Senior Capstone |
Spring 2017
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Course Information
WLC 400
Core Curriculum Course Description
Students work with the instructor and WLC faculty advisors to research, synthesize, write and present their Capstone projects. Students will also assemble a Graduation Portfolio reflecting how each MLO was met. This course is required for all Japanese, Spanish and World Languages and Cultures majors.
Course Work
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Reflective Narrative
This class was a continuation of the Pre-Capstone course (JAPN 403) from last semester. At the end of the previous semester, my partner and I completed our title and research questions as well as the English survey, so we started off this semester by translating our survey into Japanese. This was an interesting experience because when we translated into Japanese, we found some issues that we didn't notice in the English version. We also finalized our literature review and translated it into Japanese.
Although we completed our literature review research last semester, we finalised the literature review section of presentation in this class. This part of the capstone process was really a group experience because we watched and reviewed the other teams' literature reviews, which gave us the opportunity to share techniques and gain inspiration for our own presentations. Again, this part of the capstone process underwent alterations throughout the semester as new, better ideas came about. For me, I found the data analysis to be the most difficult part of the capstone process because I haven't had a lot of experience analyzing and looking for meaning inside collected data. Choosing the appropriate types of graphs (and making them) was also challenging. In the end, what helped the most was actually meeting with Sekine-sensei to discuss the results in order to find a conclusion. Through the data analysis and these discussions, I also realized what types of things we could have added to make the study more complete/well-rounded—which then became part of the "Future Studies" section. Due to the delayed results from our Japanese survey, the data analysis ended up taking place simultaneously with the final presentation review and script making (both in Japanese). This required near daily meetings with either Sekine-sensei or Saito-sensei, but thankfully everything was completed in time. |