Sometimes the best way to learn to speak a new language is to have an opportunity to engage in conversations with a native speaker of that language. For the next two years, students taking Japanese language courses at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts will have the opportunity to do so.
Miyu Sugimoto will serve as an assistant teacher to ASMSA Japanese instructor Elizabeth Brown during the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school year. ASMSA is the only public school in the state that provides local Japanese language instruction.
Sugimoto, who is from Izumi, a city in the Kagoshima Prefecture in southern Japan, is teaching at ASMSA through the Japanese Language Education Assistant Program (J-LEAP) that brings native speakers to the United States to serve as assistant teachers at K-12 educational institutions.
J-LEAP is offered to U.S. schools through a partnership between The Japan Foundation and Laurasian Institution. The goal of the program is to provide a native speaker to serve as an assistant teacher to a lead teacher at U.S. schools. The assistant teacher becomes a more confident and qualified Japanese language instructor while helping to strengthen their host school’s program in the process.
Sugimoto was originally supposed to join ASMSA’s faculty for the 2020-21 academic school year, but the COVID-19 pandemic prevented all travel through the J-LEAP program. She spent the year teaching Japanese at home, including at the university level and online.
She’s happy to finally be at ASMSA, and the students are happy she is here as well. After what may have been some nervousness to approach her at first, the students now ask her all kinds of questions about the language and her home.
“Now they ask me, ‘Do you know this? How to say this?’ They are always asking me how to say something in Japanese, especially things I may not understand in English,” she said.
Brown said she noticed the students’ enthusiasm to speak with a native speaker early in the semester. ASMSA conducts Fortnight at the beginning of each year. Fortnight allows students to finalize class schedules, new students to settle into a routine of living in the residential setting, and meeting with instructors among other activities before classes officially begin.
Brown said several of her students in an advanced Japanese course came by to meet Sugimoto.
“I was there for about 30 minutes and had to leave for another meeting. I came back about an hour and a half later, and they were still talking. She is into anime and manga as are the students. It is another way to make the language accessible. It was cool to see them connecting in that way,” Brown said.
That particular example also reflects an important aspect of J-LEAP program. Not only are the native speakers interacting with the student through the language, but they are able to share their cultural experiences directly with the students.
Sugimoto said she saw another example of cultural exchange in the classroom that impressed her. One of the ASMSA classes were holding a virtual meeting with students at Hanamaki Kita High School in Japan. ASMSA and Hanamaki Kita have a long-standing educational relationship. She was pleased to see students from both sides learning from each other.
“They were all excited and nervous at first, but after they talked with each other a few minutes, they wanted to talk about new things. They connected more deeply as they talked about things that interested them all. I think that is an important thing about learning a language,” Sugimoto said.
Brown said she is seeing results in her students’ classroom performance as well. She said there were some students who struggled learning the language last year. “This year it’s more like a hobby for them than homework,” she said.
Part of the goal of the J-LEAP program is to also help both classroom instructors become better teachers. Sugiomoto said while teaching classes in Japan she is often more on the grammar aspects of the language. She followed a strict regimen on what to teach and how to teach it.
Here she is being exposed to different teaching methods that rely more on interacting with the students. Both Brown and Sugimoto said their goal is that students spend at least 90 percent of the classroom time speaking in Japanese. That means they must find different ways for students to understand the context of what is being said thus making a more direct connection between the two languages.
Brown said research in the field of teaching languages has revealed that this kind of interactive teaching is more effective in allowing students to speak the language sooner with better understanding. Visual cues such as gestures and props help students make a connection with the language that rote memorization may not.
While Sugimoto is learning a new way of teaching her native language by using these methods, Brown said she is benefiting from having another educator in the classroom with her. Brown is in her fourth year of teaching at ASMSA, which is also the fourth year of her teaching career.
“I think we make a pretty good team. It’s good to have a person who can say ‘Hey, I noticed this didn’t go well. Here’s what we could do.’ If you have someone else to offer you advice, it helps,” Brown said.
She also plans to find ways to allow Sugimoto to serve as the lead teacher at times, Brown said.
While she says she still has much to learn in teaching the language, Brown is obviously doing something right. During her first year at ASMSA, she only had two sections of Japanese 1. This year she has two sections each of Japanese 1 and Japanese 2 and one section of Japanese 3. She has also seen students interest grow to the point where they seek out additional opportunities to experience the language.
“I will give them books to read. They will watch movies in Japanese to expand their knowledge of the language. They will speak to each other in person and in texts in Japanese,” she said.
Sugimoto can relate to those students’ excitement. When she was in high school, she was a 16-year-old exchange student at a California high school. Since then she knew she wanted to return to the United States again in the future.
“It’s why I wanted to teach Japanese in America. I met a teacher in California who inspired me. I really like America because people are so kind,” she said.