Community "Nihongo Kyoshitsu" Activities Report, vol.1
Starting this month, the Tokyo Intercultural Portal Site will provide the "Community Nihongo Kyoshitsu(Japanese language class) Activities Report."
Staff members in the Intercultural Society section of Public interest incorporated foundation Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation “TSUNAGARI” will visit Japanese language classrooms in different communities, compiling what they saw and talked about there in a report.
We plan to release a report approximately once a month, so please look forward to it!
vol.1
In our first report, we would like to tell you about a volunteer club for student "Spirit" that conducts activities in Bunkyo City!
10,347 foreign residents call Bunkyo City home (as of May 1, 2022; Bunkyo City research), comprising around 5% of the total population. While this isn't particularly high representation compared to other parts of Tokyo, the number keeps growing year by year.
Spirit, which conducts its activities in Bunkyo City, began as an extracurricular activity at Toyo University's Faculty of Sociology. In 2015, it became the volunteer club for students that it is today.
Spirit Project: Learning Support for Students with Foreign Roots
There are people who have Japanese nationality, so they are not called "foreigners," but they were born overseas and can hardly speak any Japanese. Our goal is to support children with foreign roots, on university campuses as university students, by employing the methods of "academic learning and cultural communication" to help them acquire reading, writing, listening and speaking skills in Japanese and to further their understanding of Japanese culture. -Taken from Spirit's home page
Currently, there are 15 volunteer members, mainly from the Faculty of Sociology, including foreign exchange students. They are continuing to work energetically, even during the pandemic, to help children with foreign backgrounds learn Japanese, along with other efforts.
Along with going to observe Spirit in action, we spoke with three of the student volunteers.
Top row left: Matsushita-san, the current head of Spirit (third-year student in the Faculty of Sociology); top row right: Tamura-san, the former head (fourth-year, Faculty of Letters); lower row: Aso-san (second-year, Faculty of Economics).
What led to all of you joining Spirit?
Matsushita: I got interested in helping people learn because of how much my cram school teacher helped me.
Tamura: I was interested because I used to study Japanese-language education.
Aso: I joined because I like kids and wanted to teach them how to study.
Currently, Spirit provides free support for learning Japanese to children with foreign roots on Mondays and Thursdays from 6:30 to 8 p.m.
Most of the participants are elementary or junior high school-aged children, but as there is no upper age limit, Spirit has also taught Japanese to working adults and the parents of kids in the classes, which has mostly been led by members who are studying Japanese-language education.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Spirit used university classrooms for their activities, but as it became difficult to use the rooms due to concerns about the spread of the virus, they switched to online (Zoom).
Multilingual classroom information
For this report, we were able to watch one of the Thursday evening sessions.
To make it easy for the children to ask questions, Spirit uses Zoom's break-out room function, splits up meetings, and otherwise ensures that the student volunteers and the children are working together one-on-one as much as possible.
Also, when the lessons were being held in person, Spirit members would have students bring in their homework or materials that they wanted to work on so they could look at it together, but now students send photos of these materials using a LINE group, and they look at the photos together while teaching.
LINE group for contacting the children and sharing materials
When working with children whose Japanese is not very proficient, it is very important to pay attention to your word choice.
On the day we observed, a sixth-grade elementary school student named K got a Japanese-language question wrong because he didn't know the meaning of the word "bothersome." The volunteer asked if K knew "the meaning of annoying" and explained the word while checking whether he understood. But even when confirming a correct answer, rather than simply providing an answer, the members helped the children to come to the correct answer on their own by giving them a few concrete examples and then asking "which do you think it is?"
When referring to the wrong answer that K chose, the member was also encouraging about K's answer that "a very long time" was the origin of the word "bothersome," saying "oh, so close - it's not completely wrong, you just missed it by a little bit!"
All of the student volunteers saying "it's difficult!" when giving Japanese language guidance over the screen. They also use the chat function to write out key points, so they can think about the answer together.
We also witnessed a child start chatting in the middle of her studies, to which the two student volunteers responded with smiles, saying "wow, really?" By doing things like taking a little time out of the lesson when they begin talking, the volunteers showed that they are mindful that the children are able to have fun studying, without losing their enthusiasm.
This child has been coming for more than three years now and attends almost every session. She even comes early sometimes because she's looking forward to the activities so much. We could sense his trust in the student volunteers from his positive attitude and how happily she was speaking.
Because Spirit's activities are online now...
Going online has brought certain advantages. For instance, some students who don't live in Bunkyo City connected with us through Twitter or other social media and have started attending.
We heard that:
"There are people attending who wouldn't be able to come if it were in person."
"Even if you're busy with studying or a part-time job, you can participate in the activities from wherever you are, as long as you have a computer or a smart phone."
At the same time, some difficulties have emerged, for example:
"There are children who are no longer able to participate because they don't have a way to get online."
"It is hard to give precise instructions over a screen, and we aren't able to point to things or write things down when we help the students, so teaching seems to take longer than it did when we did it face-to-face."
Because of it taking longer to teach something online than in person, Spirit has switched from doing activities one day a week to two days a week, but they still feel as though teaching online limits what they can do. There are likely more than a few organizations that also feel that conducting their activities during the pandemic is complicated.
"The student volunteers who did in-person activities will be graduating soon and leaving Spirit..."
Among the three student volunteers who spoke with us for this report, only university fourth-year Tamura-san had the experience of doing Spirit activities offline. Since the time when third-year Matsushita-san and second-year Aso-san joined the club, all activities have been conducted online, so they have not had any opportunity yet to do anything in person.
All of the members expressed their earnest wishes that "before the members who did Spirit activities in person leave the club, we want to use an extended vacation or the like, rent a facility and do some in-person activities."
In-person activities before COVID-19
What lies ahead
Although there is still no end in sight for the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked the members what kind of activities they hoped to pursue in the future.
Tamura:
"If we can make more connections and get more involved with other organizations, it will be easier for Spirit to match up with people who have had trouble finding places to study online. This will increase the number of people we can support."
Opportunities to communicate and collaborate with other organizations have decreased since the onset of the pandemic. We heard that Spirit will be working with a certain organization this year, for the first time in three years!
Matsushita:
"I would like to be able to do seasonal events where we can interact a lot with the kids, the way we did before Covid."
Since joining Spirit, Matsushita-san has only been able to see the children's faces on a screen.
Let's hope this can happen before Matsushita-san graduates!
A Christmas party held before the pandemic
Aso:
"In the future, I hope we can provide support for things like entering higher educational institutions, in addition to support for learning."
Aso-san understood and sensed how difficult it is for children with foreign roots to enter Japanese high schools from being involved last year with providing guidance to a child with a foreign background and their guardian on entering a multilingual high school.
When visiting the club and speaking with the members for this report, we were impressed to see how truly passionate the student volunteers are about carrying out their activities. Despite the limitations imposed by the pandemic and the conflicted feelings they might have, everyone at Spirit is working hard to keep doing all they can.
Many things have changed from the days before Covid, but one thing has not: "a classroom exists, and the student volunteers are there."
There must be many children who have been saved by this fact.
The role of the Japanese classroom as "somewhere you belong" is something I myself, the writer of this article, felt keenly when I was involved in the past in a Japanese classroom for children with foreign roots. I've also heard that for some children, the scope of the activities they do in these classrooms becomes "Japan" for them, and the people involved are "Japanese people" for them.
I hope that places like this, where these children feel they belong, continue to be protected and become more widespread, and that more children with foreign roots have the chance to encounter a "place" like Spirit and a "presence" like the student volunteers. And I also hope we can continue to play a part in "connecting" the people who need these kinds of Japanese classrooms with the classrooms, and classrooms with other classrooms, through our business and other activities.
Which classroom will we pay a visit to for the next Community Nihongo Kyoshitsu Activities Report? Please look forward to the next installment!
by. MK