Learning Japanese in America: A Survey of Preferred Teaching Methods

Abstract

There has been a sharp increase in the number of people learning Japanese in America, with figures in excess of 145,000 reported in the 1990s. The present study reports a survey of students (N = 387) in eight colleges, in which their opinions were sought on the teaching methods and learning styles most suited to the learning of Japanese in their own setting. The results show that students favour a mixture of traditional and contemporary methods, and have no difficulty with traditional methods of teaching that are no longer popular in contemporary modern-language pedagogy, such as exact word-for-word translation, memorisation of vocabulary lists, and overt correction of errors in class. The paper argues that the findings may be related in part to intrinsic linguistic features of Japanese, written Japanese in particular, and also to the early education of Japanese teachers in the US, who are mostly native Japanese. The findings are discussed, and their implications for the development of Japanese as a foreign language in the United States.