Grade 7 - Acquiring Information

This sub-organizer contains the following sections:
Prescribed Learning Outcomes
Suggested Instructional Strategies
Suggested Assessment Strategies
Recommended Learning Resources

PRESCRIBED LEARNING OUTCOMES

It is expected that students will:

locate and to some extent use specific information from age-appropriate Japanese-language resources to complete authentic tasks
convey acquired information in oral and visual forms, and to some extent in writing using some words and short phrases in romaji and some words in hiragana and katakana

To view the prescribed learning outcomes for Acquiring Information in other grades click on an icon below.

SUGGESTED INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES

At this level, students' abilities to use Japanese are still minimal. As they experience success in applying language-learning strategies such as using clues, connecting, and predicting, they gain confidence in working with Japanese materials.

Present students with materials that relate to various careers in Japan. Ask them to create posters about these occupations, including words associated with them. Students then present their findings to the class orally.
Provide students with Japanese train tickets and ask them to decipher the various components. Then have students create their own train tickets for travelling from one Japanese city to another. Students could also role-play purchasing the tickets.
Invite students to examine a selection of age-appropriate references such as newspapers, magazines, and materials on the Internet. Ask them to select topics (e.g., Japanese and Western fashion, popular entertainers, music, scientific investigations) and create visual displays based on what they have learned, using some simple labels in hiragana and katakana.
Ask students in groups to listen to stories in the Japanese style of kamishibai and view related illustrations. Have them highlight words they are familiar with and use information supplied by the context to infer the meaning of new Japanese words and phrases. Suggest that students add these words to their daily journals. They could then create large illustrations to tell stories in the kamishibai style.

SUGGESTED ASSESSMENT STRATEGIES

Students continue to rely mainly on visual representations to present information, while incorporating some basic, well-practised Japanese vocabulary and structures. Linguistic requirements should be simpleassessment for this organizer continues to emphasize the extent to which students successfully find and use the information required to complete specific tasks.

When students represent or report on information they have acquired, note the extent to which they are able to:
identify and recount the key ideas or impressions
include relevant and accurate details
reproduce some of the Japanese words (hiragana and katakana ) and patterns in understandable forms
organize and sequence their information appropriately

When students are working on assigned tasks, use a class list to note observations about the extent to which they:

approach tasks with confidence
persevere, trying different approaches or strategies when having difficulty
tolerate ambiguity, using the information they understand without being frustrated by gaps in their knowledge

Encourage students to reflect on and assess their strategies for extracting specific information. Pose questions such as:

Were you able to find or figure out more or less information from the Japanese resources than you expected?
What parts were easy for you?
What kinds of problems did you have? How did you solve them?
What strategies did you use when working in Japanese that you want to remember?

RECOMMENDED LEARNING RESOURCES

Print Materials

Basic Japanese-English Dictionary
Everyday Japanese
Japan: An International Travel Map
Japanese - An Appetizer
Martin's Concise Japanese Dictionary
Merriam Webster's Japanese-English Learner's Dictionary

Multimedia

Kimono
Niko Niko

CD-ROM

Exotic Japan

Revised: January 26, 1999

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