A joint distance teaching program between Waseda University, Japan and TKU will be put into practice sometime in May and June next year (2002) as Associate Professor Satoshi Miyazaki of Waseda University will conduct a simulcast teaching class to students of Center for Teacher Education, TKU.

Waseda University has long been the sister school of TKU, and she will be the first school to do such a program with TKU.

The simulcast teaching program was originally planned by “blending in” “How to Master and Teach a Japanese Language Textbook”, a course taught by Dr. Kiyohito Ishikawa, Lecturer, Department of Japanese, TKU, and offered in the Japanese Department. However, the program suffered a short change as the two schools are operating on a different calendar; so, to compensate for the discrepancy, a special date is set aside on Tuesday at 14:00 to 15:00 P.M. for both May and June, 2002 to be devoted to exercise distance teaching when Prof. Miyasaki will give a lecture on the subject of Teaching Japanese as a Language with TKU as the intended audience.

The entire program will be held by way of ISDN hookup at Room I501 in the rear building of Chueh Sheng Memorial Library. Students from Center for Teacher Education will be given first priority to listen to Dr. Miyazaki and to log in their feedback opinions/questions, if any.

This is not the first time that TKU has experimented such an innovative mode of pedagogy. Earlier on, around the 51st anniversary of TKU, she had already tried this method on “The Pedagogical Approach to Japanese Language Teaching”, a course taught by Dr. Shoji Fujii, when Prof. Miyazaki and their graduate students of Waseda University, together with Prof. Liou Charng-hui, Chair, Department of Japanese, TKU, and many faculty members had “sat in” a similar course on a similar subject. The result, they felt, was satisfactory to both sides. That’s why the second distance teaching program was materialized.