Abstract: Intercultural Competence of Elementary School Students in a Japanese EFL Context
Intercultural Competence of Elementary School Students in a Japanese EFL Context - Students’ Narratives on Curriculum and Their IC
Intercultural Competence (IC) of elementary school students in a Japanese EFL context is explored. First the three-year curriculum development integrating international education and primary English education to cultivate the students’ IC is introduced. This is followed by the research of which objectives include 1) to investigate how the students who have taken the English lessons interpret their experience of taking the lessons and how they relate what they had learned in the class with their current study, 2) to compare IC of the following two groups: A=the students who have taken the lessons and B=the students who have not yet taken the lessons. Semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire survey were employed for analysis.
The curriculum objectives are framed by IC components suggested by Huber & Reynolds (2014) and the research is by ICC factors (knowledge and attitudes) suggested by Byram (1997). The results of the objective 1 indicate that 1) the topics/teaching materials presented in the lessons were helpful to stimulate the students’ intellectual curiosity for further learning, 2) empathy may have been one of the key factors to raise their motivation to take actions. 3) the lessons may have promoted some students’ changes of perceptions, motivation, and action. The results of the objective 2 show that there is not much difference in terms of knowledge of others/their own between the two groups, however, in regards to attitudes Group A shows more willingness to take other’s perspectives and broader perspectives on relations, to have curiosity about more various aspects of others and stronger motivation for communication using verbal and non-verbal communicative conventions with mutual efforts.
Limitations of the practice include limited opportunities to actually communicate with people who have different cultural affiliations and to critically think about “glocal issues”. For further practice, it is necessary to explore our local human resource for actual encounter and increase opportunities to discover “internal diversity”. Limitations of the research include lack of multiple perspectives to assess IC, the time lag between the lessons and the interviews, and insufficient triangulation of data. For further research polysemy of the students’ limited vocabulary should be considered.