Japanese Language and Literature

Japanese Language and Literature (JLL) is a journal published twice yearly by the Association of Teachers of Japanese (ATJ). Published since the founding of the ATJ in 1963, JLL covers material on Japanese pedagogy , Japanese linguistics and Japanese literature. It also carries reviews of books germane to its main areas of interest.

To give a flavour, the October 2001 edition carries articles entitled Towards a Feminist Critical Pedagogy in a Beginning-Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language Class, Aesthetics of Unconventionality: Fūryū in Ikkyū's poetry, and Heritage Language Students of Japanese in Traditional Foreign Language Classes: A Preliminary Empirical Study.

The journal also carries lists of doctoral (PhD) and, in later years, MA theses. As Japanese Studies has grown in popularity as a field, in recent editions these abstracts have come to take up a considerable portion of the journal, on average about fifty pages. These cover institutions primarily in north America, but there are also entries from the UK, Australia, and other countries.

Articles are fairly evenly balanced between the three main areas of interest, although of late (since 2001) pedagogy and linguistics-related contributions seem to have come to outweigh literary content.

Reviews are generally useful, especially those of the latest textbooks, grammars and vocabulary guides for those of us still struggling to master the Japanese language.

References

Japanese Language and Literature, The Association of Teachers of Japanese. Further details available at the ATJ's web site.