Selected Papers of the 24th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics

Japanese Students’ Developmental Changes in InterculturalCompetence
Kahoko Matsumoto1

1

International Education Center, Tokai University
mkahoko@tsc.u-tokai.ac.jp

Abstract
This study compares the degrees of intercultural awareness and competence of elementary school, juniorhigh school, and university students based on the analysis of retrospective entries of intercultural encounters
made into the European self-reflective tool, Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters (AIE). By comparing
the tendencies and characteristics of how each group perceive “otherness” or “foreignness” in theirrespective intercultural encounters, the type and method of intercultural education appropriate for each level
have been considered, with the creation of maturity-based instructional models in mind. Data analysis by 2
types of text analysis software have identified diverse ways perceptions of “otherness” were expressed andfunctioned in intercultural encounters that the 3 groups experienced. The entries of university students
exhibited quite dichotomous (we vs. others) and stereotypical perceptions and attitudes. On the other hand,
younger subjects’ responses were more idiosyncratic, though often very simplistic; more natural, intuitive
reactions and interpretations of the intercultural events appeared compared to university student entries.
Since it is apparent that the proclivity for stereotyping gradually emerges and seems to strengthen during
younger ages, effective intervention or scaffolding in the elementary and junior high school level will bebeneficial to raise intercultural awareness and facilitate the avoidance of simplistic overgeneralizations.

Keywords
intercultural competence, intercultural awareness raising, Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters (AIE),
perception of otherness, stereotype, overgeneralization, text analysis, instructional models

1

Introduction

In Europe, the Council of Europe has been promoting the use of a self-reflective tool called “Autobiographyof Intercultural Encounters” (Figure 1 and hereafter referred to as AIE) for students to analyze and learn fromtheir experiences dealing with people with very different ethnic/cultural backgrounds (Koyama, 2011). The
tool is described as “a complementary teaching tool to help students
exercise independent critical faculties in solving problems in intercultural
encounters, by making them reflect critically on their own responses andattitudes to experiences of other cultures (White Paper on Intercultural
Dialogue, 2008, p.43). The person(s) involved in the intercultural encounterthat respondents choose to answer questions posed in AIE doesn’t/don’t
have to be a foreigner, but any person who is “foreign” to them or whomthey consider the “other” who is very different from them. As many as about
50 questions are posed (# of questions varies because some are elective) inorder to make students self-evaluate their experiences from multiple pointsof view and help them gain deep reflection on their experiences, which
activity usually takes about an hour to complete. After the first question ofdefining the respondent oneself, AIE askes about the intercultural encounter
Figure 1: AIE

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Selected Papers of the 24th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics

most memorable to each of them, soliciting first impression of the person foreign to them, changes ininteractions and feelings with reasons, and what they have learned from the experience in a multiple ways.
Sometimes, similar questions are posed by different wording in different sections; actually, in our paststudies (Matsumoto & Koyama, 2014; Matsumoto, 2017), quite many university students changed theirattitudes and views as they moved on, guided to reflect their intercultural encounters from various
perspectives.
In the first previous study, an attempt was made to find the tendencies and characteristics of 80 Japanese
university students in handling various intercultural encounters by collecting their detailed responses written
in the AIE translated into Japanese and mounted on the Moodle site (Matsumoto & Koyama, 2014). The
study was done as a part of a public grant project (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grant: Project#2232011) which aimed to create teaching models for intercultural competence that allow Japanese youths tobecome able to solve misunderstandings in various intercultural situations. With almost 3 million foreigners
living in Japan and over 20 million tourists visiting annually, students have many different types ofintercultural encounters. Both the quantitative and qualitative analyses of various entries made by these 80
students clearly showed what specific problems they faced and how they tackled them in various situationsof intercultural communication. The most noteworthy finding was their strong dichotomous mindset, namely,
the tendency to view the interaction in the “us vs. others” manner, which was manifested in their own
explanation of the experiences, even in the cases where cultural difference was not so salient. This mindset isalso related to having stereotypes about people from different areas and cultures, seen in various types ofovergeneralized remarks made about them. Interestingly, the perceptions expressed by those who havesuccessfully dealt with culturally-foreign situations showed the two conflicting aspects, sometimes
simultaneously; though having developed a new open-minded attitude toward “the foreign other”, they left
the comments which reflected a strengthened parochial view of their being Japanese.
In 2013, the young learners’ version of AIE was launched by the Council of Europe, so a new experiment
was designed based on it with Japanese elementary school children, the hope being that the comparison with
university students may elucidate when and how the dichotomous and stereotypical way of looking at
foreigners or people with different ethnic/cultural backgrounds is formed. The young learners’ version of AIE
has both interview and written versions and is much simpler than the original version; it tries to bring out
natural responses from children about either an imaginary intercultural encounter (by showing pictures) or
the one most memorable to them in real life. Both versions were translated into Japanese and usedinterchangeably depending on the ages of children. In the study with 41 university students and 35
elementary school students, the text analysis using an IBM text-mining software and the semantic-network
analysis by KH Coder (Higuchi, 2013) revealed that the children’s responses were much more idiosyncratic
and intuitive, though often simplistic, and they showed much less dichotomous, stereotypical mindset
compared to the university students. It seems that stereotypical views of people from other areas and culturesderive from the depictions of foreigners in different types of media, which tend to be overgeneralized as wellas the simplistic comparisons between the Japanese and groups with different ethnicities and/or nationalities(Matsumoto, 2017). This new line of inquiry has been done as a part of another public grant project (Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science Grant: Project #16H03456), aiming at constructing teaching models forintercultural competence for children which are closely tied to the secondary and tertiary models previously
established.

2

Purpose of the study

The aim of this study is twofold; first, to confirm the tendencies or characteristics of Japanese
university and elementary school students in dealing of culturally-foreign people by replicating
the previous studies with a larger number of subjects from different schools, and secondly, byadding junior high school students as subjects, to find the developmental changes in theirattitudes and views going through various intercultural encounters and solving problems,
which appear in their answers to the questions posed in a well-accepted self-reflective tool(AIE). By doing a systematic text and semantic-network analysis of the data together withbasic quantitative analysis, an attempt was made to find the developmental process ofJapanese youth generation to form the above-mentioned dichotomous perspective, which often
involve stereotypes. Then, the type and method of intercultural education appropriate for each10Selected Papers of the 24th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics

level will be proposed, which, hopefully, will lead to the creation of maturity-based
instructional models.

3.

The study

3.1.
Subjects
Three hundred twenty-six students in 9 different English classes at four private universities were asked tomake an entry of the intercultural encounter that is most influential to them in response to various questions
included in AIE. Concurrently, the responses of 166 junior high school students and 192 elementary school
students were collected using the written type of young learners’ version of AIE.
3.2.
Experimental method
The original version of AIE translated into Japanese was prepared for online use so that the responses would
be automatically collected and tabulated for analysis. Whereas university students were able to respond to
AIE without much introduction because the purpose and questions of the tool are quite self-explanatory. On
the other hand, an introductory lesson had to be prepared and conducted to the elementary school children
and junior high school students to explain the meaning of intercultural encounters as well as the definition ofpeople with different ethnic/cultural backgrounds. Since most elementary and junior high school students
cannot use the computer keyboard, they were asked to write their responses on the paper-based version,
which were typed by research assistants later. In case of very young children, namely, first, second and third
graders of elementary school, recorded personal interviews were conducted using the same questions andprompts.
3.2.
Data analysis
First, a qualitative, holistic analysis was done to obtain overall tendencies, followed by the statistical text
analysis by an IBM software and the semantic-network analysis by KH Coder. The statistical analysis
includes tabulation of words in terms of frequency as well as evaluation of collocational relationships ofimportant words that indicate agency in, and attitudes and mental states of, students’ managing interculturalcommunication both at the time of the encounters and in hindsight. Then, the comparison was made to thetabulated and categorized/coded data of 3 groups.
3.3.
Results and discussion
3.3.1.
University Students’ Responses
University students’ responses were different partly because they used the longer, original version of AIE
and more importantly, the “foreign” people they encountered were very diverse, which was, in fact, apleasant surprise to the author herself. Compared to a variety of experiences university students had, theworlds of elementary and junior high school students is limited, so quite a few of them wrote about the
English teacher from other countries who visited their schools once a week. The following is the list of theareas that the people university students wrote about came from:
1. The types of 326 encounters
Encounters in Japan: 225
Encounters outside Japan: 101
2. Areas of the people they wrote about are from
Asia (10 different countries): 115
North America: 50
Europe (6 different countries): 42
Middle East: 29
Oceania (incl. Micronesia): 27
Latin America: 21
Russia: 18
Africa: 14
and Japanese with different ethnic/cultural backgrounds: 10
3. Ages
University Students: 145
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Selected Papers of the 24th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics

Adults: 134
Children (ages 4-11) : 28
Older Adults (over 60 years old): 19
SPSS text analysis software can show the number of<Answer to a summary question>
all the tokens (words and expressions) and thechangeoccurrences of important collocational relationships
myselfamong them, but it is quite hard to integrate them intoreflection
meaningful conclusive statements. For this reason, KH
communication
EnglishCoder was used to see the relationships among various
harderfurtherstudy
ideas and concepts more clearly. Figure 2 is an exampleof how it visualizes the connections among ideas, wherechancerelated ideas are placed near to one another while larger
cultureinvestigate othercircles reflect a greater number of occurrences andcountries
positively
thicker lines represent greater collocational relatedness.
consider/understandThis particular figure visualizes all the responses to one
go overseasof the summative questions, “How has this experiencefrom now on
exchange withchanged you? Will you decide to do something as aforeign countries
19
peopleresult of doing this AIE?” Red circles were added by theauthor to bundle related ideas together in an attempt tocapture overall tendencies of the
responses tothis question (Since the analysis was done in Japanese, English translation of major ideas were added.) These2 types of analysis by SPSS and KH Coder were conducted to all the questions in order to tease out
tendencies
andcharacteristics
ofresponsesof3groups.
University students’ responses were quite similar to
Figure 2: Example of KH Coder Analysis
those of the 2 previous studies, the characteristics of which are summarized below.
1. The awareness of and willingness to understand “others” were clearly observed in most of their entries.
However, again, they tend to evaluate the encounters by “we vs. others” dichotomy, even in the cases
where not much difference exists, meaning that they didn’t realize the diversity among the “others”. For
instance, their comments often included expressions such as “unlike us, Japanese, he is ….,” “Middle
Eastern people always like to ……. though it’s not in our culture,” “I understand her points because she is
an American, but we, Japanese don’t act that way,” “I know that all westerners are more direct compared
to us, Japanese.” First, students constantly compared the behavior and attitude of the person they hadinteracted when comparison was not necessary, even when they were simply asked to explain what they
did or how they felt in the interactions. Secondly, they often failed to see the diversity among people fromother areas and appeared to have stereotypical, overgeneralized understanding of people from the same
area or country. Such a mindset was more frequently observed when they remarked on Asian people; atypical response was “I can understand her better because we share the similar Asian culture.”
2. Motivation toward English study as well as interests in other cultures seem to have been raised by the actof reflection itself. When each student’s trajectory of records was analyzed qualitatively, approx. one-thirdof them were able to change their parochial views through the reflective process: typical responses were
“Maybe I was wrong in the beginning to think he was rude. He was just trying to do ….,” and “After all,both of us were trying to be nice to each other in different ways. It’s just how we realize that feeling was a
bit different.” In general, whether there were changes in students’ attitudes or views or not, its main
purpose, that is, facilitation of raising intercultural awareness by autonomous learning has been provenbecause there was no teacher intervention.
3. Various types of media influence were detected, notably in their use of stereotypical, sometimes biased or
prejudiced sweeping statements. Quite many remarks including such statements appeared with explicit
allusions to the media depictions such as “I learned about that kind of national character in famous TV
series, XXX” or in a more implicit manner. Media influence obviously is related to students’ tendency to12Selected Papers of the 24th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics

overgeneralize people from various areas as a homogenous group without diversity and juxtapose
Japanese (as “we”) and people with different ethnic/cultural backgrounds as a bulk. Incidentally, many
uses of expressions that denote inclusiveness and generality were used such as “all, most and typical(adjectives)” and “usually, generally, most of the time and as always (adverbs and adverbial phrases).
3.3.2. Responses of elementary and junior high school students
The main purpose of this study is to compare different ways perceptions of “otherness” were formed andfunctioned in the intercultural encounters that children, junior high school students, and university students
had experienced. Most importantly, it was the first time that junior high school students were included as
subjects in order to find developmental changes that may take place between elementary school and tertiary
education. Thus, the inquiry into university students’ responses and those of children was replicated, first to
confirm their characteristics in a larger scale, and then to find developmental changes in junior high school
students’ responses in a single experiment with the same conditions applied to 3 groups. The hypothesis
arising from the 2 previous studies is that the tendencies and characteristics found in university students’
responses in previous studies emerge in childhood and are strengthened as they grow.
Like the case of university students, the tendencies found in elementary school students’ responses weresimilar to those found in the previous study. The elementary school students’ responses were more emotional
and idiosyncratic, reflecting the feelings they had at the time of the intercultural encounter, though often
simplistic or trite; the dichotomous perspectives seen in the university students’ responses appearedsporadically, but the data analysis showed more natural, individualistic reactions and interpretations of theintercultural events. It is partly because they are not cognitively mature enough to review the encounter
objectively and integrate their thoughts, thus tend to express what they have thought and felt at the time. So
many comments revolved around whether they liked or disliked the person they encountered, with the use ofmany simple adjectives describing both the person and the encounter (“nice”, “kind”, “happy”, “interesting”,“cold”, “mean”, “scary”, etc.).
As hypothesized, the responses of junior high school students were somewhere in between, where thestereotypical, overgeneralized comments increased compared to elementary school children, but with many
individualistic and/or intuitive perceptions also being exhibited. All groups, to varying degrees, havetendencies of making stereotypical, sweeping statements about people different from themselves, which isquite natural as Japanese young people still live in a mostly homogeneous environment. Yet, we found suchstereotypical remarks had increased as Japanese children proceeded from elementary school to junior highschool. To show the change quantitively, researchers and their assistants looked into all the comments andtried to find those which include stereotypes and unsupported overgeneralizations. Though such a manual
counting cannot be very accurate, it, nonetheless, elucidated the developmental change. Of all the comments
made by 3 groups, 29% of statements of university students reflected some stereotypes and unsupported
overgeneralizations compared to 17% of those made by junior high school students and 11% of those madeby elementary school students. During this time-consuming counting, it was also found that the comments
reflecting media influence increased from elementary school students’ responses to those of university
students. Actually, elementary school students’ responses sometimes showed the influence of parents andpeople close to them more; they answered, “My mother said that Americans are….” in response to thequestion “Why do you think so?” In these cases, adults could be feeding stereotypes in the media into theminds of children. On the other hand, the responses of junior high school often reflected media influence
more often just like those of university students; their responses included comments such as “I saw many
Arabic people act like that in movies,” and “Many TV programs show Chinese people in that way.”
Naturally, the responses of university students were more varied and complex thanks to their learning
about other countries and cultures and exposure to various intercultural encounters, which can frequently
happen on their campuses nowadays. Yet, such learning and exposure without sufficient interculturalcompetence may lead to inappropriate stereotypes and overgeneralized understanding of people from otherareas and cultures, especially under omnipresent media influence. However, as previously mentioned, about
one-third of them were able to change their rather parochial views through a reflective process of itself; on
the contrary, such a change was only observed in the entries of 31 junior high school students. It is partly
because the young learners’ version of AIE doesn’t ask as many questions as the original one whichfacilitates deeper reflection. Yet, the original version will be too long and included questions are toocomplicated for them. If another version of AIE for adolescents were developed that fits junior high school
13Selected Papers of the 24th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics

students’ cognitive developmental stage, we could have brought out more evidences for developmental
changes. Still, in sum, it is apparent that the proclivity for stereotyping often emerges or is strengthened
during elementary and junior high school days, presumably by the influence of media and people
surrounding them. Therefore, it seems that proper intervention or scaffolding in elementary and junior highschool education to raise intercultural awareness to facilitate avoiding simplistic generalizations andstereotypes would be highly beneficial.

3.3.3. Media influence
After stronger media influence was observed in university students’ responses compared to those ofelementary school children in the previous study (Matsumoto, 2017), an additional question wasadded after the last question of AIE, asking each subject to choose the kinds of media theyfrequently use daily from the given list; each student can select up to 3 kinds of media, but most ofthem chose either one or two of them. In the comparison of comments made by elementary school
children and university students, it was noticeable that these 2 groups were dependent on different
types of media and their use of and relationship with them were also different. Therefore, theresponses to this added question seemed worthy of investigation and analysis. Table 1 shows thepercentage of frequently used media by each group out of the total number of choices made.

TV
Print MediaInternet
SNS
OthersTable 1: Types of Media Frequently Used
Elementary School
Junior High SchoolStudents
Students
72%
53%
26%
17%
29%
43%
7%
17%
1%
2%

University
Students
27%
6%
69%
44%
4%

Note: The percentage of each column does not add up to 100 because some subjects chose a multiple
number of media.

There are overlaps in between media categories as print media can be read or TV programs seenon the Internet. Yet, present-day Japanese students rely on so-called e-media (the Internet and SNS)
more and more as ages proceed, the influence of which were detected both explicitly and implicitly
in their responses to AIE. The reason why print media is still used by elementary school and juniorhigh school students is probably because the use of newspaper and magazine articles at school has
been promoted and often connected with their class activities and homework. Also, elementary
schools usually prohibit or limit the use of smart phones at school, so elementary school students’
responses included many references to popular TV programs rather than the information obtained
from e-media. However, the influence of beliefs and attitudes of their parents and relatives related
to foreigners appeared in their responses occasionally, which could reflect the stereotypical views
that these adults have formed due to the influence of some media. On the other hand, university
students’ responses often reflected the information and images they received or exchanged via
e-media, especially the Internet. What made their responses different from the other 2 groups was
the reliance of rather individual, personal information exchanged by the Internet and SNS; theyoften referred to the real experiences of themselves and their friends that had been shared by theInternet service like You Tube and SNS to support the particular reactions exhibited toward andopinions expressed about people with different ethnic/cultural backgrounds. A positive side of thisphenomenon is their attempt to grasp and treat cultural differences individualistically based on realexperiences, but if they depend on the information provided by their friends through SNS, theinformation itself may be colored or tainted by the influence of other types of media that thesepeople had been exposed to in the past.
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Selected Papers of the 24th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics

4.

Conclusions

The following are the conclusions of this experiment.
1. The most important finding was that it appears that the proclivity for stereotyping often emerge and isstrengthened as children grow, being exposed to different types of media and interacting with people whohave stereotypical views including their parents and friends. The tendencies and characteristics ofuniversity and elementary school students found in the previous 2 studies were mostly replicated andconfirmed with a larger number of subjects. When junior high school students’ responses were added tothe comparison, the developmental pattern of the dichotomous, “we, Japanese vs. others” mindset was
clearly revealed, namely, positing themselves (Japanese) as opposed to other people from different areasand cultures while neglecting the diversity among them. This could be a common tendency of people
without sufficient exposure to and experience with those with different ethnic/cultural backgrounds, but it
was alarmingly too strong for Japanese youths to become global citizens in future who will be able to form
fruitful relationships with people around the world. The same stereotypical view was even applied tothemselves in the manner they failed to see the diversity among the Japanese having different subcultures.
Junior high school students, compared to elementary school children are more cognitively mature; thus, as
their world expands with increased exposure to different types of media, they become more prone tostereotypical, overgeneralized conceptualization of people foreign to them than elementary school
children.
2. As easily expected, the responses of university students were varied depending on their learning histories
and experiences rather than their original dispositions, compared to the counterparts of elementary schooland junior high school students. However, at least about a third of them were able to change theirethnocentric views, though to different degrees, through the reflective process that AIE prompted andfacilitated. Quite a few of them arrived at positive learning by reviewing the intercultural encounters thatthey had described negatively in the beginning. It means that the original version of AIE partially served
its purpose of autonomous learning and could be an effective learning tool to post-adolescents. Still, froma larger picture of educational perspective, it is evident that the introduction of intercultural awarenessraising at earlier ages is necessary and the use of young learners’ version of AIE has a lot of possibility tonurture intercultural competence if efforts are made for proper intervention and scaffolding.

5.

Future directions

Our project team is in the process of constructing a series of maturity-based instructional models ofintercultural competence and critical thinking, which reflect accumulated data from both the past andon-going studies. They consist of the types and methods of intercultural education appropriate for each level,
which have been tested at various schools of different characteristics in different educational environments;
some are progressive private schools while others are traditional local public ones. As expected, we had tomake changes in the instructional models after each trial lesson, but in general, have been successful infostering intercultural competence in elementary school and junior high school students, which are shown inthe comparison between their pre-lesson and post-lesson entries in AIE. Likewise, first, second and third
graders of elementary school showed more interest in and less bias toward people with different
ethnic/cultural backgrounds in the follow-up interviews after the small-group introductory lesson.
One big difficulty we have been facing is Japanese people’s excessive attention to English education andthe centralized educational system which control teaching contents of elementary and secondary education,
which prevents new lessons on intercultural competence from being tested or introduced easily. Japanese
Ministry Education has been keen on the development of English education methods and new criteria, so
Common European Framework of Reference (2001) has been adopted in language education, especially
English teaching and assessment from its early stages. Sometimes, this almost exclusive emphasis placed on
English education runs counter to more pluralistic approaches to language and culture prevalent in Europe(2006). Hopefully, our attempt to create programs and curriculums to raise intercultural consciousness andnurture intercultural competence will attract more researchers’ interests, including educators of languages
other than English, and help change the beliefs of policy makers as well as general public so that theimportance of this type of education will receive more attention.
Continuous efforts will be made to do more fine-tuning of the instructional models we have developedwith modifications and adjustments, with an eye toward arriving at more feasible, optimal and consistent15

Selected Papers of the 24th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics

intercultural education instructional models that are conducive to different types/levels of classes atelementary, secondary, and tertiary education in Japan. AIE will continue to be used, firstly to validate theseteaching models and materials and secondly, for autonomous, reflective learning per se, which is its originalfunction. It is hoped that the further collection of real intercultural experiences from different age groups ofyounger generations will also help make the teaching models and methods more sophisticated and attenuatedto different developmental stages and actual needs of Japanese students.
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