Pedagogy

A specialist in East Asian language pedagogy, Mari Noda is primarily interested in curriculum, material development, and assessment. She directs and teaches in SPEAC (Summer Programs East Asian Concentration), which currently offers training in teaching of Japanese and Chinese and intensive Japanese and Chinese languages. Her recent publications include A Performance-based Pedagogy for Communicating in Cultures (co-author, Matthew B. Christensen, National East Asian Language Resource Center at The Ohio State University, 2002) and Acts of Reading (co-author, Hiroshi Nara, University of Hawaii Press, 2003). She is the content designer of the Interactive CD-ROM for Japanese: The Spoken Language Part 1 (Yale University Press). She is currently developing the intermediate to advanced level software to accompany Japanese: The Spoken Language Parts 2 and 3. She is President-elect of the Association of Teachers of Japanese and chair of its SIG on Study Abroad for Advanced Skills (SAFAS). She serves as the faculty advisor and coach for the OSU Aikido Club and Nihongo Osyaberi-kai.

Charles Quinn teaches courses in Japanese language, language pedagogy, classical Japanese, and linguistics. His work in pedagogy, like that of several DEALL colleagues, seeks to more fully conceptualize language as a cultural phenomenon, and to develop instructional practices that answer to that conceptualization. For example, for a learner to build a lexicon that will eventually support real, coherent creativity appears to require a rich and varied, hands-on experience in which words have time to become associated with their many voices: their prosodies, their syntactic and collocational affinities, their likely speakers and purposes, and more. Another pedagogical challenge that Japanese culture confronts us with is in helping learners develop a reliable feel for socially apt ways of referring to themselves and others. Socially apt reference depends on, among other things, an awareness of where one should “stand” vis-à-vis one’s referent and addressee, on which topics, in which settings, for which purposes, and so on. Over the history of Japanese, personal reference has been attuned in fundamental ways to epistemic differences, such as who knows what and who is positioned to claim knowledge of what—which has made practicing it rather different from personal reference in, say, English. To grow reliable memories of this sort takes effort, the help of imaginative pedagogical design, and time—another truth that's inconvenient enough to often be ignored.

Quinn’s interest in "everyday genres" of talk and text in the pedagogy of today’s language has a parallel in his studies of classical Japanese, in the semi-regular ways in which purposes, audiences, words, and grammar mutually implicate one another. The "pentad" of act, scene, agent, agency and purpose that Kenneth Burke introduced and developed in his Grammar of motives makes a similar point. If an adept reader of any genre is attuned to these mutual associations, identifying and exemplifying them in significant numbers of text tokens seems like good pedagogy for classical Japanese, too. A book underway, Classical Japanese in context: a reader's rhetoric of grammar, aims to explore the consequences of this

Quinn has written interpretive studies of the grammatical and discourse functions of inflected form in earlier Japanese; the kakari-musubi construction; auxiliaries ki and keri as evidentials; and sentence-final mo in Old Japanese. Others of his studies examine the derivation and subsequent grammaticization of sentence-final particles so/zo and ka and inflecting adjectives (keiyoosi).

Prof. Jianqi Wang specializes in language pedagogy, corpus-based language analysis, multimedia presentation of pedagogical materials, and distance learning. Prof. Wang serves as associate director of the National East Asian Language Resource Center at Ohio State. Prof. Wang's current projects include: 1. Database of Modern spoken Chinese in spontaneous discourse 2. Perpetual Tutor, a backbone system that supports residence and distance learning of Chinese 3. Portfolio Management and Assessment, a system that supports the evaluation of students in Individualized Instruction, Distance Learning and Study-abroad/Internship programs

Ph.D., linguistics, 1998, The University of Chicago.
Prof. Yuasa's current research focuses on the interaction between syntax and semantics, exceptions/idiosyncrasies in grammar, and multi-modular approaches to grammar. Her book, Modularity in Language: Constructional and Categorial Mismatch in Syntax and Semantics, was published from Mouton de Gruyter in 2005. She is also interested in applying the findings in linguistics into Japanese language pedagogy. She is the director of the Japanese Individualized Instruction Program and teaches 5th Year Japanese courses (Japanese 710.51~712.51), Pedagogical Syntax (EALL 701), and Syntax Seminar (Japanese 784) on a regular basis.