East Asian Languages & Cultures Newsletter Fall 2014 Dear Alumni, Students, Friends, and Supporters of the Inside this Issue: Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, With this new edition of the annual EALC Newsletter, we update Department News you on significant department developments, faculty accomplishments, and student club activities. New Hires We also bring you student news and feature several alumni. Faculty Updates Student News We look forward to seeing some of you during the homecoming and reunion weekend in September and hope that you will Alumni Profiles continue to share your stories and experiences by visiting the Department’s website and filling out the alumni form: http:// Student Club Events college.wfu.edu/ealc/alumni/alumni-form Announcements Department News We had an unusually busy year and a particularly eventful spring. With only two full-time positions in Japanese language, literature and culture, Professor Yamada’s departure in Spring 2013 presented significant challenges to the Department in general and the Japanese Program in particular. Professor Yamada was on schedule to teach EAL 375 Senior Research Seminar in fall 2013 and EAL 285 Contemporary East Asian Cinema in spring 2014 besides courses in Japanese literature and culture. Professor Andy Rodekohr took over the senior seminar and the contemporary East Asian film class while other faculty members took on Professor Yamada’s advising duties. The Department started a search to replace Professor Yamada last fall and successfully recruited a tenure-track assistant professor of Japanese in spring 2014. In spring 2014, the Department also clarified its mission and embarked on a comprehensive assessment of the Chinese and Japanese majors. Faculty members chose three learning outcomes and assessed them using a variety of means including focus group meetings and analyses of student projects and tests. The faculty were encouraged by the overall positive findings and formulated action plans to address curricular and pedagogical weaknesses. In April, the Department sponsored Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama’s visit to Wake Forest University with the Humanities Institute and the Teaching and Learning Center. Professor Kuriyama is a well-known historian of East Asian medicine at Harvard University and an expert in incorporating digital media in the classroom. In addition to delivering a fascinating lecture on the history of ginseng, Professor Kuriyama gave a talk on multimedia assignments and a workshop on maximizing the potential of PowerPoint. Spotlighting recent experiments at Harvard, Professor Kuriyama discussed new forms of pedagogy made possible by the democratization of audiovisual expression and the implications of electronic media for the future of teaching and scholarship. His lectures and workshop attracted a large audience of students and faculty from the College. In October 2013, the North Carolina Confucius Institute awarded the Chinese Program $500 worth of books and teaching aids in recognition of the excellent performance of the Wake Forest University students in the 2013 North Carolina Chinese Speech and Writing Contests. Finally, the Department took steps to enhance its web presence. In August, EALC launched a new website at www.wfu.edu/ealc. EALC is now also on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wfuealc. Alumni can connect via our LinkedIn page at http://www.linkedin.com/groups/WFU-Chinese-Japanese-EAL-Major-4935360. Please visit these sites to view upcoming department events and stay in touch with former classmates and teachers. New Hires Nicholas Albertson joins the Department as assistant professor of Japanese. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2013, with a dissertation on nature, idealism, and allusion in Romantic poetry of the Meiji-era (1868-1912). His current book project takes this research further by examining competing ideals of poetic realism and objective sketching techniques. Nick was drawn to literature of the Meiji period because of its rich blend of tradition and experimentation in a time of cultural upheaval and rapid scientific progress. But he first fell in love with Japanese language and culture in the sixth grade, when his family spent five months in Kyoto. He went on to major in East Asian Studies at Brown University, and he spent his junior year abroad in Kyoto. After college, he taught English for two years in the northeastern city of Morioka. In graduate school, Nick returned to northeastern Japan to do research at Tohoku University in Sendai. Upon his return to Chicago, he taught courses on Heian-era (794-1185) noblewomen’s diaries, twentieth- century Japanese novels, and concepts of nature in Japanese literature, along with survey courses in Japanese history and literature. He also served as a writing intern for first-year college students. Most recently, he taught Japanese literature and language at Smith College, in his hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts. Nick is energized by the level of interest in East Asian cultures and the dedication among the students at Wake Forest, and he looks forward to teaching a variety of courses here. The Department also welcomes three part-time instructors Li-Jung Lee, Kazumasa Ueda and I-Ning Huang this fall. Li-Jung Lee received her M. A. degree from the Graduate Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language at National Taiwan Normal University. She is interested in cultural communication and second language learning. In her spare time, she likes to jog on the campus and watching films. She is extremely happy about the many wonderful resources available for language teachers at Wake Forest University. Kazumasa Ueda graduated from Kansai Gaidai in Osaka, Japan with a B. A. in English. He took Japanese linguistics classes in college and became interested in teaching Japanese. He hopes to gain valuable experience at Wake Forest University under Professor Yasuko Takada’s guidance. After leaving Wake Forest University, he plans to attend graduate school and study Japanese linguistics and pedagogy. His goal is to teach Japanese as a foreign language in a university setting. I-Ning Huang graduated from National Tsing-hua University in Taiwan. Currently, she is finishing her master’s degree in Chinese language pedagogy at National Taiwan Normal University. She has taught American and Japanese college students for several different academic programs in Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. At Wake Forest University she will assist in the Department’s first and second-year Chinese classes. Faculty Updates Fengyan Hu, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Chinese, travelled to Orlando, Florida to participate in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) conference in November 2013. At the conference, she gave a paper titled “Textbook Writing of Advanced-level Business Chinese: a Case Study.” Based on her experiences with several textbooks and her analysis of their strengths and weaknesses, she wrote and presented a sample chapter focusing on Coca-Cola’s entry into the Chinese market. Working jointly with the Chinese Club members and other colleagues in the Chinese Program, she organized several activities such as Chinese tables, the Chinese Spring Festival Celebration and Chinese movie nights. On April 5, 2014, she attended two workshops “Survey Design for Chinese L2 Classroom Studies”and “Introduction to Comprehensible Input and TPRS for Teaching Chinese” at Duke University. Fangfang Li, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Chinese, co-organized Chinese speaking roundtables, a Chinese cooking event, movie nights, and a celebration of the Chinese Lantern Festival enhancing students’ Chinese language skills and helped them understand Chinese culture and society. In fall 2013, she joined a faculty book discussion group. In spring 2014 she attended a number of workshops sponsored by the Wake Forest professional development center and a teacher outreach workshop at Duke University. She received a certificate of achievement from the Confucius Institute of North Carolina in recognition of her contributions to the 2013 North Carolina Chinese Speech & Writing Contests. She also created a Facebook page for the Department. Yasuko Takata Rallings, Associate Professor of the Practice in Japanese, derives her greatest satisfaction from teaching first through third-year Japanese classes. She has also been very active in various professional organizations. She presented “Project Work in the Japanese Classroom: Ensuring Learning and Motivating Students” at the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina Fall Conference in October, 2013. She also co-presented “Developing Language-Focused Tasks in Content-Based Instruction“ with Professor Noriko Fujioka-Ito of the University of Cincinnati at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Annual Convention in Orlando, FL in November, 2013. In addition, she is the second vice president of the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina (FLANC), and helped organize the FLANC Spring Conference at the UNC-Asheville in March, 2014 as the Program Chair. The conference attracted over 130 K-16 world language teachers from all over North Carolina. She has also been serving on the Board of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese (AATJ) as the 2013-2014 Fall Conference Co-Director. In April the College awarded Professor Rallings a prestigious Wright Family Faculty Fellowship in recognition of her excellence in teaching, mentoring and professional development. We hope you