Book review: NIPPON 3.0 の処方箋

Last year, TJSC (the Teachers of Japanese in Southern California) invited Dr. Yasuhiko Tohsaku to their fall workshop as a keynote speaker to discuss language education in the 21st century.  I enjoyed his presentation, and later on over the winter vacation, I had the chance to read his book.  To summarize, this book outlines bringing Japan and language education up-to-date for the 21st century.  "Nippon 3.0" refers to upgrading Japan’s education system to be able to respond to the growing diversity and complexity in the world today.  However, the ideas that he writes about are perfectly applicable to any language educator’s work.

 

Namely, one of those ideas is the development of what Dr. Tohsaku calls SNA (Social Networking Approach).  In the past, and even in some places even now, language learning consisted of rote memorization.  This is the Audiolingual Approach (AL).  Simply put, it was impractical.  Just through AL alone, people could not learn how to communicate.  Then in the 1970’s came the development of the Communicative Approach (CA), which placed more emphasis on information exchange and transmitting information. In order to accomplish that, greater communication within the classroom was necessary.  However, as this was often simulated (i.e. role-plays) and therefore separated from real life, Dr. Tohsaku pinpoints a new development taking hold: SNA.  SNA bridges the gap between the classroom and society by having students engage actual issues in the world around them, using the language that they are learning.  Of course, both AL and CA have their own roles and aren’t meant to be discarded completely, but Dr. Tohsaku writes that it is important to take that extra step when learning another language, and that extra step is applying what one learns to the greater society.

To give a more specific example of SNA, I’ve seen this in one classroom, in which students in the Japanese classroom learned about hafu living in Japan.  Through that, the students reflected on and related their own diverse backgrounds, whether they are Chinese, or Mexican, or Japanese, or mixed, or of any other background; everyone’s experiences is respected and given expression.  They accordingly learned the target language that they could use to describe their background.  Their final project was making a video celebrating diversity, both of themselves and of other communities like hafu, and sharing that video with their Japanese peers.  In another example, another classroom learned about Japan’s aging society, a recurring topic in the news.  This classroom subsequently decided to make bento boxes for senior citizens in a nursing home in Japan.  Through this, they learned food-related language, learned how to communicate with nursing-home residents (to ask their food preferences), learned about bento culture, and most importantly, connected their learning with greater society.  Another excellent example was introduced in a previous post, where a summer program brought students to Minami-sanriku-cho to hear the voices of those affected by the Tohoku Disaster of 2011.  Through their Humans of Minamisanriku project, the students were able to understand what people have been going through, as fellow human beings.

All these examples are ideas that are both fulfilling and experiences that will remain one’s whole life.  SNA allows students, teachers, parents, community members, future employers, and decision-makers to see the role that language learning has in society.

As such, this book is a great introduction into SNA and the wider theme of cultivating global citizens who can succeed in the 21^st century.  The writing style is aimed towards both the general public, so anyone can pick this up and read it.  This is great for the new teacher who is either thinking of entering the field, or who just started out, as well as the veteran teacher interested in current trends in education.