Wise Up Community Home Education, is a charity offering educational opportunities to children and young people who have been removed from school due to difficulties such as bullying, ill health, or who come from areas of severe deprivation. A modest grant from the Foundation enabled them to offer extended Japanese language studies to students and young people in Wales and to help them acquire basic qualifications in the language.

There are over 8,000 students learning Japanese at secondary level in the UK, the largest number in Europe.  The popularity of Japanese increases by the year and GCSE exam entries have more than doubled since 2000. Resources are scant and no UK designed GCSE textbooks exist. Grant support was given to the Japan Foundation London Language Centre’s major initiative to develop, CHIKARA, a unique on-line resource for teachers of Japanese in 260 schools and colleges across the UK.

The Institute of Translation and Interpreting recently received a small grant for its IJET Conference for professional Japanese-English translators and interpreters.

A number of grants have also been given to the British Association for Teaching Japanese (BATJ) towards its Annual Seminar and Conference and the mounting of  professional conferences throughout the UK, a recent one being on Japanese Applied Linguistics. Common problems faced by learners of Japanese were examined and ideas shared on new resources and latest teaching methodologies. The BATJ is the principal body for the encouragement and promotion of Japanese language education in the United Kingdom through teaching and research.

A BATJ conference.

An award from the Foundation enabled Oxford Brookes University to invite a speaker from Japan for a conference on e-learning and Japanese language education, the first of its kind in the UK. It aimed to update e-learning pedagogy and practice, create links between practitioners and disseminate good e-learning practice within Japanese language education. A recent award was also made to Cardiff University’s Japanese Studies Centre towards a seminar and conference on Japanese Language Learning and Acquisition.

Grant support is given to schools in the UK to help them introduce the teaching of the Japanese language either within or outside the curriculum. Recipient schools over the past year have included:

Ashlyns School, Berkhamstead
Caroline Chisholm School, Northampton
Swavesey Village School, Cambridgeshire
Ysgol y Preseli School, Wales

We have recently given grants to Edinburgh University towards the development of a Japanese Language teaching technique using hand held devices, to the Centre for Translation Studies at Leeds University for a UK-Japan collaboration on methods of effective translation using novel wiki technology and to Sheffield University’s School of English Literature and Linguistics to support a Japan research visit to study the language ability of Japanese-English bilingual children.