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 were matched based on the participating mentees’ career interests, majors, or specialties during the fall semester in 2016 and 2017. The mentors came from a variety of professional fields, such as the school of management, law, medicine, engineering, humanities, and international relations.

1. Each mentor was matched with one or two mentees and had conversations for two to three hours through Skype, phone, email, or in-person meetings during the course of the semester. The main topics they covered were mostly related to the mentees’ career path: preparation, questions and answers, advice, networking, tutoring on the particular subject content, etc.
2. Mentoring meetings were conducted fully in the target language, and mentees were encouraged to ask questions in cases where they encountered unfamiliar vocabulary or terms in their field of interest in the target language. Mentors were also guided to provide their mentees with explanations or clarifications when asked. English was used only for the case of simple and quick verifications for word meaning, with the purpose of ensuring time efficiency and optimizing language learning.
3. Mentees were assigned to submit their written reflection in the target language after every meeting with their mentors. Mentees also participated in class discussion and sharing in the target language once a month after each time they met with their mentors. As a final reflective activity, mentees were asked to complete an online survey regarding the project in English.
4. 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.