to me right away and said that her company was very interested in doing outreach and invited our students to tour the facility. On Tuesday October 20, the Japanese Club members and I took an hour-long bus ride to Hebron Ohio and had the opportunity to meet the President, HR personnel, as well as the translators and interpreters for this company. My students were so excited to see how the language that they have been studying and working on is so beneficial and applicable right here in Ohio. Japan is the number one foreign investor in our state and it is important that we all advocate for its relevance and need. When we arrived we had a panel introduction of the President and director, and my students got to see firsthand how the interpreters worked simultaneously to interpret the English spoken language into Japanese and vice versa for the THK personnel. My students also got a chance to introduce themselves and tell the company why they were interested in Japanese and why they chose to study the language. One of my Japanese 2 students even did her entire introduction in Japanese! I was so proud! After meeting the staff, our students got their very own guided tour of the facility. We got to see how the metal parts are made and assembled as well as how well the robots worked to assist the humans! Afterwards, THK was gracious enough to provide us with some awesome pizza for dinner, as our students participated in round table discussions and Q & A sessions with the interpreters and translators. They asked some very insightful questions, such as the interpreters' biggest struggles and challenges, why they chose to study Japanese, and how to improve language skills. Overall, this was very productive and my students even wished they had more time to talk! I am so excited to be able to offer opportunities such as this one to our kids here at Marysville. Students need to take their language learning outside of the classroom and see its real-life applications and possible future career options. I strongly encourage teachers of non commonly taught languages, as well as common world languages to seek opportunities in and outside of their community to get students excited about what they are learning. We need to advocate for our programs and for the importance of learning another language. Take advantage of your connections and colleagues. You never know who your students can connect with! |
AuthorI am a high school Japanese teacher developing my own comprehensive and communicative Japanese program in Marysville, Ohio. Archives
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