Educators of Japanese studies from all tertiary Japanese programmes in New Zealand and representatives of other stakeholder groups gathered at Massey University, Palmerston North, on September 13 and 14 for a workshop ‘Tertiary Japanese Language Education in New Zealand – Are We Giving Generation Z What They Want?’ The workshop was co-hosted by the School of Humanities, Massey University, and JSANZ, and funded by the Japan Foundation, with support from the Sasakawa Fellowship Fund for Japanese Language Education. Former Ambassador to Japan and Chairman of the NZ Committee of the Japan NZ Business Council Mr Ian Kennedy gave the opening address.

The keynote address was delivered by Professor Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW Australia, the University of New South Wales, on the topic ‘Japanese Communities of Practice: Connecting Japanese language university students and the world beyond’. Professor Thomson also facilitated a lively and stimulating workshop on ‘Learner inclusive classroom activities: Towards promotion of learner autonomy and expression of learner agency’.

Participants came away brimming with fresh teaching strategies and keen to launch new projects to energise and advance Japanese language education in New Zealand.

The Sasakawa Fellowship Fund for Japanese Language Education in New Zealand is delighted by the Education Minister Hekia Parata’s announcement  of more money for schools to increase the number of Asian language students to support trade and international relationships.

Professor Brigid Heywood, who chairs the fund’s management committee, says the extra $10 million over five years annnounced on Wednesday to set up new Asian language programmes and strengthen existing ones is “a wonderful initiative”, particularly if it encourages systemic changes in attitude about the value of people proficient in the languages of New Zealand’s major trading partners.

Professor Heywood, who is Massey University’s Assistant Vice-Chancellor Research, Academic and Enterprise, says that in recent years the importance of Japanese and other Asian languages has been frequently signalled in the media and in ministerial documents as a key to advancing multinational business relationships and export growth. “But there has been a mismatch between what is said at this level and what actually appears in terms of policy directives and implementation.”

Research commissioned by the fund last year into the decline in Japanese language education in New Zealand in recent years identified a complex interplay of factors.

“It is not compulsory at any level to learn a language in New Zealand, so it’s exciting to see policy makers moving away from the view of languages as a ‘nice optional extra’. Not only is it vitally important for New Zealand to have proficient speakers of te Reo Māori and of the languages of our trading partners, but the more intrinsic benefits that learning a second language confers on individual – and by extension on our society – are being increasingly recognised by employers, who are starting to seek out speakers of other languages.

“Research is clear that those who have learned a second language are better multi-taskers, have better memory retention, are better team players. There is even research to show that learning a second language can delay the onset of dementia by up to four years.

“Our stereotypical ‘English is all we need’ attitude is changing. We’ll need to do a lot more, systemically, of course to distance ourselves from this attitude, but the minister’s initiative is a great start.  There is strong evidence that companies in the UK are losing business to their European counterparts, and English graduates losing out in the job stakes to their European peers, because of their inability to speak the language of their trading partners. It is exciting that we are seeing positive  steps at the policy level to avoid this happening in New Zealand.”

In its programmes to support teachers and students of Japanese, the Fund strongly promotes the value of adding Japanese to law studies, business, engineering and science. “Employers are starting to call for employees with the particular skillset they seek, plus a language,” Professor Heywood says. “We need to work harder to get this message across to students and their parents. But equally, our educational institutions need to look at restructuring their programmes to make it possible for students to add a language to their programme of compulsory papers – with some courses, it is almost impossible to combine them. And let’s look harder at how we can make the study of a language compulsory at some levels in New Zealand.”

The Sasakawa Fellowship Fund for Japanese Language Education is a national programme set up in the late 1990s to support teachers and students of Japanese at all levels and across institutions. The funding comes from Japan but it is chaired and co-ordinated by Massey University.

The trust is planning to publish profiles of more than 100 New Zealand graduates in Japanese language, highlighting their successes in a wide variety of careers. One of them, Youth Japan New Zealand Business Council co-founder Jeanine Begg, speaks Korean as well as Japanese, has degrees in Japanese and political science, and is Antarctica New Zealand’s marketing and communications general manager.

Jeanine Begg