Atsushi Fukada and Mayu Miyamoto
Please join me in congratulating Atsushi Fukada, professor of Japanese and linguistics, and Mayu Miyamoto, a doctoral student in the School of Languages and Cultures, upon receiving a 2016 Excellence in Distance Learning Innovation Award. Their Japanese courses were selected for this award for their innovative use of Speak Everywhere, an online language-learning tool developed by Atsushi.
Speak Everywhere has made it possible to teach Japanese—one of the most difficult languages for American students—almost entirely online. Students first complete self-learning modules, learning vocabulary and grammar using textbooks and the Speak Everywhere software, which records oral exercises so that instructors can monitor students’ progress by listening to their audio submissions. Students then test and improve their fluency with one weekly 20-minute class session with two students and the instructor, conversing to practice using what they’ve learned in near-authentic scenarios. Speak Everywhere has expanded possibilities for teaching foreign languages online by combining frequent asynchronous (self-learning) modules with infrequent synchronous activities (e.g. real-time conversations) in a user-friendly teaching interface. Atsushi’s preliminary research has shown that students in online language courses generally perform comparably with classroom language students, and on some measures, even outperform them.
Congratulations to Professor Fukada and Mayu Miyamoto!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts