Hello!
I am wondering if anyone here, teaching at a high school can help me with this. Do your schools offer literature classes in Japanese or English?
I am working on a report for my next year and wanted to include information on the amount that students read and if reading and analysis are taught. My school currently doesn’t provide these kinds of courses, and my evidence, interactions with my students, is very anecdotal. They read manga and the occasional light novel, but very few are interested in reading novels.
Any information, resources or anecdotal would be very welcome.
1 comment
Japanese high schools have “Modern Japanese” which is Japanese literature class in Japanese. It’s basically like standard American high school English class – you read short stories and classic novels written by American (or the occasional Brit or Canadian) authors and write essays on them, answer quizzes, and discuss. Here they read lots of novel excerpts and short stories. Now and then a novel. Japanese writers, of course. They do read and analyze. I would say the analysis is lighter than what we tend to learn in the States. At least comparing it to what I learned in school.
My guess is that your school does this too, as it is a required class per MEXT. When the student says “I have Japanese class,” that is probably the class they mean. Unless they say “I have old Japanese class,” in which case, they are studying “Classical Japanese,” just as many native English speakers had to drudge through a 6 week unit on “Old English.” However, here, they hang out in old Japanese for some years.