The Seventh Symposium on Writing Centers in Asia will be held on Saturday, March 7, 2015, in Kawagoe, Saitama, Japan. It will be hosted this year by Tokyo International University in conjunction with the Writing Centers Association of Japan.

Proposals are sought in all areas of research and practice related to writing centers as well as the teaching and learning of writing. The submission deadline is January 15, 2015. To register to attend or to submit a proposal for a presentation, visit the WCAJ website.

The first, still informal gathering on writing centers in Japan was held in 2009 at the University of Tokyo; six universities were represented. The next year, the symposium was hosted by Waseda University, which has the largest writing center in Japan. The Kanda Institute of Foreign Languages hosted the third symposium on March 9, 2011 (just two days, it turned out, before the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami would disrupt life in eastern Japan for some time to come).

While the first three symposia were attended mainly by writing educators working in Japan, the fourth and fifth symposia, held at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in 2012 and 2013, and the sixth, held at J. F. Oberlin University this past March, attracted attendees and presenters from other countries, including China (specifically Hong Kong and Macau), Korea, Bangladesh, and the United States. The 2012 symposium was also the first organized by the Writing Centers Association of Japan, a small group established mainly to ensure that the symposia would continue to be held on a regular basis.

When the first writing centers were established earlier this century in Japan, most were attached to university programs that either taught English as a foreign language or offered degree programs taught in English. Those centers at first largely borrowed their methodologies and approaches from North American centers and research. In recent years, though, more universities in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia have been setting up writing centers to help students writing in the countries’ national languages as well. The interactions among educators involved in first-language, second-language, and foreign-language writing have turned out to be very stimulating.

Tom Gally, The University of Tokyo