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The global pandemic has forced all language teachers, regardless of their affinity to and preparation for online teaching, to convert their face-to-face courses into online versions of crisis teaching. Despite being a crisis, it has also opened opportunities for language educators and researchers to identify innovative ways of evaluating, improving and revamping their current practices. This timely paper reports on emerging issues triggered by emergency remote teaching (ERT), gleaning from the in-depth observations and critical reflections of a Japanese language program coordinator (instructor). Through autoethnography, she provided her first-hand experience and critical reflection on the ERT phenomenon. Qualitative data were gathered from her journal reflections, course evaluations, student assessment outcomes, and communication records documented in Blackboard. The findings pinpoint the following aspects amid ERT: the primacy of tele-/co-presence and the issue of privacy; solutions for online test proctoring and technical malfunction; pedagogically-sound assessment methods in fully online contexts; the balance between asynchronous and synchronous modes and interactions among students. The salient aspects offer best practices that synergize pedagogy and technology for less commonly taught languages delivered in a fully online environment. These valuable lessons learned from ERT can be conducive to future remote teaching in the post-COVID-19 era.

Foreign language teaching in distance education is administratively and pedagogically challenging; research on the perspectives of novice practitioners' online teaching is also relatively scarce. This study explores how a novice Japanese teacher navigated and negotiated her professional development in a two-way virtual practitionership during her first online teaching. Data were collected from ongoing dialogue journals between the novice and her mentor followed by a semi-structured interview. Qualitative results indicate that pedagogically-sound and personalized digital tools can not only reduce the psychological distance between the teachers and students, but facilitate online teaching and learning via a performance-driven, standard-based curriculum. Informed by Action Research, the study reveals how both practitioners de/reconstructed their teacher identities and achieved professional empowerment through robust supervision and reciprocal teacher evaluation in a virtual environment. It further demonstrates the extent to which this evidence-driven and research-oriented approach can better address the genuine concerns of a foreign language program in distance education. Specifically, this context-responsive study indicates the improvement of online course delivery, teacher training and program sustainability in its own right.

Advanced nuclear fuels are designed to offer improved performance and accident tolerance, with an emphasis on achieving higher thermal conductivity. While promising fuel candidates like uranium nitrides, carbides, and silicides have been widely studied, the majority of uranium compounds remain unexplored. To search for potential candidates among these unexplored uranium compounds, we incorporated machine learning to accelerate the material discovery process. In this study, we trained a multiclass classification model to predict a compound's thermal conductivity based on 133 input features derived from element properties and temperature. The initial training data consist of over 160,000 processed thermal conductivity records from the Starrydata2 database, but a skewed data class distribution led the trained model to underestimate compound's thermal conductivity. Consequently, we addressed the issue of class imbalance by applying Synthetic Minority Oversampling TEchnique and Random UnderSampling, improving the recall for materials with thermal conductivity higher than 15 W/mK from 0.64 to 0.71. Finally, our best model is used to identify 119 potential advanced fuel candidates with high thermal conductivity among 774 stable uranium compounds. Our results underscore the potential of machine learning in the field of nuclear science, accelerating the discovery of advanced nuclear materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the objective of language teaching is shifting from producing so‐called "native‐like" speakers to fostering speakers competent in intercultural communication, it has become necessary to identify the kinds of learning resources that may be related to the learner's development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in today's context of globalization and technological innovation. Employing a mixed‐method approach with focus group interviews (n = 46) and a survey (n = 342), this study examines Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language learners' out‐of‐class intercultural experience and examines how interpersonal engagement and media usage are associated with the three dimensions of ICC: approach, analyze, and act. The study found that while both interpersonal interactions and media usage related to target language were positively associated with self‐reported gains in all three dimensions of ICC, media use consistently had a greater effect on ICC than interpersonal interactions. The implications of these findings for language educators are discussed. The Challenge: With internationalized campuses and global presence of East Asian media, learners of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean have various out‐of‐class intercultural engagement opportunities. How and to what extent do learners interact with individuals and media from the target language culture? What impact does this have on their intercultural communicative competence? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of distance learning courses for less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) often meets with instructional challenges, especially for Asian LCTLs with their distinct non-Roman characters and structures. This study documents the implementation of a fully online, elementary Japanese course at Stony Brook University. The curriculum was designed around the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages's (ACTFL) World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages; performance-driven assessments; and task-supported, technology-enhanced principles. Asynchronous and synchronous tools were incorporated to facilitate task delivery and reduce the virtual isolation of learners. A simulated Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) was conducted for the online students in order to compare their oral performance with that of the face-to-face (F2F) cohort in the preceding semester. Quantitative results show that online students outperformed their F2F counterparts in most of the Integrated Performance Assessment's scoring criteria, with a statistically significant difference in the criterion "Communication strategies." Survey results indicate students' positive attitudes toward language gains and corroborate the qualitative results gleaned from student learning journals and survey responses: Students' sense of isolation was replaced by a sense of co-presence. We conclude that developing an online LCTL course, though challenging, is feasible and maximizes outcomes through the synergy of multimodal digital platforms, and a standards-based, task-driven curriculum design.

Our pilot project created blended/online courses to accommodate the growing needs of precollegiate and collegiate students interested in learning Korean and Japanese. In the initial phase, we conducted a survey of students' experiences with and perceptions about blended/online Asian language learning. We found a general lack of familiarity with, and moderate resistance toward, online language learning modes. With learner attitudes in mind, we developed online modules for beginning Korean and Japanese courses. In this article, we report the survey results and the process of developing these innovative blended and online modalities of content delivery, focusing on the strengths of the modules and the unforeseen development challenges. The impacts that these technology-enhanced environments may have on student perceptions of transactional distance and tele-/copresence are explored. We suggest that transforming conventional East Asian language courses into blended/online modes is not only feasible but also beneficial for foreign language teaching and learning.

The global pandemic has forced all language teachers, regardless of their affinity to and preparation for online teaching, to convert their face-to-face courses into online versions of crisis teaching. Despite being a crisis, it has also opened opportunities for language educators and researchers to identify innovative ways of evaluating, improving and revamping their current practices. This timely paper reports on emerging issues triggered by emergency remote teaching (ERT), gleaning from the in-depth observations and critical reflections of a Japanese language program coordinator (instructor). Through autoethnography, she provided her first-hand experience and critical reflection on the ERT phenomenon. Qualitative data were gathered from her journal reflections, course evaluations, student assessment outcomes, and communication records documented in Blackboard. The findings pinpoint the following aspects amid ERT: the primacy of tele-/co-presence and the issue of privacy; solutions for online test proctoring and technical malfunction; pedagogically-sound assessment methods in fully online contexts; the balance between asynchronous and synchronous modes and interactions among students. The salient aspects offer best practices that synergize pedagogy and technology for less commonly taught languages delivered in a fully online environment. These valuable lessons learned from ERT can be conducive to future remote teaching in the post-COVID-19 era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]