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Short Term Fellowships to Japan
The Sasakawa Fellowship Fund offers Short Term
Fellowships to Japan for Japanese Language or Japanese Studies teachers, or for
others in a position to share their findings with these teachers. The amount of the award will be $5,000.
Half will be paid soon after notification of the success of an application. The
second half will be paid on receipt of evidence that the fellowship holder has
taken steps to share their findings or resources with the Japanese language
teaching community. Applicants are responsible for making their own arrangements
for the visit.
Following is a list of Short Term
Fellowships that have been approved since the project was introduced in
2003:
In 2003, Janis Maidment worked with Jenny Short at the Japanese Language
Centre in Urawa, creating web pages of activities to accompany the
materials Jenny was writing for beginners to Year 11 students of
Japanese. These activities are available in the Language Revision page
of the NZAJLT website (link here). As well as developing the activities
herself, Janis was responsible for taking photos to accompany the
material. She also used her time in Japan to advance plans for the ‘Kiwi
Tsunami award’ under which …..
Chris Morris, then Principal of Chartwell School in Wellington, the
world’s only Japanese Joint-venture school, received a Short Term
Fellowship for a study tour to Japan in September-October 2003. The
purpose of his trip was to gain a better understanding of the Japanese
education system in order to be able to cater more effectively for the
Japanese national students at his own school. He was committed also to
passing on his findings to other non Japanese staff at Chartwell for the
same reason and to fellow principals.
Glenda Koefoed photographed the kanji which appear in the NZQA
prescription lists relating to Years 11 and 12 of ‘Japanese in NZ
curriculum’ and produced from these a set of power point presentations
to illustrate real life contexts for these kanji. These, and an
accompanying set of activity worksheets, are available to teachers
through the NZAJLT website
(this will take you to the homepage of the students’ site. Click
‘joining NZAJLT’ to see how to subscribe to NZAJLT and therefore be able
to access many excellent resources developed for and by NZ teachers of
Japanese).
They can be used either as an independent revision tool for individual
students or a resource for use with classes.
The Hay family (Dad, Mum and two teenagers) packed up their house in
Keri Keri and travelled to Japan for a year in 2005/2006. They had had
little prior experience of or preconceptions about Japan and wanted to
expose themselves to a completely different culture and lifestyle for a
year. They planned to set up an interactive website, on which the two
children would post their observations as ‘Kiwi Kids in Japan’ and
invite feedback and discussion via email from invited classes in New
Zealand. In the event it proved impossible to set up the website in the
time frame proposed, and instead, on their return, the children gave
power point presentations and performed a dance they had learnt, to 10
different schools in the Keri Keri area. Their power point, with many
fascinating photos showing aspects of Japanese way of living that had
struck them as very different to the Kiwi way that had been for them the
‘norm’ until that year, is available for viewing here. This may be of
interest to Social Studies teachers teaching a unit on Japan, as well as
Japanese language teachers. To view a shortened version of their
PowerPoint in PDF please click
here (1.38Mb).
Aukje Both spent time in Japan in 2006 taking photos of katakana in situ
which she the used to produce the resource ‘katakana in context’, an
interactive CDROM for use in the classroom. This resource is available
to teachers through the NZAJLT website. Aukje has presented
about her resource at the Sasakawa Conference 2007 in Christchurch and
the CASTEL (Computer assisted Learning) Conference in Hawaii in July
2007. At both conferences Aukje presented a very compelling argument for
teaching katakana before hiragana. A short description of the paper she
presented at the Hawaii conference, with photos, is available
here.
Further information and the application form are
available here
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