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Japanese Instruction over the Web: Examples at MIT and UC Berkeley
Masayasu Aotani, Lecturer
Technical Japanese Language Project
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
aotani@mit.edu
Many institutions across the United States are using the internet and the World Wide Web in innovative ways
to teach Japanese. Some of the examples of using the net for Japanese instruction are given below.
1. Communication with e-mail pen pals in Japan
UC Berkeley, Tennoji High School, Wellesley
2. Collaborative publication of school papers
Wellesley
3. Sharing syllabus over the net
MIT
4. Development of common resources
University of Washington
5. Distribution of teaching materials over the net by the National Institute for Educational Research in Japan
NIER, Tsukuba University
6. Japanese Cafe with live conversation
Infowave
7. Japanese phonetic drill over the net
Fujitsu
This trend which started at the college level is now spreading down to secondary and primary education. For
example, Professor Miyagawa's group at MIT is organizing local high schools in an effort to promote a wide
use of the net for language instruction.
Here in the Bay Area, the Instructional Technology Program at the University of California at Berkeley is
helping the Japanese Program in the East Asian Languages Department in the areas of Japanese e-mailing and
preparation of Japanese homepages.
With the embedded Japanese capability of Netscape and other browsers, using Japanese on computers and
displaying characters on the screen are becoming effortless these days.
It is becoming quite easy and increasingly popular to make the cyberspace a part of the classroom.
At a more advanced level, there is the famous Caters sentence structure analyzer developed by Tsukuba
University for MIT's Technical Japanese Language Project.
This software shows the basic skeleton of each Japanese sentence in selected articles along with readings of all
kanji. It is intended for use by fourth-year level students of Japanese with technical background. Though it
cannot replace teachers, this is a hefty package to be used both in preparing for classes and in reviewing the
course material.