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Mari Noda, associate director of the National East Asian Language Resource Center (NEALRC) at The Ohio State University, was featured in the June 2022 issue of the International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) Newsletter. The IFLE Office of the U.S. Department of Education publishes a quarterly e-newsletter to share information that may be of interest to current and former IFLE grantees, interested applicants, and the general international community.
Dr. Noda is the lead author on the NihonGO NOW! textbook series, a beginning-level courseware package that takes a “performed culture” approach to learning Japanese, balancing the need for an intellectual understanding of cultural and structural elements with ample opportunities to experience and explore the language within its cultural context. Award-winning Japanese filmmaker Hiroki Ohsawa directed the web video series, which has won awards from several international film competitions. The series received partial financial support from the NEALRC’s FY 2018-2021 Title VI Language Resource Centers grant.
The materials, published in 2021 by Routledge, provide training equivalent to two to three years of regular instruction at the college level. Each level of the series is comprised of two textbooks and two activity books, along with audio and video files. Together, they provide opportunities for learners to expand repertoire of cultured language use through modeling of templates, hypothesizing, and experimenting their own synthesis and creativity.
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