Teaching JFL in the Canadian Classroom: Oral language and written (literary) texts

The movie Driving Miss Daisy includes a scene in which Miss Daisy, learning that her driver is not literate, exclaims something to the effect of “but you look at the newspaper every morning.” Her driver explains that yes, he looks at the newspaper, but that he never said he was reading it. Similarly, this presentation examines assumptions about literacy practices, specifically speaking to the appropriateness and difficulty of using literary and non-literary texts in the teaching of Japanese in a foreign language context. While using literary texts can enhance FL students’ learning of culture, knowing which texts can be useful is problematic when students are FL beginners who have had no prior exposure to written texts, and/or when their reading skills are not additional to pre-existing oral skills as is the case for L1 learners. Moreover, canonical literary texts are often not of interest or relevance to FL learners. Therefore, I suggest that manga be considered literary texts. While manga may be denigrated as “unliterary” or as a “poor man’s literature”, they are also current, urban, frequently sophisticated, and appealing to millennial youth. Now-canonical English literary texts such as the novel, or even Shakespearian plays too were often considered lowbrow when they first appeared. I also suggest that the current university system in Canada, reflecting much university-level teaching globally, conflates oral and written language to the detriment of both. While language teachers espouse the communicative approach, CBLT or CLIL, much of the university curriculum is tested via written language. As a result, heritage language learners of foreign languages are intentionally excluded from FL classrooms; however, heritage language learners frequently lack literacy skills and literary knowledge. All of these factors must be considered when debating the merits of literary texts in the JFL classroom.