A student sits at a table across from her friends. She is reading a colorful manga and losing track of time as she becomes absorbed in the story. After finishing one volume, she eagerly returns to the bookshelf to pick up the next and returns to her seat.
It’s a scene that would not be out of place at any manga café in Tokyo, but the setting here is unusual: UCLA’s Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library. The student is using materials from the library’s extensive reading collection in Japanese.
This unique collection contains authentic Japanese-language reading materials. Extensive reading is a language learning approach that supplements classroom instruction with free reading for pleasure. Students select their own reading materials according to level of difficulty and improve their language skills as they read without relying on dictionaries or textbooks. The library's collection includes not only manga but also children’s books, novels, and nonfiction works.
A collaborative effort
UCLA’s collection of extensive reading materials emerged from a collaboration among the East Asian Library, the Asia Institute, and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, made possible with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, which has recognized the Asia Institute as a National Resource Center for East Asia since 1974. The Department of Education awards National Resource Center grants under Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
As a National Resource Center for East Asia, the Asia Institute administers Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for UCLA students, organizes workshops for Los Angeles area K-12 teachers, and works with local community colleges on area studies curriculum, among other projects. UCLA also hosts National Resource Centers for Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The Asia Institute had always supported acquisition of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean materials for the library in its budget, but with federal funding for Title VI programs cut by 40 percent in 2011, this support was temporarily eliminated.
With funding restored in the 2014 grant cycle, the Asia Institute and its partners got together to rethink their approach to library support. According to Elizabeth Leicester, executive director of the Asia Institute, the goal was to design an innovative program that would not merely provide for book purchases, but also create a sustainable collection that would outlast federal funding and better reflect new priorities of reaching a wider community of students and library users at UCLA.
New trends in library collections
East Asian Studies Librarian Su Chen explained that the decision to collect extensive reading materials was based in part on recent trends in library space usage at universities nationwide. “Mobile technology and remote accessibility of electronic resources beyond library walls and hours have challenged libraries to rethink the library as a whole,” she said. The East Asian Library wanted to do its part in designing new spaces for teaching and learning.
In 2013, Chen attended a conference presentation on Japanese extensive reading collections. After the conference, Chen returned to UCLA and met with her fellow librarians and language teachers to consider the possibility of developing a similar resource.
Meanwhile, Japanese Studies Librarian Tomoko Bialock joined UCLA in September 2014. She had spearheaded a successful collection of Japanese-language extensive reading materials in her former position at USC. During the summer of 2013, Bialock visited the nonprofit Tagengo Tadoku, which promotes extensive reading in Japan. In Los Angeles, “I went out on weekends to hunt for appropriate books for extensive reading in secondhand and other bookstores in town,” she recalled.
Bialock’s arrival at UCLA allowed the East Asian Library to collect extensive reading materials relatively quickly. By building on her previous experience, she was able to launch UCLA’s collection by the end of 2014 so that instructors could make use of the materials in winter 2015 courses.
The East Asian Library also maintains an online catalog of readings that includes sample pages so that students can search the collection and find level-appropriate materials before they arrive at the library.
Linking library with classroom
Eishi Ikeda, a lecturer in Asian Languages and Cultures who teaches third- and fourth-year Japanese, said that he was very excited about the extensive reading collection from the beginning and was eager to use it for his classes.
“Japanese pop culture fans are a heavily represented demographic in our language courses, and they are more familiar with manga than I am,” Ikeda admitted. “But most of them have never read these manga in the original Japanese.”
Ikeda had heard about extensive reading approaches to language teaching before, but didn’t have a chance to implement them on a large scale until recently. He explained that Japanese language textbooks are effective in helping students understand grammar, but their reading passages are brief and often not very interesting to students.
Ikeda said that the collection takes advantage of students’ natural interest in reading, allowing them to choose the materials that most appeal to them. He integrates the readings into his classes by requiring the students to keep a journal about their reading and submit regular book reports.
The Japanese language has features that make extensive reading a particularly useful approach. One of these is a complex writing system that requires students to learn and absorb large numbers of Chinese characters known as kanji. Ikeda said that the graded learning materials help students become more comfortable with the way Japanese appears on the printed page. Lower-level books include phonetic guides to show how characters are pronounced, while these visual aids gradually disappear in the upper levels.
Both the language instructors and the librarians closely monitor students’ interest in the reading materials so that they can determine how the collection should focus as it grows. So far, the materials are used in upper-level Japanese courses taught by Ikeda and Yumiko Kawanishi, the Japanese language program coordinator. Next year, when the two instructors will teach beginning Japanese, the extensive reading approach will be adopted at those levels while remaining in use for third- and fourth-year courses.
Students are responding enthusiastically to the collection. Ikeda said that many of his students told him that their enjoyment of reading in Japanese has increased, they gained confidence, and they were able to pick up vocabulary incidentally without depending on dictionaries. The collection has even become a subject of scholarly research by one of Ikeda’s graduate students who is studying second language acquisition.
Looking ahead
Chen is confident about the future of the program. Librarians for Korean and Chinese studies have already begun to plan collections for those languages, she said. While the specific collections and their uses may differ depending on each language’s characteristics, the basic concept of encouraging language learning through self-directed reading is the same.
Chen, Bialock, Ikeda, and Leicester gave a presentation about the Japanese collection at this year’s Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) conference in Chicago. Several other institutions, including Princeton University and the University of Arizona, have already begun efforts to build similar collections inspired by UCLA’s example.
The extensive language collection for Japanese is located in the reading room of the East Asian Library on the second floor of Charles E. Young Research Library. The materials are in two bookcases at the reading room entrance, which hold approximately 500 volumes. Some are for on-site use only, while others can be borrowed by UCLA affiliates. For more information, please visit the library’s guide to the collection, which includes a video presentation by Eishi Ikeda.
Photos provided by UCLA East Asian Library staff.
Published: Thursday, June 18, 2015