This semester, I am teaching the English 2 class for international students and students who already have very high English proficiency. How do you teach English to somebody who already knows it very well? As somebody with a background more in literature than language pedagogy, I don’t have a quick and easy answer to that question. Rather than trying to answer it head-on, I have given the class a focus on developing intercultural competency and skills navigating between the two languages of Japanese and English (in addition to all of the other rich language resources students bring to the classroom). To bring this topic to the front of students’ minds, we spent the first three weeks working on the topic of “Multiculturalism in 21st century Japan”. Students have read a short work of Japanese transnational literature in English translation and thought about the difference between “Japanese” and “Ja-pa-nese”, in addition to taking part in class discussion about challenges faced by Japan as it becomes more culturally and ethnically diverse in the coming years. A focus on developing intercultural skills is being carried through to the second topic, “Travel Writing”, in which students were encouraged to find travel blog posts written in any language they know and introduce them in English.
