Three papers on the outlook for second language teaching and learning introduce the conference on second language curriculum and evaluation. "My Story of Language Teaching" (Andrew Wright) describes a variety of personal and professional experiences in the course of 50 years of language teaching, each highlighting emerging social values…

An American Jewish woman learning Japanese in Japan examines the relationship between language, language learning, and personal identity. Autobiographical reflections are combined with entries from a diary and scholarly observations about the interrelationship of gender, race, culture, social class, historical experiences, and language learning.…

The article explores the purpose and methods of teaching the personal narrative in foreign language classrooms. Following a cross-cultural comparison of the history, purpose, and form of autobiography in first-language contexts in the United States and Japan; a review of the place of personal narrative in second- and foreign-language composition…

Personal narratives of 20 middle-class Japanese preschoolers, half of them 4 years old and half 5 years old, and their mothers were analyzed using stanza analysis and high point analysis. The patterning in stanzas yielded the following: (1) with regard to the proportion of three-verse stanzas, there were no differences between the groups of…

This paper describes a technique for English-as-a-Second-Language teaching that has students and teachers sharing personal narratives, developed using ethnographic research techniques, as a classroom exercise. The technique, used in a higher education institution in Japan, is presented as a work-in-progress to those who are interested in…

This article describes the implementation of the cooperative development (CD) technique by two professors at a Japanese university. With this technique, colleagues work together by adopting the roles of "speaker" and "understander" to support each other's process of addressing teaching concerns. The skills required for CD…

This feature is a collection of brief essays recently written by Japanese and Chinese gay youth, followed by commentary from several leading educators and scholars. Akihiko Komiya's "Difficulties Japanese Gay Youth Encounter" provides excerpts from the stories of six gay youth and their everyday lives, based on their letters in…

This book examines how culturally specific aspects of Japanese preschool children's narrative discourse skills develop and eventually lead to literacy. It discusses how language shapes and is shaped by culture-specific experiences, analyzing how young Japanese children develop narrative structure and how Japanese parents guide their children in…

Excerpts from interviews with 30 Asian high school students concerning their acculturation to the American classroom are presented and discussed. The students had been in the United States for no more than 2 years, and were here for a variety of reasons, including extended visits with relatives to temporary appointments of their parents to U.S.…

The collection of essays on teachers as course developers is designed to help teachers understand how to develop courses or modify existing ones using their own experience and the experiences and theories of others. It attempts to capture this process through the stories of six teachers who have developed courses. Each narrative focuses on a…