The CALPER Japanese Project

This project heavily strikes a chord with me. For non-native learners targeting or not interpretation, advance learning is a key issue seldom heard about. One day, there will be a need to expose the facts and reasons why a massive majority of Japanese interpreters are native Japanese speakers, or put it from the opposite viewpoint, why non-native interpreters are so few. One of these reasons, worldwide, is the lack of advanced Japanese teaching and learning strategies.

I love the following objectives :

CALPER Japanese Project
“Learning through Listening towards Advanced Japanese”

* To complement existing materials that tend to focus on reading comprehension (re: contents as well as structures)
* To explore critical approaches in teaching language and sociocultural issues -- 4D’s “descriptive, diversity, dynamic, discursive” (Kubota, 2003)
* To prepare learners for the language use outside of classroom and to have them reflect on their own performance
* To reconsider linguistic structures from the perspective of interactional necessities

And although the resources can't be accessed, it's good to know what was done:

1. Identified recurring topics introduced in published intermediate and advanced language textbooks.

(e.g., college life, home stay, customs, food, gender, education, pop culture, employment, cross-cultural communication, globalization, expatriates in Japan)

2. Asked Japanese speakers to discuss specific topics in a discussion or interview format.

3. Recorded 30 interactions (approximately 18 hours).

Usable chunks were selected:

4 Identified 1-5 minutes segments that can be used as instructional materials (based on sequential boundaries, quality of recording, clarity of speech, level of difficulty, content of discussion).


Subjects raised are:

* Topics currently available

・ Food ・ Gender

・ Gift ・ Home stay

・ Japanese and American Universities

* Topics to be added in the future

・ Education

・ Learning Japanese Language

・ Communication Styles and Identities

・ International Marriage

・ Popular Culture

The document is not dated so I can't figure out the status of this program. It highlights none the less the orientation towards setting listening as a major conduct of advanced language acquisition. It also highlights the need to create non-scripted casual speech contents. The primary competence of the non-native speaker is to be a non-native listener before turning a non-native talker. Non-scripted "natural" spoken Japanese sources are scarce and might need to be recorded in an ethnographical approach. Non-scripted "natural" spoken Japanese refers here to speeches that are not tainted by TV mimicking or formated by marketing.