(no subject)
Yesterday I read through the student evaluations from the Japanese 101 students last quarter. As usual, the majority of the negative comments received were on two topics: the grading system and the teaching method.
The grading system seems harsh to many of the students because it grades only results, not effort. The overriding criteria of the grading system is how a native speaker of Japanese who does not know English would react to your speech (the things you have to say in class are carefully controlled so that you study everything you are expected to say). The grading system doesn't care if you spent 5 minutes or 5 hours studying, and one of the things that frustrates many students is that time spent does not necessary equal grade received. For most of these students I have mixed sympathy because the TAs and the head teacher are willing to take office hours to show people how to prepare for class and how to study, but many people do not do this.
Some of the people who get especially upset are the usual straight-A students who either coasted through high school, or were used to situations where all you have to do is study for X more hours and then you'll definitely get an A. They don't realize that 3 hours of bad studying is not that much different from 1 hour of bad studying, and I think that some of them see a visit to the teacher's office as sort of a failure, or something that only remedial students have to do.
There are several complaints about the teaching method, but the primary one is from people who want to see more of the writing system introduced. There's an unfortunate tendency for people to think that learning Japanese primarily consists of learning kanji (the characters borrowed from China). It's particularly tempting because the Japanese government has this sort of semi-official list of 1,945 characters. Many people incorrectly believe that this list indicates *all* the characters you need to know to read anything in Japanese, and that consequently your progress in Japanese can be numerically quantified. For instance, if you have studied 200 characters, then you have learned 10% of Japanese. Unfortunately this belief is encouraged by certain language programs that put numerical kanji values on the levels (i.e. after beginner level you know 300, after intermediate you know 500, etc.)
I won't spend pages going on about how misguided this belief is, but it causes many people to resent the fact that we introduce the writing system rather slowly. They seem to think that if they're not learning kanji, they're not making any progress. Although I think a legitimate argument can be made that the OSU program underemphasizes reading and writing, the complaints the students make show a complete lack of understanding not only of the program's aims, but the nature of learning a second language.
What's especially interesting to me is what I see as a student in the Chinese 101 class -- there it's pretty much the opposite. Everyone groans whenever we have to do a writing/reading class, and it seems like a lot of them would be just as happy to focus only on the spoken language and completely ignore the characters. Professor Noda (the head of the Japanese dept.) told me that 20 years ago the Japanese program was the same way -- they had to work to convince people that spending time studying the writing system was worth it.
However, we get a lot of good comments as well, and it's gratifying to see the comments from the students who really do seem to pick up on what OSU's program is trying to teach them.
The grading system seems harsh to many of the students because it grades only results, not effort. The overriding criteria of the grading system is how a native speaker of Japanese who does not know English would react to your speech (the things you have to say in class are carefully controlled so that you study everything you are expected to say). The grading system doesn't care if you spent 5 minutes or 5 hours studying, and one of the things that frustrates many students is that time spent does not necessary equal grade received. For most of these students I have mixed sympathy because the TAs and the head teacher are willing to take office hours to show people how to prepare for class and how to study, but many people do not do this.
Some of the people who get especially upset are the usual straight-A students who either coasted through high school, or were used to situations where all you have to do is study for X more hours and then you'll definitely get an A. They don't realize that 3 hours of bad studying is not that much different from 1 hour of bad studying, and I think that some of them see a visit to the teacher's office as sort of a failure, or something that only remedial students have to do.
There are several complaints about the teaching method, but the primary one is from people who want to see more of the writing system introduced. There's an unfortunate tendency for people to think that learning Japanese primarily consists of learning kanji (the characters borrowed from China). It's particularly tempting because the Japanese government has this sort of semi-official list of 1,945 characters. Many people incorrectly believe that this list indicates *all* the characters you need to know to read anything in Japanese, and that consequently your progress in Japanese can be numerically quantified. For instance, if you have studied 200 characters, then you have learned 10% of Japanese. Unfortunately this belief is encouraged by certain language programs that put numerical kanji values on the levels (i.e. after beginner level you know 300, after intermediate you know 500, etc.)
I won't spend pages going on about how misguided this belief is, but it causes many people to resent the fact that we introduce the writing system rather slowly. They seem to think that if they're not learning kanji, they're not making any progress. Although I think a legitimate argument can be made that the OSU program underemphasizes reading and writing, the complaints the students make show a complete lack of understanding not only of the program's aims, but the nature of learning a second language.
What's especially interesting to me is what I see as a student in the Chinese 101 class -- there it's pretty much the opposite. Everyone groans whenever we have to do a writing/reading class, and it seems like a lot of them would be just as happy to focus only on the spoken language and completely ignore the characters. Professor Noda (the head of the Japanese dept.) told me that 20 years ago the Japanese program was the same way -- they had to work to convince people that spending time studying the writing system was worth it.
However, we get a lot of good comments as well, and it's gratifying to see the comments from the students who really do seem to pick up on what OSU's program is trying to teach them.