Teaching Writing: not correcting but communicating. Japanese as a Case Study.

Abstract

This action research examines teaching writing in Japanese without corrective feedback. I adopted Active Learning in my Japanese lessons of the first semester of 2020 for master's degree students majoring in Japanese Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. The students were required to develop a report throughout the semester while reflecting on comments or questions from the peers in group activities. However, I did not provide any corrective feedback to the students' drafts against their expectations for the native Japanese teacher. The objective is to encourage the students to express their own thoughts in their own Japanese, and the hypothesis behind this is that corrective feedback may reinforce the idea that only native teachers know the right answer for Japanese writing and the students do not. Besides discouraging them to write in their own words, corrective feedback may allow students' attitude to accept uncritically what teachers say in foreign language education. Through the group activities some participants gradually shifted their values from grammatical accuracy to originality of writing and active engagement with the peers. Ultimately, they increased awareness that the students could affect writing of the peers and their own, decentralizing the native teacher's role in the classroom. The analysis of this process shows the transformation of the fixed relationship between the native Japanese teacher who corrected and the students who were corrected.