Increasing Diversity of Japanese Language Teachers : Approaches to Teaching-Related Professional Development for College Students in North America

Attribution 4.0 United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Japanese Language and Literature Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese jll.pitt.edu | Vol. 54 | Number 2 | October 2020 | https://doi.org/10.5195/jll.2020.139

teaching as a possible career. I will share approaches that I take in my work, as well as activities conducted by and with colleagues. I will discuss a range of approaches to increasing teacher diversity by promoting language teaching as a possible career. The University of Washington has comparatively well-resourced Japanese studies and Japanese language programming compared to other universities in our area, which may allow us to implement more strategies than universities with smaller programs. To be maximally useful to faculty from Japanese programs of various sizes and with various faculty specializations, I will organize these according to the nature of resources needed to implement these strategies, beginning with strategies that are the easiest and cheapest to implement. The strategies I will present include (1) advisement, (2) guest lectures, (3) instructional units related to foreign teaching and learning, (4) teachingrelated internship programs, and (5) courses on Japanese second language acquisition and teaching methods, where I will present a new course on teaching JFL in North America and teaching English in Japan.

Advisement
Student advisement is a natural place to begin in helping students to consider teaching as a possible future career. Students welcome conversations about career possibilities. We cannot direct their career choices, but we can mention teaching-related careers and provide information about K-12 and higher education teaching, depending on their skills and interests. I have found that students and community members who are exploring teaching as a career often begin with very little knowledge of what is involved. They need to understand the job qualifications required for different sorts of teaching positions, including the language skills that are required, the types of training required for different sorts of positions, and the level of academic skill needed for different kinds of teacher-training programs. For example, some students think that if they get an M. A. in Japanese linguistics they can get a job as a K-12 teacher (not realizing that what they need is to be certified to teach a language, which is not a function of Japanese M. A. programs); that with an M. A. in Japanese in hand, they will be able to get a full time job teaching Japanese in their city of preference; or that a Ph. D. is a vocational degree that, once obtained, assures them a job as a university professor. Students also need guidance regarding the availability of full-time openings commensurate with their language skills and planned educational path. I often direct students and community members to two resources: (1) the Japan Foundation Los Angeles' (JFLA) webpage "Becoming a Japanese Language Teacher" and (2) the "Jobline" website of the American Associations of Teachers of Japanese (AATJ). While somewhat oriented toward people from Japan, the JFLA page offers information that is both helpful and realistic (for example, pointing out that college teaching positions for those with M. A. degrees are often term-limited appointments), along with giving an orientation to the process of becoming a K-12 teacher, which is unfamiliar to many. For students interested in college/university teaching, the AATJ Jobline is a place to see the kinds of openings that are available as well as the qualifications required for different types of positions. Looking over these resources is helpful for those considering teaching in deciding if they want to continue by taking next steps toward a particular type of career.

Guest Lectures
Our connections with local Japanese language teachers are very helpful to students. Of course, our in-house university/college teachers can give talks about their own career paths to becoming college faculty. Local Japanese teachers, including alumni who have become Japanese teachers and work nearby, are also excellent resources to invite to give guest lectures. Figure  1 shows a flyer for a recent talk that we sponsored. The speaker is an example of a home-grown teacher and a University of Washington graduate who has a heritage language background in Japanese ( Figure 1).
Another way of promoting language teaching as a career for U. S. citizens and permanent residents is to promote the JET Program. Because we live in a city with a Japanese consulate, each year a JET representative comes to campus to talk to students. In addition, we invite returnee JET participants to come and talk about their experiences. The JET Program provides teaching experience and is a common first step toward a teaching career for those learning Japanese in college. JET also provides the student committed to the work of immersing themselves in Japanese-speaking communities in Japan with opportunities to develop their Japanese language and cultural skills, providing them with the strong language skills necessary to become a Japanese language teacher. Figure 2 depicts a flyer from an event where we invited three local JET alumni to talk about their experiences with students.

Instructional Units Related to Japanese Teaching or Learning
Teaching a unit in a language class or content class about Japan that relates to second/foreign language development or language teaching and learning can open conversations about teaching as a possible career. In my course on minority languages in Japan, I have a unit on bilingual development and a unit on English in Japan, for example. In the latter, I include research on the JET Program. In my Japanese discourse analysis class, I cover interlanguage pragmatics and discuss research on pedagogical applications of the findings of discourse analysis. Might a literature course touch on L2 writers? Might a social sciences course consider Japanese diaspora and education issues, or touch on language policy? In language courses we can coach students to be teachers for one another, have students take turns as "teacher," or connect with local schools where Japanese is taught to provide classroom volunteers. Japanese faculty can also share their own career path stories during informal moments, which encourages future conversations with students about their own Japanese-related career paths. Students who are working to envision their own future careers find stories from role models to be helpful, and such conversations can lead to more formal advisement opportunities related to career development to help students who might be interested in teaching to consider various possibilities.

Teaching-Related Internship Program
Since Spring Quarter 2018, we have been offering a teaching internship course that I developed in order to give students an opportunity to explore language teaching as a possible career. Catalog copy for the course is shown in Figure 3. Our course offers students the possibility of interning in university courses for any of the languages that we teach.  Students can do a one credit or a two-credit internship, for three or six hours per week. Interns do not replace the duties of faculty or teaching assistants but work as supplementary helpers. To sign up for an internship, a student meets with the faculty member who teaches the course where they would like to intern to discuss possible duties. If the faculty member agrees to have the student as an intern, they together plan student duties, which are shown on an agreement form, and the student then enrolls in the course ( Figure 5). The course also requires students to submit a written reflection paper describing their experience. As of Winter Quarter 2020, twenty students have enrolled, eleven interning in Japanese language courses. An article in our newsletter features this course (Asian Languages and Literature 2019). One intern noted that the internship "really made me question my own baseline language skills.… I had forgotten why certain grammar points exist the way they do" (8). She also enjoyed watching students develop and considers teaching to be a possible career option. Another intern said that his experience sparked his interest in applying for the JET program and that "it was a great experience both in lesson planning and testing the limits of my own Japanese language capabilities" (8).
Helping in a foreign language classroom, doing tutoring, or materials development may prompt deeper consideration of language teaching careers. An internship also provides stronger qualifications for teaching language in Japan, where students can further develop their linguistic and cultural competence, which is prerequisite to becoming a Japanese language teacher.
We are at early stages of including a service-learning opportunity for students studying Japanese and other Asian languages. Few resources are required to do an in-house internship such as this, which is supervised, onsite, by the faculty member in whose course the student interns. I have been thinking of how we might expand our course to reach more students by providing opportunities for teaching-related internships in a broader range of settings. Fitzgerald (2010) describes including an optional service-learning component in an undergraduate course, connecting students with outside agencies. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) offers a foreign language teaching internship course that places undergraduates in local K-12 public school classrooms as tutors or classroom assistants (Polansky 2004, Polansky et al. 2010). CMU's course goes beyond ours in including a syllabus of readings, assignments and journaling designed to promote tutor reflection and development. The faculty supervisor also does site visits as the main instructor supervising the internship course. I am exploring possibilities related to expanding service-learning opportunities for our students.

Courses on Japanese Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Methods
Since I am an applied linguist, teaching in my own field provides a natural avenue for raising issues related to Japanese language development. In this section I will introduce two undergraduate courses, one on Japanese second language acquisition (SLA), and a new course in development on teaching/learning foreign language in the Japan context.

The Acquisition of Japanese as a Second or Foreign Language
This course provides many opportunities for students to think about how Japanese language skills develop. I also include a unit on language acquisition in JFL classrooms. The catalog description is shown in Figure  6. Because the students are Japanese majors/minors and students who know Japanese because they are from Japan or grew up using Japanese at home, I teach SLA by connecting to their own language-learning experience by focusing on topics such as language learning motivation, classroom interaction, study abroad, and language and emotion. For their term paper, students do an interview project; as part of the course, I teach interview research methodology. Each quarter, some students decide to interview language teachers, while others interview learners of Japanese. Seeing the course's success in nurturing interest in language teaching among some students, I wondered how to help students to develop further in this area.

A Japanese-Focused Teaching Methods Course for Undergraduates
I have recently designed a new course entitled "Foreign Language Teaching in the Japanese Context: English in Japan and Japanese in North America." The catalog description is shown in Figure 7. The goal of this course is to provide a practical and hands-on overview of foreign language teaching methodology, to prepare students for careers teaching Japanese as well as for EFL jobs in Japan. Teaching English in Japan provides an immediate career option for new college graduates with native or near-native English skills. Completing a college course on the topic of foreign language teaching will distinguish students who have taken this course as compared to typical college graduates without such training. Meanwhile teaching in Japan can move motivated students toward the advanced proficiency and cultural competence needed to teach Japanese professionally. In searching for models to inspire course design, I found examples of Japanese foreign language teaching courses for undergraduates at Portland State University and Australian National University, for example, where undergraduates and graduate students enroll in a course that can be taken for either undergraduate or graduate credit; I did not find any offerings that were only for undergraduates, or that combined foreign language teaching methods with a focus on JFL and EFL. 1 For the main course text, I have chosen Johnson (2018), An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching (see Swan 2010 for a review). Johnson covers foreign language teaching methods and considers how languages are learned, interactionist SLA theory, learner characteristics and individual differences, contexts for language teaching/learning, syllabus construction, lesson planning, language skills, and assessment. I plan to supplement Johnson with articles covering content specific to the North American JFL and Japanese EFL contexts, as well as to introduce sociocultural theory as an approach for understanding and guiding classroom foreign language development. I will also supplement Johnson with information on ESL (English as a second language) teaching in North America, to raise awareness of differences between foreign and second language instruction and the nature of these different sorts of careers. Table 1 presents a possible organizational arrangement of textbook chapters and supplementary readings. Additional details are given in the Appendix.
Class will be taught in a workshop style, emphasizing practical application and creative development of skills. Students will create language teaching materials and do teaching demonstrations in small groups during class sessions. Since the students in the class are language learners themselves, I also plan to have students try out some innovative learning activities themselves, such as Koyama's (2016) dubbing activity, so they can reflect on the impact of different types of activities and assignments. The course includes a required service-learning component of teaching/tutoring as language class volunteers on our campus or in the community, or as 1:1 volunteer tutors, with students keeping a journal of their experiences. There will also be field trips, such as a visit to the University of Washington Library's Japanese Tadoku  see, for example, Tabata-Sandom 2017) collection where they will look at the collection and prepare to write or co-author a book for the Tadoku library. And, by offering the class late in the day, the schedule will permit inviting guest speakers-local JFL teachers, those who have taught EFL in Japan or are currently teaching ESL, and graduate students whose research closely relates to teaching JFL or EFL. Finally, to develop a stronger understanding of the job market and prepare students for job applications, students will do online research, collecting resources on applying for jobs in Japan, creating resumes, and tailoring resumes and cover letters to create an application.

Conclusion
College and university faculty who teach Japanese are in a unique position to promote diversity in our shared field of Japanese language teaching. This paper has introduced a range of strategies, including student advisement, guest lectures, internships, instructional units, Japanese SLA courses and teaching methods courses, that can be harnessed to guide students to consider Japanese language teaching careers. These strategies, individually or in combination, can lay groundwork for interested students to think about and prepare for future teaching careers. As Japanese faculty, our fields of specialization, program curricula, and expertise vary, as do our opportunities to introduce JFL teaching careers to diverse students. Each of us can think creatively about how we can help to guide students in their career development. We can choose strategies that fit with the scope of our own positions and teaching responsibilities, each considering the resources we have and what it is that we, personally and in our academic programs, can do to promote JFL teaching as a possible career path to our diverse student communities. Will these strategies result in increased diversity among Japanese language teaching professionals? Only time will tell. Our work is one of planting seeds, tilling soil, watching students grow, and cheering for them in their career journeys. Where will they go? I know that we will, as always, follow their development with interest.

APPENDIX
Topical areas and potential supplementary readings for a course on teaching JFL in North America and EFL in Japan: • Teaching positions and qualifications needed to teach Japanese in the U. S. (Japan Foundation 2019) and English in Japan (Leachtenauer 2015) • Bilingual and immersion education in the U. S. (Bialystock 2018) • Japanese L2 pragmatic development-Taguchi (2014) on incomplete sentences • K-12 EFL instruction in Japan: "Lesson study" as teacher development (Rupp 2015), language policy and the JET Program (Marchesseau 2014), "English activities" in the elementary school (Okumura 2017), a response card teaching technique for Japan EFL (Pellowe 2015) • Japanese and popular culture in the classroom-teaching Japanese with anime and popular media (Koyama 2016;Wong and Chan 2017) and video games (Shintaku 2019).