- Applicable Proficiency Range Intermediate –high to Advanced Proficiency
- Applicable Language ALL
- Project Content and Theme Community-based Academic and Career Mentoring Program
- Pedagogical Approaches Community-based, Content-based, Language for Professional/Academic Purposes.
- Primary Genre Inquiry, Request, Advice, Report
- Project Description Through the JAM project, (an) undergrad student(s) and graduate mentor are matched, based on their academic interests, major or specialty. Then, each junior and mentor spend time together, having conversations about their career interests, consultations, getting and giving advice, all in the target language throughout the semester. This project can be integrated with the Misaeng project, adding to its educational synergy. It provides students with opportunities to discuss, learn, and practice hands-on with their mentors through community-based career and academic mentoring, developing students’ language learning and culture, business culture, job preparation, professional skills, knowledge training, shadowing, and networking.
The Junior-and-Mentor project is a community-based project designed for students in an advanced Korean language course at a private U.S. university. Korean graduate mentors at the same institution and undergrad mentees in an advanced Korean language class are matched based on the participating mentees’ career interests, majors, or specialties during the fall semester. The mentors come from a variety of professional fields, such as the school of management, law, medicine, engineering, humanities, and international relations.
- Each mentor is matched with one or two mentees and has conversations for two to three hours through Zoom, phone, email, or in-person meetings during the course of the semester. The main topics they cover are mostly related to the mentees’ career path: preparation, questions and answers, advice, networking, tutoring on the particular subject content, etc.
- Mentoring meetings are conducted fully in the target language, and mentees are encouraged to ask questions in cases where they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary or terms in their field of interest in the target language. Mentors are also guided to provide their mentees with explanations or clarifications when asked. English is used only for the case of simple and quick verification for word meaning, with the purpose of ensuring time efficiency and optimizing language learning.
- Mentees are assigned to submit their written reflection in the target language after every meeting with their mentors. Mentees also participate in class discussion and sharing in the target language once a month after sessions they meet with their mentors. As a final reflective activity, mentees are asked to complete an online survey regarding the project in English.
- The JAM project is one of the built-in Project-based learning activities in the course curriculum, and mentee students earn participation and completion grade, which amounts to 10 % of the course grade.
Students with an advanced language proficiency range should be encouraged to further develop their language and cultural performances, which also involves a deeper cultural awareness (ACTFL, 2012). That is, students should be able to “understand and use cultural knowledge to conform linguistically and behaviorally in many social and work-related interactions…[and to] show conscious awareness of significant cultural differences and attempt to adjust accordingly” (p.15). However, in reality, students in language classrooms have limited opportunities and interact mostly with their peer students and instructor in the fixed social setting. In addition, the institution has also limited access geographically to the local community of the target language and culture. Indeed, career preparation and getting mentored are among the critical interests and needs among college students in this highly competitive environment. With the reasons given above, this project can utilize campus community resources – graduate students, alumni — staff who are native target language speakers and professionals – to foster the development of Intercultural Communicative Competence and the Connections standards goals in career and academic contexts.
- Project Goals and Learning Objectives
The primary goal of this project is, through career development mentoring, to provide the learners of FL with opportunities to develop well-rounded 5 C Standard goal areas – Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and Communities.
This project is to enable the connecting of classroom learning to content subjects and real application, and thus makes students language learning more relatable and meaningful.
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1. Communication Standard
- Students can understand, interpret and analyze authentic informational texts, along with conversations and discussions.
- Students can exchange information and ideas; meet their needs or address situations; express and react to preferences and opinions in conversations.
- Students can present information to narrate, inform, describe, or explain.
2. Cultures Standard
- Students converse comfortably with others from the target culture in familiar and some unfamiliar situations and show some understanding of cultural differences.
- Students demonstrate awareness of the subtle differences among cultural behaviors and adjust their behavior accordingly in familiar and some unfamiliar situations (e.g. interacting with professional advisor or mentor from the target culture).
3. Connections Standard
- Students utilize authentic source –mentors, to acquire information and to exchange opinions on issues of academic and professional interests.
4. Comparisons Standard
- Students compare ways of networking in work places and universities and understand the similarities and differences between the target society and their own.
5. Communities Standard
- Students engage in school community–mentors, graduate seniors.
- Students communicate orally and in writing with members of the target language community on topics such as college life in general, one’s major and career.
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- Project Outcomes
- Students can link their classroom learning with real-world application through their mentoring sessions: Mentees communicate in the target language regarding professional content-area (e.g., professions in law, business, and engineering) with native speakers of the target language.
- Students can utilize their learning of cultural practices, sociocultural concepts, and language –vocabulary, idioms and expressions through the classroom learning –a Korean drama series, Misaeng (Incomplete life), in which economic and sociocultural issues in Korean society are presented– during meetings with their mentors.
- Students can experience real applications and practices in the target language and culture through participating in a real-world community-based career/academic mentoring program.
- Major Tasks Mentees meet with their mentors for career advice/mentoring. At the end of semester, each mentee submits their reflective writing as a project report and all mentees have an in-class discussion to share their experiences they had with their mentors, along with how those experiences ultimately affected their career preparation and paths. All of these activities are conducted in the target language.
- Project Duration It can be implemented with adjustments depending on the course curriculum and the mentors. For example, students participate in 4-6 sessions with their matched mentor outside of the classroom; 2 times of in-class discussion (one hour each time) during October and November.
- Project Module ProM JAM
- Supplemental Materials
- Assessment Students take the project exit self-reflection survey as a final process after completing the project tasks—mentoring sessions, in-class discussions, and presentations. Access Link
 Reflection survey QR Code
- Guest Speaker Series, Career Talk As a part of the project, the class organizes and hosts a guest speaker series, 직업의 세계, in which guest speakers from various professional fields give a career talk. Each talk series offers an engaging QA and discussion session after the speaker’s talk. Mentors can be invited as guest speakers, and usually, one or two speakers are invited in the semester. The following sample career talks feature speakers who are former students of KREN 152.
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