Junior teacher internship: Promoting cooperative interaction and learner autonomy in foreign language classrooms

In teaching and learning foreign languages in places where the target language is not spoken, it is difficult but important to increase interactive opportunities among learners. A junior teacher internship project, in which a group of third-year Australian university students of Japanese participated regularly in first-year Japanese classroom activities, as well as lesson planning, is examined in this article. The article discusses learner autonomy and cooperative learning, the project procedures, and project evaluation in terms of reactions by both first-year and third-year students and observations by participating teachers and the project coordinator. Evaluation of the project indicated increased interactive opportunities among the third-year students as well as the first-year students, enhanced motivation of first-year students, raised third-year students' awareness in learning and reaching, and as a result, promoted cooperative and autonomous learning in the learners.