Call for Papers: The 23rd Annual Conference of the Central Association of Teachers of Japanese

The 23rd Annual Conference of the Central Association of Teachers of Japanese will be held at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana on Saturday, September 29, 2012.

Japanese education in the U.S. entered a new phase in the last few years due to budget cut and the competition from interests in Chinese. The impact of such changes is seen in the unprecedented cancellation of the 2011 CATJ meeting and the elimination of Japanese programs, particularly high schools. Meanwhile technology has created unprecedented potentials for foreign language education. What is the nature of these changes? How should we respond to it?

This conference is organized to resume the annual CATJ meeting and to provide a platform for teachers of Japanese to exchange views on these and other issues. The theme of the conference is “Embracing the New Phase in Japanese Education in the United States.” We welcome proposal of papers that address topics including but not limited to the following: the nature of the changes in Japanese education in the U.S., Japanese pedagogy, second language acquisition, heritage language education, technology in language learning and teaching, Japanese culture, and Japanese literature. Individual presentations will be 20 minutes long followed by 10-minute Q&A sessions. The conference is open to both K-12 and college levels teachers of Japanese. For high school teachers from Indiana, registration fees and transportation (mileages) will be reimbursed after the conference by a grant from Indiana Humanities.

The submission deadline is June 15th, 2012. Notification of the acceptance will be sent in July 2012. Papers presented, with revisions made after the conference, will be published in a Conference Proceedings volume as well as online. Please submit an anonymous proposal to kmatsumoto at bsu dot edu by June 15th, 2012 with a separate sheet containing the following information:

1. Your name, affiliation, position, e-mail and summer contact information
2. The title of your paper, in both English and Japanese
3. Abstract of your paper (300 words in English or 700 characters in Japanese)
4. Equipment needed, other than a computer and a projector

If you have any questions, please contact Kazumi Matsumoto at kmatsumoto at bsu dot edu.

The 23rd CATJ conference is organized by the Japanese Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at Ball State University, funded by two generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities through Indiana Humanities and the Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) of the Association of Asian Studies.

Zheng, G. Call for Papers: the 23rd Annual Conference of the Central Association of Teachers of Japanese. JTIT-L listserv (JTIT-L@LISTS.PSU.EDU, 16 Apr 2012).