Due to the recent on-going trend towards globalization, our society has become more multilingual and multicultural than ever.  In such an environment, I feel that those who are engaged in Japanese language education need to help learners develop their ability to actively participate in society using Japanese and to live in concert with others as members of various communities both in and outside the classroom.  We do not exist alone in a vacuum, but live in socially and culturally rich contexts, or communities, in which language plays a crucial role. 

Thus, as the Standards for Foreign Language Learning state, the ultimate goal of learning a foreign language is to interact with people who would be otherwise unreachable beyond school settings, i.e., participating in a multi-lingual society.  In keeping with this belief, I approach teaching as an opportunity for me to support my students in achieving this goal. 

The first step to help students develop the linguistic and cognitive capacity to use Japanese for to participate in communication is to provide them with opportunities to use Japanese in meaningful contexts for communicative purposes.  To do so, I plan and organize class time with three steps: presenting patterns in natural contexts rather than in isolation, having students practice patterns orally, and engaging them in pair or group activities that reflect real-life situations.  Even for those students who have limited linguistic knowledge, the activity of presenting new information in familiar situations activates their background knowledge, helps them understand new information (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical structures), and constructs new knowledge by relating it to what they already know.  Furthermore, by assigning many activities that require students to work in pairs or groups, I help students to learn about each other and build a "community" where they cooperate with each other to achieve the same goal: to learn Japanese. 

Classroom learning can be very effective in achieving proficiency in the target language. Nevertheless, as I stated above, I firmly believe that it is essential for foreign language learners to experience social and creative use of the language outside the classroom, i.e., beyond the "pseudo" reality created by the instructor. It is my belief that the Internet can be a useful tool to provide a variety of opportunities for communication with people beyond the school setting, virtually eliminating the constraints of time and geography. Taking advantage of this characteristic of the Internet, I actively incorporate Internet-based projects using weblogs, or "blogging," and "podcasting" into my courses. In these projects, students are engaged in authentic communication with an authentic audience. That is, in blogging, students express themselves about various topics and exchange opinions and information with readers who leave comments on their blogs. In podcasting, the students produce their own radio programs about topics of their choosing and broadcast them through the Internet.  Furthermore, they critically examine and discuss characteristics of "good" and "bad" blogs/podcasts in order to improve their own blogs/podcasts and create evaluation criteria for their own and classmates' blogs/podcasts.  Through writing posts and producing podcasts, students can improve the language skillsnecessary for becoming active participants of a community of Japanese-language speakers beyond the school setting.  Both projects also help students to develop critical thinking skills and media literacy through discussing characteristics of blogs and podcasts as media and evaluating their own and others' blogs/podcasts.

As an educator, I strive to support my students in any way that I can so that they find fulfillment in Japanese language learning. I plan to continue to provide my students with an optimal learning experience by incorporating activities that allow real-life applications of the language (i.e., grammatical rules) as well as by taking advantage of technologies such as blogs and podcasts so that they can experience social and creative aspects of language use within and beyond the classroom. Traditionally, language learning has been seen as gaining knowledge of grammatical and cultural rules. I believe, however, that as users of the language themselves, the students are not simply the receivers of the rules transmitted by the instructors; they are rather participants of

communication in which they construct knowledge through interacting with others. Through my instruction based on this belief, I strive to continue to help students develop their linguistic knowledge and to encourage them to play an active role in their own learning by participating in communities of Japanese-language speakers and forming their own communities in which they socially and creatively use the language.