COURSE TITLE: AP Japanese Language & Culture	GRADE LEVEL: 11-12
CODE: FLJ614	COURSE LENGTH: v36 weeks
PREPARATION Japanese III, Japanese IV, or Japanese V

 

 

 

Note: This is a draft course description. The College Board has posted a draft of the official course description on their web site. Please reference the College Board web-site for updates and further information.

An AP Japanese Language & Culture course covers the equivalent of a third-year college course in advanced Japanese language and culture. It encompasses aural/oral skills, reading comprehension, and composition. It does not assess student handwriting of Japanese kanji, per se, although when tested by the College Board, students will be required to write via the computer. This course emphasizes the use of Japanese for active communication, and has the following objectives:

• The ability to comprehend a wide variety of Japanese spoken by native speakers, including drawing inferences based on the register of the speaker and nonverbal clues;
• The acquisition of vocabulary and a working familiarity with at least 500 kanji to allow the comfortable, accurate reading of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as some modern literature in Japanese;
• The ability to produce at least 300 kanji for composition purposes; and,
• The ability to communicate in the presentational, interpretive, and interpersonal modes with appropriate accuracy and fluency.

Course content might best reflect intellectual interests shared by the students and teacher (the arts, history, current events, literature, culture, sports, etc.). Materials might well include recordings, films, internet research and activities, newspapers, and magazines.

Students will be expected to write: passages on personal information/experiences, advertisements, reports of products and practices of Japanese culture, and introductions about daily life and activities. Students will be expected to: grasp the gist and details of authentic written text/charts/graphs/signs relevant to daily life and grasp the gist of expressed opinions, both written and verbal, on social and cultural issues. Students should be able to initiate and sustain short conversations in a manner comprehensible to native speakers accustomed to dealing with learners of Japanese. Students should be able to request information on a variety of topics and respond appropriately. Students should be able to exchange information verbally and in writing and to give preferences, offer suggestions, extend/respond to invitations in a culturally appropriate manner.

Draft written:  January 18, 2006