Presenter: Dr. Masako Douglas Professor Emerita

Date: Sunday, April 27, 2025

Time: 9:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (PDT)

Registration Fee: $5 (2024-2025 TJSC Membership is required.)

Delivery Format: Zoom (The Zoom meeting URL will be sent to all registered participants)

Workshop Presentation Summary

In daily life, it has become common to use technology, such as sending text messages on smartphones and creating documents on computers, which has significantly reduced the practice of writing by hand. Consequently, opportunities to write kanji have also decreased. People often type in hiragana on a keyboard, and several kanji options are displayed, from which they select the correct one. Reports suggest that this change is affecting the kanji ability of Japanese people. On the other hand, in school education, the traditional method of repeatedly writing kanji to rote memorize them is still prevalent. In addition, kanji instruction is often limited to the initial introduction period, after which learners are left to manage on their own. This has created a significant gap between the changing kanji ability of Japanese people and the unchanging methods of kanji education in schools.

In this workshop, we aim to explore what kind of kanji ability is needed in the digital age and what kind of kanji education is necessary to develop this required ability.

Biography of the Presenter

Dr. Masako Douglas (ダグラス昌子先生) Professor Emerita

Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, California State University Long Beach

Dr. Masako Douglas received her Ph.D. in Education at the University of Southern California. She has taught all levels of Japanese language and culture courses at University of California Los Angeles and California State University Long Beach, including the courses for Japanese heritage language learners and the courses with a service-learning component. She also developed JHL curricula for young learners and has taught different levels at Saturday JHL schools.

Her areas of specialization include curriculum design and instructional approaches for JFL and JHL education, the development of Japanese heritage language, and the development of literacy (kanji ability and reading skills). She has conducted workshops on content-based instruction, project-based language learning (PBLL), early reading instructional approaches for young Japanese heritage learners, and kanji education. Last year, in collaboration with instructors from immersion programs and a JHL school, she completed the creation of Japanese leveled readers for early literacy, and began distributing them online for free.

Currently, Dr. Douglas serves as a board member of the Bilingual and Multilingual Children's Network, a board member of the National Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools, the chair of the Heritage Language SIG of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese, and a curriculum advisor at Orange Coast Gakuen. She serves as a PBLL mentor at the National Foreign Language Resource Center in the University of Hawai’i.

Workshop Schedule:

9:00-9:15        Greetings and announcement

9:15-10:15        Session 1 Kanji Ability

10:15-10:30      Break

10:30-12:10      Session 2 Kanji Instructional Approaches

                        -Discussion and Sharing

12:10-12:20      Q&A

12:20-12:30     Closing

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春の研修会申込締切日：2025年4月25日（金）11:59 pm (PDT)

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