October 23, 2006

Teachers of Japanese from across the world are taking advantage of a learning tool created by Mieko Peek, Lyon College’s instructor of Japanese language and literature, and the college is getting some worldwide publicity because of it.

Since Peek established the Japanese studies website three years ago, which she created to serve as an aid in learning Japanese vocabulary, it’s received over 31,000 hits.

"Genki, the textbook I use, has a lot of online exercises, but no vocabulary exercises," she said. "I divided the vocabulary words in each lesson between three and six so that it is easy for me to assign each section for the students."

Peek said she used "Hot Potatoes" from the University of Victoria in Canada as a model for the site.

"The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web," she said. "Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge for those working for publicly funded, non-profit educational institutions who make their pages available on the Web."

The exercise site is spreading the name of Lyon College across the globe, she added.

"A great number of Japanese teachers make free online exercises so that students can use them to improve their Japanese," Peek said. "Since I have a link to Lyon College from my home page, the name of Lyon College is known worldwide to those who study Japanese. The Web address to my exercises site also has Lyon in it."

The Freeman Foundation has supported her Japanese program since 1995, Peek said.

"I have just received the grant from them for the 2006-2007 academic year," she said. "This grant is the fourth at Lyon College. My previous institution was Louisiana State University in Shreveport."

Located at: www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/mpeek/japanwebpages/GenkiExercises.htm, the Web site is free of charge.

Lyon College is one of only four colleges in the state that offers Japanese studies.

For more information on Lyon Japanese programs, contact Mieko Peek at (870) 793-1790.