Dear readers, it’s been a while.

I’m Simone Albesano from the grammar team of the ‘Collaborative Creativity’ program and I’m currently working as a supervisor for the Japanese language e-learning platform JaLea (for any further information about its vision and goals, I suggest to check out this post by coordinator Federica Tocci). In this post, I would like to report my last weeks’ activity by mentioning some of the challenges my colleagues and I encountered as a (sub-)team while revising, and thus renewing, JaLea’s grammar and lexical items. In particular, I will cope with three pedagogical issues: the discourse of ‘inclusivity’ in the example sentences, the difficulty in defining the syntactic category of some lexical units within the example tables, and finally the importance of providing pragmatic, free-to-use and 分かりやすい wakariyasui (‘easy to understand’) grammatical definitions to JaLea’s future users.

During the last weeks, I’ve been assiduously working with my colleagues Giulia Verzini (senior trainee) and Tommaso Cavalieri (junior trainee) on more than 350 items among grammatical patterns, expressions, particles etc. As we proceeded with our tasks we noticed an increase in the number of items revised per week, which I hope will grow further. In fact, instead of revising together one single item at a time, each of us recently started to work on separate blocks of items in order to optimize the amount of checked items per day. However, since our revision activity is based on the core concept of 協力 kyōryoku (‘collaboration’) as Giulia brilliantly pointed out in one of her previous posts, we are still strictly intertwined in the decisions we make every day to renew JaLea’s contents.

“I personally think working in a pair with just Simone as I’ve done in the past semester would have made the debate an uneven one. One of us would have ended up inevitably overtaking the other. However, the presence of a third unbiased party allows us to always add an objective perspective whenever a disagreement comes up, and that is essential to achieve a fair result.”

I always keep in mind how much teamworking is essential for the kind of task I’ve been encharged with, since it gives me the chance to question and enlarge my point of view in order to offer a more inclusive, ‘six-handed’ and hopefully empowering product.

Speaking of inclusivity (for more information check out Tommaso’s interesting post), the reformulation of example sentences within the grammar items we are revising is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects related to the ideological implications of language education. In particular, I still remember the following example showing the use of the adverbial noun それぞれ sorezore (‘respectively’) within a sentence: 夫婦はそれぞれの役割がある fūfu wa sorezore no yakuwari ga aru (‘In the couple, each one has a role’). In this case, the example clearly sticks to a gender-role-based stereotypical image of the heterosexual couple, which thus deviates from any form of ideological empowerment. It also gives no visibility to an emerging new portrait of contemporary world society represented by LGBTQ+ couples. Although one may think that replacing the word 夫婦 fūfu with the more neutral カップル kappuru could have been a good solution, I believe this would have left the problem of ‘role-based couples’ unsolved. We then chose to completely change the example sentence, being aware of the fact that this simple decision would have had a subtle but important impact on the perception of gender equality.

As I mentioned above, another controversy my colleagues and I have to constantly struggle with is the definition of syntactic categories within the sample tables. These tables need to be filled out with an initial letter or an abbreviation defyining the syntactic category of the corresponding lexical unit. We always attempt to keep the syntactic categories in the tables as homogenous as possible in order to facilitate and not confuse the learner, but this not always turns out to be an easy task. In fact, sometimes we need to make compromises with some particular units such as adverbial nouns: although they are grammatically actual ‘nouns’ they often work as adverbs! Language can be hard to analyze in its countless facets, but I personally see this underlying complexity more as a pro than a con, a stimulus to the L2 learning process.

Finally, I would like to draw some attention to the importance of pragmatic descriptions in providing grammar items to JaLea’s users. At a certain point of our work, we recently noticed a tendency to dive into more detailed grammar-based descriptions instead of going ‘straight to the point’. However, since we noticed this trend we are continuously bearing in mind the kind of target we are aiming at in order to create accessible and free-to-use contents with no levels nor boundaries. At this poinnt, I would like to write more about this and other future developments in my next posts.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned!

Simone