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The Institute for Japanese Studies will present a lecture by Tetsuo Harada, Waseda University, on Tuesday, September 6 from 2:20 p.m. to 3:40 p.m. at Mendenhall Lab, Room 173 (registration required). Prof. Harada will present "Speaking Proficiency and Phonetic Ability of Children in a Japanese/English Two-way Immersion Program in the US."
Abstract: This talk focuses on two-way immersion (TWI) programs, in which a balanced number of students from each target language group are enrolled in a class and they are expected to receive greater exposure to a second language from peers than in one-way immersion programs. The study examined how elementary school children in a Japanese/English TWI program in the US developed their speaking skills measured by the ACTFL Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL) and also through evaluating pronunciation accuracy obtained by acoustic analysis (i.e., voice onset time or VOT). Seventy-one students (27 Japanese-as-a-world-language (JWL) learners and 44 Japanese-as-a-heritage-language (JHL) learners) in the program participated in both an oral interview and a sentence reading task for eliciting voiceless stops /p, t, k/ in English and Japanese. Results showed that both groups of children successfully developed their speaking proficiency and produced target-like Japanese VOT.
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