Welcome to Languaging!
Thank you for visiting the Languaging! webpages.  Here you will find virtual versions of the same newsletter we copy, fold and staple once a semester at Dokkyo University in Saitama, Japan, just north of the Tokyo metropolis.  This is a newsletter written and published by students and teachers.  Many of the contributors study or work at Dokkyo, but we invite everyone to contribute.

Issue 5 is Alive!  And the new issue is finally online!

Some engrossing reading for summer vacation! We begin this issue with an interesting feature interview with Ruth Yatesby Markus Rude on how teachers can make their writing classes more interactive and save theirselves from overwork..  Ruth's classes become micro-learning communities, but as she says, "I'm not even sure if they actually realize the underlying aim of promoting collectinve thinking and learning from one another."

Also in this issue, a number of students (current and former), including Masumi Nakamura, Aya Sasaki, Eri Ishida,and Mina Takahashioffer their reflections on language learning language, the teachers that inspired them,  techniques that helped them, and the philosophies that guided them. 

Next come a collection of articles loosely related by the theme of teachers learning.  While Terumi Ohnishi considers the value of teachers who don't pretend they know everything, and that by not doing this, they gain the opportunity to learn with their students and become role models for their students.  Miho Furuyama shares with us her experience of returning returning to graduate school during a leave of absence from her work as a public junior high school teacher.  Markus Rude and Christopher Carpenter, two language teachers, share stories of learning Japanese in their daily lives in Japan. 

Next, students voice their reasons and experiences in autonomous learning that came about when they set up an English study group coordinated by the author Paul Dore.  Also, you can be moved by the `Song For All Seasons' in four languages (demonstrating some inter-departmental collaboration here at Dokkyo University between Murphey, Vendredi-Auzanneau, and Rude).  Newblood has been introduced into the Dokkyo English teaching staff, and you can read all about them in the "Introducing" column (Welcome Akiko, Yuka, and Jodie!) .  And that's not all!  There's website recommendations, a couple of jokes for sharing with your students (compliments of Thomas Karrer, our guest humor editor), and more!  So, with your free hand grab a coffee (or whatever beverage you prefer during these hot dog days) and click on the Current Issue link for a good thought-provoking read.

Also in these pages you will find the Languaging! archives (revisit issues 1, 2, 3 and 4!),  Languaging! Links, and Languaging! News.  And don't forget to sign our Guest Book.  We are a work in progress!  We greatly appreciate your comments and suggestions for our newsletter and website.  And please contribute!  We want to hear what you have to say about learning and teaching languages. 

If you would like to receive email notification when the new issue of Languaging! becomes available, please send an email to the editors at: [email protected]  Write "Add me to the mailing list" in the subject line.



Iris Chang was one of the most promising historians in America and a vigorous champion of human rights.  Her most prominent work was the 1997 international bestseller, The Rape Of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II.  It was described in its foreword by William Kirby, the chairman of the history department at Harvard University and a scholar of China, as "the first full study in English of Nanking's tragedy".  It described from original sources the rape, torture and killing of an estimated 300,000 Chinese by a force of 50,000 Japanese soldiers.  The book was denounced as inaccurate by Japanese right-wingers, who vilify Chang as a propagandist for demanding that the Tokyo government should apologise.  (Obituary excerpt by Christopher Reed, from The Gaurdian, Nov. 15th, 2004.)

Chang died at the age of 36.  Godspeed, sister.

Note: For another perspective of this massacre see “A Numerical Study of the Nanking Incident,” by Akira Nakamura. Dokkyo University Studies in English, 60. (2005).  Also see “Tri-nation history text aims to counter whitewash,” in The Japan Times (May 25, 2005) for information on a new multi-national textbook, The History That Opens the Future.

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About Languaging!
Languaging! is a semesterly newsletter published by students and teachers at Dokkyo University in Saitama, Japan.  Our goal is to encourage students and teachers to explore their learning and teaching more reflectively by writing about it and sharing their ideas in our community of learners (we are all learners, after all).  We want to encourage people to learn and teach (and write) together.  We believe learning and innovation happen most frequently (and most productively) when people are doing it together.  We want to encourage others to innovate,  to collaborate, to take risks, and even to make mistakes.  Mistakes are when we learn the most!  And  we want to encourage people to write about it!  Writing is a great tool for the reflection it occasions in both writer and reader.  Finally, we want to be the newsletter that isn't afraid to abuse the exclamation point (!).  We're excited about learning and teaching, and we want to share that excitement!