I was recently interviewed for an article on becoming bilingual, which had many great tips from other fellow educators as well.
Check it out here!


https://www.wyzant.com/blog/language-educators-on-how-to-become-bilingual/

A couple of weeks ago we had a visitor to our Japanese classes! Ayumi san came to observe my classes and recorded some of the stuff that was going on in there and submitted it to the Sakura Radio Japanese station! 

Ayumi works for Honda Logistics in Marysville and her company has sponsored our Evening of Japanese Culture before. We are very thankful for such generous sponsors that help make trips to Japan for our students possible! 

You can stream the Japanese radio station at SakuraRadio.com for free at any time!

We really enjoyed having her in our classes and all the questions she asked both my students and me. She was wondering about our small city and how big Japanese was becoming here. My level 3 and 4 classes had a chance to interact with her in Japanese and enjoyed the challenge. She even wrote a blog about us which can be found here.

My students were able to grab a short snippet of the interview and record it on their phones :) Here is the file:

On March 4, 2017 5 Marysville students competed in the 18th Annual JASCO Speech Contest in Dublin, Ohio.

The following were the speech topics of our students:

Meghan Bradley (12th grade , MHS)" My trip to Japan"
Garrett Brown (12th grade, MHS) "My Japanese Experience"
Eve Hawley (10th Grade, ECHS) "My life"
Zack Dumbauld (10th Grade, MHS) "Photography"
Zach Shafer (10th Grade, MHS): "Singer" 

I have attended the speech contest ever since I was a student teacher, and I love watching how it has grown with various levels. When I was student teaching one of the students in our class ended up placing in the top 3. I remember how proud I was of my students even though I wasn't their real teacher, and how it felt when all the practice sessions finally paid off. 

Last year we had 4 students make it in the top 10 to compete in the contest, after only studying Japanese for 1.5 years and being in the their second year Japanese 2 class. It was so cool to see them up there competing with upper level students. Even though they didn't place in the top 3, one of our students won the pronunciation award.

Learning a second language takes courage, as it makes us vulnerable, and sometimes unsure of ourselves. Making mistakes and forcing yourself to be uncomfortable and nervous in front of people is not always easy. When things aren't easy, we usually either shut down and give up, or choose to attempt to conquer. Persevering is harder because it means that we might try, and in the end still fail. That experience in itself is worth entering the contest. Knowing that you wrote something worth performing, and then getting up on stage in front of family, strangers, teachers, and judges is both amazing and terrifying at the same time. 

When preparing for the speech contest students memorized their essays chunks at a time, and then performed them for me, for other people, for their parents, friends, and classmates. We also practiced answering questions pertaining to their essay in order to prepare for the question/answer session from the judges at the speech contest. This is essential so that students know their speeches in and out as well as feel comfortable answering questions. But truthfully, if Japanese or any foreign language is taught communicative in a proficiency-oriented setting, students will be exposed to hearing the language and be used to speaking it on a daily basis. Therefore, the question-answer session for us was not that challenging. Nerve-wracking, but not impossible. 

This year, 2 of our students ended up placing in the speech contest. Zach Shafer won the Consul General Award, which is a special prize which the Consul General awards to his favorite performer's speech. Zack Dumbauld won 2nd place in the contest. I could not have been more proud. 
I am excited to see what next year has in stock for us!


Photos:

This past November I attended the annual ACTFL Conference in Boston. As usual, there were tons of great sessions to choose from, and I had a tough time narrowing down the one I wanted to see. Many of the world language teachers, especially Japanese teachers know of Yo Azama, 2012 ACTFL Teacher of The Year. He often gives talks at the language conferences I attend, and is very popular among the Japanese teaching community. This year a session titled "Impact on the Global Citizen: Language Learning Through Social Justice" presented by Yoshiko Saito-Abbott, California State University, Monterey Bay and Yo Azama, North Salinas High School, caught my eye and I was glad I got there in time, because at some point it became standing room only! Yoshiko Saito-Abbott is also the current president of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese, or AATJ. 

Their presentation focused on implementing social justice themes into our teaching, in any world language course, but their examples were specific to a Japanese classroom setting. This could be done in any class, but what is more fitting than a world language class, where our goal is to build more culturally aware  global citizens? Aren't our classrooms the perfect safe spaces for change-making critical dialogue to take place? Are we doing our students a disservice by not creating spaces for uncomfortable conversations to take place? Who is truly uncomfortable, the teacher or the students?
Yo Azama's presentation broke down a unit which he taught in a Japanese 3 class, focusing on the theme of an "ideal city or town". His unit plan had students research various places in Japan, compare and contrast various living aspects such as crime rate, cost of living, etc., as well as discuss poverty issues and hunger in Japan and in his home town.  

I really wanted to do something like this in my own classroom, so I took the plunge and created a unit based off of his unit ideas and vocabulary. I added some words of my own which I thought would pertain to the topic, but the basis of the unit theme, activities and discussions, stemmed from his presentation. 

As a summative assessment right prior to my maternity leave, I had students create group presentations in which they researched various aspects of Japanese culture and compared them to American culture, such as homelessness, policing, soup kitchens, shelters, as well as ideal living situations and fairness vs. unfairness. I initially wanted them to create a PSA (public service announcement), but the groups each took their own spin on it, and each presentation was different, and I ended up liking the varying results. 

Below is the project outline I had for my students:
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I also had some pretty "high-level" vocabulary which guided our discussion throughout. Like I said before, I cannot take credit for any of this as I used Azama Sense's unit outline and vocabulary ideas as inspiration. If you take a look at the list below, you might at first think that these types of words are "too hard" or unreachable, but as with many aspects of language learning, if students are presented words, patterns, etc., in a meaningful context and are asked to apply it to their own lives, the idea of "hard" becomes irrelevant. I always thought difficulty was subjective and my students proved to me once again that if the topic is something they can get passionate about, then the words flow naturally out of their mouths. 

Lastly, I want to say that I believe I was able to give my students the space to bring up topics that otherwise would not be discussed in their other classes, or maybe even in their home lives. Students were given a voice to speak about their experiences and their lives in a second language. How can it get better than that?

​The Japanese program in Marysville is in its third year, offering Japanese 1, 2, and 3 at both Marysville High School and Early College High School, as well as Japanese 1 and 7th grade exploratory Japanese at Bunsold Middle School. Our program is currently the largest Japanese program in the state of Ohio with over 200 students enrolled in all three schools. We have built this program from the ground up, adding one level of Japanese at a time. I have had the pleasure to choose a relevant curriculum which is always growing and updating itself with the students’ interests and passions in mind. We don’t use a particular textbook or written curriculum. Instead, we teach high-frequency vocabulary and sentence patterns in order to get our students to be able to communicate and have useful language skills right away. Everything is contextualized and builds on itself, so students are repeatedly exposed to material until it becomes second nature.
 
Students want to learn to be able to communicate in a second language. I believe that world language programs should reflect students’ goals and teach towards language proficiency. Japanese classes here are taught in 90-100% target language from the first day of Japanese 1. The goal of our Japanese program is to have our students be able to communicate in Japanese. So often students take many years of a language without being able to hold simple conversations and exchange ideas on things that matter. We teach our students to make mistakes, grow from them, and not be afraid to speak. Students are exposed to authentic sources from the very beginning, as they are taught to take risks, guess at meaning, as well as use context clues to grasp ideas from any format of text. Japanese 1 students can analyze menus, children’s books, shopping guides, and advertisements from the first month of school. Japanese 2 students take these interpretive skills and build on them by analyzing ideas, points of view, as well as arguments in short articles, blogs, cooking videos, as well as advice columns.
 
What makes our program stand out is the rate at which we teach written characters, as well as how we incorporate grammar into our instruction. We teach the entire hiragana alphabet in the first couple weeks of school, 5 characters at a time. We then move on and introduce the katakana alphabet at the same speed, after which we teach about 100 kanji characters. All of this is done in Japanese 1. What I found with my high school experience is that the written language was introduced very slowly, and I was never taught much kanji, which hindered me in the long run. The rate at which we introduce characters allows our students to be able to read, write, and communicate much faster, as Romaji disappears from their lives 2-3 weeks into Japanese 1. Students are continuously exposed to Katakana and Kanji through almost daily authentic source analysis, making their recognition and production skills almost automatic. I am passionate about the fact that our program teaches students to communicate and produces students which can compete in speech contests after 1.5 years of Japanese language instruction. I couldn’t be more proud of the students in our program who score in the 90-99% nationally on the AATJ National Japanese Exam, as well as the student I had last year who scored 1st place nationally.
Students acquire grammatical patterns, particles, and tense changes through natural exposure to the language spoken in class, and application of the language with peers. I never discuss the meanings of particles, the names of the grammatical terms, or the conjugation of verbs. Instead, students pick up on patterns with gestures, pictures, as well as comparisons of situations and various questioning techniques. We read and act out stories, find patterns, and apply those patterns to the language that is being taught.
 
In order to build a successful language program, it is essential to advocate and lead with proficiency-based teaching practices to build a comprehensive language curriculum. In Marysville 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 Schubert Sensei’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 an introduction and connection to the overall program. It is so important to build interest at the lower grades 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!

The city of Marysville has recently signed a friendship city agreement with Yorii Machi is Saitama Prefecture, which has allowed us to create a student exchange program. We work alongside the city to foster that relationship as well as get a lot of support from local Japanese companies, as Japan is the number one foreign investor in the state of Ohio. We advocate for our Japanese program by putting on various events, such as our annual Evening of Japanese Culture, which is sponsored by local companies and showcases many examples of traditional Japanese culture and food. 

​When Ayane Hida from The University of Findlay visited our classes in January, she taught us about the importance of characters in Japanese culture. Many prefectures in Japan are known for their characters and these are used to increase tourism, sales, and create a sense of pride and unity within the community. All of our students used a pencil to draw up their own  character ideas for Marysville and MHS/ECHS. There was a common theme of lions, turtles, and of course, corn.  We narrowed it down to three designs. We picked them because they were similar in shape, simple, and had the cute factor. 

Eve Hawley, Rachel Clarridge, and Aaron Schoby designed these 3.

​This was the digitalized result:

Archie the tortoise is for Early College High School because they have a pet tortoise. It is also wearing a bandanna with gears, which symbolize the STEM school engineering focus. 

Monarch the lion is for Marysville High School because our mascot is a monarch, a strong lion and leader. (Our version is so much cuter!) 

The one in the middle, Corn-chan is just super cute and all the students in Marysville thought that corn was a symbol in our town.


We plan to utilize these characters as symbols of Marysville Japanese and sell shirts with them on it, as well as promote them during our culture events, honor society, etc.
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This year we were also able to start our very first chapter of the Japanese National Honor Society. Eligible students had to be in their second year of Japanese with a 3.0 cumulative GPA and a 3.5 in Japanese classes. Schubert Sensei and I had the distinct pleasure of inducting 22 students on April 30, 2016 and we couldn’t be more proud! The event included guest speeches by JR Rausch of Marysville, Eric Phillips of  Union County Chamber of Commerce, Damon Robinson of FT Precision Inc., Isao Shoji or Japan America Society of Central Ohio, and Jun Kawabe of Ohio Wesleyan University. Our students got to hear firsthand the wide range of benefits and experiences that studying Japanese can bring, as well as say a few words on their own about their experience studying Japanese at Marysville. The ceremony included reading of the oath in both Japanese & English, as well as a candle lighting, and a delicious reception of Japanese finger-food afterwards. It was great to get a chance to mingle with parents as well as see how Japanese has impacted students personally. The mission of the Japanese Honor Society is to serve as a bridge of international understanding between the US and Japan as well as an ambassador to promote friendship between the two countries. JNHS members will teach Japanese to elementary school students for a period of 5-8 weeks as well as serve as tutors to the lower levels of Japanese at both ECHS and MHS. Next school year we will fundraise by selling t-shirts with the amazing Marysville characters on them: Monarch the lion, Archie the tortoise, and of course Corn-chan. ​



​Here is the program from our event:

On April 5, 2016 we successfully put on our second Annual Evening of Japanese Culture, in order to advocate for our language program, showcase Japanese culture, and raise money towards the Japan trip 16 MHS students are taking on June 14.

The event included the following:
書道　calligraphy
茶道　tea ceremony
合気道 aikido
剣道 kendo
弓道　archery
踊り　dance
着物　　kimono
おもちゃ　toys
金魚すくい　goldfish game
折り紙　origami
大福 daifuku 
お好み焼き okonomiyaki
たこ焼き takoyaki
太鼓 taiko drumming

Not only were we able to raise over $5,000 to help our students,  but we also had a huge turnout, great sponsors, and amazing community and business support! We could not have done this without all of your help! You can be on the lookout for next year’s culture event on Saturday April 8, 2017. Mark your calendars!


To see a list of sponsors click here.

To view photos from this year's event please click here.

Check out our event program! 
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