Lately I’ve been getting really excited about academia. This is good, because it means graduate school might not be as big of a jump as I thought. Even better, I’ve taken to researching graduate schools when I need a pick-me-up, which is something I should probably be doing now anyway.
While doing Google searches for “Differences Between Japan and America,” as inspiration for writing the Impending Speech of Doom, I’ve turned up some pretty interesting articles. Many of them don’t pertain to my speech at all, but I read them anyway. When you combine this with all the desire for academia pumping through my veins, you get what you’re seeing now, some scholarly reviews of the research journals I read. At least it’s academically focused, which is a nice change from the daily life and random ramblings I’ve been doing in the blog as of late.
The first article I read was about was a study on the difficulties of academic writing in Japanese, especially from the vantage points of non-native speakers of Japanese. My only regret is that I can’t find the article anymore in order to link it. Nevertheless, I’ll talk about it because it was neat.
The article only researched other Southeast Asian students learning Japanese, so it really spoke to me more as an educator of a language than as a student of Japanese. The researchers claimed that the difficulties of scholarly writing in Japanese stem from the fact that overall Japanese academic writing is just not common. Sometimes elementary school students are expected to write book reports, but after that all of the focus in the Japanese education system is on preparing students for entrance exams to higher levels of education (high school, university, etc). As a result, there’s very little standardization or guideline for academic writing in Japanese. (Or verbal English, for that matter, but that’s a personal woe unrelated to the article).
The researchers interviewed a handful of students and teachers (not a great sample size) to gage their experiences and they found that close to 90% of primary subject courses had only multiple choice test-style assessment. Out of the 10% of classes that did include an essay component, the number of essays written per class was very low. Furthermore, very few of these essays were analytical at all, as most of them explained a problem or recorded oral presentations. Only about 1 out of 14 was analytical.
Even more detrimental is the fact that, there’s little critical or logical thinking in a Japanese classroom to begin with. Most of the classes are taught in a classic lecture-style, teacher-centered, education model. This leaves little room for analytical thinking, let alone analytical writing. Apparently this is also the case in China, Korea, and other Southeast Asian countries.
As if the lack of academic writing history wasn’t enough, teachers who want to teach a primary subject through essay writing find several more obstacles. For example, Japan’s infamously large class sizes aren’t conducive to writing assignments. Thus, a surge in essay writing doesn’t seem to be on the horizon.
Coming back to the students learning Japanese as a second language, this creates a problem for when they actually do write analytical essays. Exchange students claim to have five major gripes with writing assignments in Japan,
1) Insufficient Japanese reading skills for research prior to assignment,
2) Inadequate vocabulary and lack of proficiency with written Japanese,
3) Lack of clarity in the requirements of the assignments,
4) Lack of academic writing experience, and
5) Insufficient cognitive skills for developing arguments.
Some of these problems, such as limited reading and vocabulary skills, are basic problems one encounters when learning a new language and they can’t really be avoided. These problems are the same as the language problems one encounters in an ESL program. Others gripes, like the lack of academic writing experience, are more cultural than anything else, so they even afflict the native Japanese students.
The article says that never having encountered academic writing in one’s native language is the most damaging thing for writing in a second language. Students just don’t have the cognitive ability they need for analysis.
The problem is exacerbated for non-native speakers by the fact that classes are so big, and students in the study often said that as a result of class size little feedback was given about how their writing was scored and they didn't feel like they could ask questions either. To make matters worse, students admitted to regularly copying entire chunks of text from books and websites - and without citation. This proposes a serious problem for students writing in America, whether they realize it or not.
Aside: this makes me wonder what the plagiarism standards are in other countries if this kind of behavior creeps out at all.
Since most of these problems are attributed to passive learning styles and an emphasis on memorization, I also wonder what it's like for these students when they go to American schools. Is this analytical culture something they notice and consciously address when they arrive? Or do they naturally adjust? Or do they just get frustrated? Or perhaps, since academic writing is such a priority for us, we don’t give them the opportunity to struggle because we’ve been challenging them to keep up with our writing since they first started to learn English.
In the end, I suppose that many of these problems aren’t really an issue in ESL classrooms as thoughtful as the ones I’ve worked with in the past. Clarity is something we focused on heavily, always repeating instructions multiple times and always handing out rubrics outlining what we’re looking for in essays. Still, it makes me wonder how these problems will manifest themselves in my future ESL career, considering this experience problem is highly documented in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese students, all of which have a close exchange relationship with the U.S.
Though it’s probably not so simple, I do have some recommendations for easy first steps toward solving the academic writing dilemma:
1) have specific conversations on integrating information from sources so that researching is not as overwhelming,
2) proactively teach proper citation so that students can use it as a tool for writing (which will also avoid trouble),
3) reduce class size as often as possible, and if not possible, enact special office hours or study groups for support,
4) teach academic writing as a way of life, rather than as another example of the target language or a way of getting from point A to point B in a primary subject course. That makes the whole process more feasible and less abstract.
You can’t magically make students fluent in Japanese and you can’t retroactively give them back the missing academic writing from the previous 13 years of their educations, but at the very least it prevents them from making very grave errors like plagiarism. Of course, a catch-all solution for the four things mentioned above is to start exchange students off in an intensive language program (which my alma mater actually does), so that students can start their education in a small group in which they can network and get much-needed assistance while learning essential skills of language and university culture via classes directed at people in their same situations. After passing this, they can be mainstreamed into regular university work where academic writing in the target language no longer a problem. Sure it takes time, but take a few more classes, because a wordsmith, and have a successful university career. Even if you can keep up in the topic, what good is it really if the medium thwarts you? Though really, it’s still the education system’s problem, not the student’s. As teachers we have a responsibility for the success of our pupils and if an intensive language program isn’t available, you’d better thing of a smaller scale solution to fix the problem.
The interesting thing is that the same aforementioned pedagogical solutions for non-native speakers and their writing woes can also be used to fix the writing problems in native Japanese writers. I’m beginning to think that well-designed “Freshman Composition” classes for native speakers of English are not as trivial as people think they are. Granted, our students have a lot more experience in academic writing from high school. I’d have to see some data.
Turning to a different sample of students in the context of this study, no Westerners learning Japanese were included in the research. While it’s interesting to see how students from similarly debilitating cultural backgrounds are affected by this problem, it would also be interesting to compare the success rates of students in the same system but with advantageous native backgrounds. The data in the crossover between such Westerners and the people in this study would be useful for drawing conclusions, considering the aggressive history of analytical thinking and academic writing in American schools.
Well, provided this research is true, I'm pretty glad I have the experience of academic writing in my native language, since I’m working on an academically written version of the Impending Speech of Doom in Japanese right now. Also, what up! This was four pages of analysis. I’m pretty sure that means I just wrote a term paper for fun.
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