Educators Launch Drive to Improve Classes in Japanese : Languages: Interest is booming, but teaching and testing standards are inadequate, critics say. The College Board plans to devise a proficiency exam.

Ask high school students why they are studying Japanese instead of less difficult foreign languages and the answer often is about economics.

“In the future, I know Japanese will be the language of money. Maybe I can get a couple of bucks learning it. Maybe it will be easier finding a job,” said Omar Miramontes, a 10-grader at Bell High School, an overwhelmingly Latino school in the industrial city south of Los Angeles.

Likewise, Ryan Gorecki, a freshman at mainly Anglo, suburban Moorpark High School in Ventura County, explained: “The Japanese are taking over a lot of businesses in America and I figure, to be competitive with them, I’m going to have to communicate with them.”

Such financial pragmatism, along with Asian immigration, is boosting enrollments of Japanese classes in high schools around California and the nation. But with the increases comes more attention to what educators complain is a lack of clear standards in teaching and testing Japanese.

Those concerns are the basis of a national conference at Stanford University this weekend, sponsored by the College Board and the National Foreign Language Center. The long-range goal is to help the College Board, the organization behind the Scholastic Aptitude Test, draw up a Japanese language achievement test by 1993. That proficiency examination will join ones in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Latin and Hebrew, all designed to help in college admissions decisions.

First, however, basic questions have to be settled about how to teach Japanese to young Americans. Especially debated will be approaches to its intricate writing systems. The resulting achievement test, in turn, is expected to have much influence on what is taught after 1993. The test’s very existence is expected to further increase enrollments in what is already the most popular non-European language in U.S. high schools.

“If you are going to be testing French or German or Spanish, there is a fairly clearly understood set of subjects toward mastering those languages and fairly well-accepted texts. With Japanese, that doesn’t exist yet,” said Brian O’Reilly, associate director for the College Board’s testing program.

The effort is considered so important that the National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded it nearly $400,000. “A significant slice of people in the United States have to have a deep understanding of Japanese culture and Japanese society. And they should be having some direct contact through the language,” said James Herbert, an endowment official. High schools’ emphasis on European languages “just hasn’t prepared us for the kind of world we are inhabiting now.”

That world--and certainly the U.S.--is increasingly tied to Japan. The more parents and students hear of Toyota plants in Kentucky, a Sony takeover of a Hollywood studio, Tokyo money on Wall Street and golf resorts bought by Japanese interests, the more they ask schools for Japanese classes.

As a result, the number of American high schools offering Japanese has grown over the past five years from about 200 to 700, according to the Center for Improvement of Teaching of Japanese Language and Culture in High School, a group based at the University of Illinois. “It is easily the fastest-growing language around,” said center official Barbara Shenk. Still, with about 25,000 high schools in the nation, there is enormous room for expansion.

In California, the number of students in kindergarten through 12th grade learning Japanese more than quadrupled, from 562 in 1983 to 2,391 last year, according to the state Department of Education. (Those figures do not include the many weekend language and culture schools for Japanese-Americans.) In comparison, California students of Spanish, the most popular language, increased by 27%, to 404,822, in the same period, while French showed little growth and German dropped.

But how enrollments translate into actual proficiency in Japanese is not known. Some experts say a good portion of the students will never be able to hold a real conversation in Japanese. U.S. Defense Department language schools estimate that basic fluency in Japanese takes five times the class hours needed to master Spanish or French.

“There’s a real Japanese boom because a lot of parents think if their children learn some Japanese, they are going to have a terrific advantage. But the parents and the principals usually are not aware how long it takes Americans to learn it. The students think if they learn a year or two or take it for a summer, they will be able to run a branch of Sony,” said Eleanor H. Jorden, a Japanese scholar who is deputy director of the National Foreign Language Center, a Johns Hopkins University program based in Washington.

Given that difficulty, scholars disagree on how the language should be handled in high schools. Among the questions to be debated at the Stanford conference this weekend are:

Should spoken or written Japanese be stressed? Should young Americans care about the levels of courtesy inherent in native Japanese or simply strive to make themselves understood? When should students learn the two phonetic writing systems in Japanese?

And, when should the third and most difficult component of written Japanese be taught--the thousands of Chinese-style ideograms known as kanji? (A sixth-grader in Japan is supposed to memorize about 900 kanji, a high school graduate about 1,800.)

“A lot of Americans have a ‘can do’ spirit. But they quickly a hit a brick wall (of the kanji characters) and can’t recover,” said J. Marshall Unger, chairman of the East Asian Languages and Literature department at the University of Hawaii’s main campus. He heads the College Board task force developing a curriculum linked to the achievement test.

Still, high school teachers of Japanese insist they have been finding their own ways to classroom success.

In the overwhelmingly Latino flavor of Bell High, a visit to Tim Mathos’ classroom can be a surprise. The blackboards are covered with Japanese writings. At the start and finish of his classes, students rise and bow, exchanging ceremonial greetings with Mathos. “Mina-san, ohayoo gozaimasu “ (Good morning, everyone), Mathos says.

“ Sensei , ohayoo gozaimasu. Ogenki desu ka? “ (Good morning, teacher. How are you?) the class responds. He then leads them through Japanese songs and fast-paced drills, calling on students as Cindy-San and Jose-San, adding the traditional sign of respect.

Mathos gets his students quickly into the two phonetic writing systems-- katakana, generally used to write words borrowed from European languages, and hiragana, used with kanji characters to write the bulk of Japanese. (All three are used together in modern Japanese.) He rejects the Roman alphabet transliteration used by many textbooks for English speakers, calling it “a dead end, like learning a useless writing system.” He introduces about 25 kanji characters the first year and estimates that his better students will be able to read, if not write, about 350 after two years.

“Chances are that a great number of these students won’t be fluent,” Mathos conceded. “Yet I think it’s been a positive experience. They’ve learned about the culture and it’s good for their self-esteem. It shows them they can do something other people think they can’t do.”

Aida Villegas, a junior in Mathos’ second-year class, says the complications of Japanese can be learned by studying enough: “It’s a pattern you keep adding to. You don’t have to be an honors student but you have to promise yourself and the teacher to try your best.”

At North Torrance High School, most of Christine Ito’s pupils in Japanese language classes are third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans and others of Asian background.

Some, like Danny Watanuki, a junior in Japanese III, knew a little Japanese from home but did not know how to write. He enrolled in the high school class, seeking “to learn about my heritage” and to get a handle on the language for what he hopes will be his future in computer technology.

Ito uses Roman transliterations much of the first semester because, she explained, “I think you have to have something to identify the sounds. Otherwise, it’s overwhelming just to learn the characters.” She adds the two phonetic writing systems but holds off on much kanji memorization until the second year. At the end of the fourth-year class, students should know about 300 characters by sight, she said.

Ito is pleased about the prospective College Board test and said she probably will change her classes to dovetail with it. “I’ve been teaching the way I think is right. It’s not necessarily the right way,” she explained.

Because of the difficulty of the writing systems, the Japanese test is likely to use tapes and have an emphasis on verbal skills, educators predict. The existing language achievement tests all stress reading and writing skills.

“I hope we can really test honest-to-goodness, practical use of the language as opposed to citing grammar rules and fill-in-the blanks,” said Jorden of the National Foreign Language Center.

For years, Asian-American educators pushed for an Asian language test. But the College Board said it could not afford to develop Japanese or Chinese tests because the market of student test-takers would be too small. Asian-Americans and some educators argued that student enrollments in the languages would increase in response.

Then, in November, the College Board announced reforms in its overall testing programs, including plans to create the Japanese achievement exam by 1993 and one in Mandarin Chinese a year or so later. The National Endowment for the Humanities grant ended the argument about funding for the Japanese test and shifted focus to its content.

“There is always the sense that having a College Board achievement test legitimizes the study of a subject and makes it more worthwhile,” said the College Board’s O’Reilly. “Students can demonstrate mastery of a subject in a way that’s beneficial to them in the college-going process.”