Developing Research Skills: Engaging with Japanese Social Issues in an English Medium Seminar

Adrienne Johnson
Shirayuri University
johnson[at]shirayuri[dot]ac[dot]jp
Cecilia Smith Fujishima
Shirayuri University
fujishima[at]shirayuri[dot]ac[dot]jp

Developing Research Skills: Engaging with JapaneseSocial Issues in an English Medium Seminar
ABSTRACTIn this paper we report on a project conducted in a semester-long introductory English-Medium
Instruction seminar in 2023 that aims to cultivate research and analytical skills for students to both
help prepare for their graduation theses and utilize in their lives beyond university. To provide
background, we first contextualize the seminar. We then outline the previous project iteration,
followed by the rationale for updating. We introduce four discrete strategies: building knowledge,
comparing sources, identifying stakeholders, and developing an awareness of underlying issues inindividual stories. To date, students have demonstrated they are able to recognize and potentiallyreconcile different viewpoints. However, identifying broader, overarching concepts that enable
them to connect different stories in other contexts remains a challenge. We conclude by outlining
suggestions for improvement, hoping to provide an example for other teachers aiming to develop
student research skills in similar contexts.
Keywords: EMI, research skills, curriculum internationalization, pedagogy, JapanThe LD30 conference encouraged us to engage with students to enrich their lives and empower
them to be active learners who can make a difference in the world. In this paper, we aim to help
achieve this goal through presenting concrete research strategies utilized in a project conductedin a first and second year English-Medium Instruction seminar class. First, we provide context for
both the project and class within which it takes place. We outline difficulties with past attempts toachieve similar goals, and then explain our rationale for the updated project on which we report
here. We next provide our ideas for the revamped research project, followed by an interim reporton student outcomes and conclude with concrete suggestions for both improvement and broader
application by other teachers.

CONTEXT AND GOALS

The research project in this report was completed by first- and second-year students through twocycles in an introductory seminar class in 2023. Students take a total of four introductory seminars,
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which are samplers for the 24-unit “courses” that are available to them in third and fourth year. Course,when used in this paper, will refer to this sense of the word. Our introductory seminar is for Course
I, a course focused on Japan in international society; other courses are focused on language orliterature. The course students choose determines their seminar and required electives for graduation.
In addition to introducing the course, one of the main objectives of the class is to develop students’
academic skills, including research skills, so that they are equipped to take Course I in their senior
years.
In this project, we focus on developing foundational skills to find, compare, and utilize different
information, which ideally enable students to become more media literate, more flexible to better
understand different points of view, and more creative in approaching problem solving. Researchskills at university contribute to their compulsory graduation thesis in fourth year. Strong researchskills also provide students with essential skills for life beyond university through enabling them to“identify a problem, collect informational resources that can help address the problem, evaluate
these resources for quality and relevance and come up with an effective solution to the problem”(St. Louis Community College Libraries, 2023).
At the outset, many students report a lack of familiarity with research, and have difficulty imagining
research as a skill that applies practically to their lives. For example, many do not connect the processof planning a trip, which involves checking times, finding a place to stay, places to eat, and sites tovisit to research skills that have crossover into the classroom. We therefore face both conceptual andpractical challenges in developing research skills in our context.

HOW THE PROJECT HAS BEEN ORGANIZED IN PREVIOUS YEARS

Although students have completed a group research project each semester since we have beenteaching this seminar, this year we changed the task to deepen students’ understanding of research.
Previously, we had given students a research assignment that investigated change in Japan. Students
were tasked with researching a contemporary issue in Japan through a historical lens, examining thepast and present situations and making predictions about the future based on their research. The
objective was having students recognize that change in society is normal, and something to takecharge of rather than to be feared or resisted without consideration. The goal of the project wasworthwhile, and students often found the project interesting, with many making efforts to present
their information well. However, we became dissatisfied with the project for a number of reasons, andfrom this year changed the approach.

THE RATIONALE FOR CHANGING

We decided to change the project primarily because it was not developing students’ ability to think
as researchers sufficiently. The content produced often demonstrated shallow understandings ofthe topics at hand. Rather than expanding the students’ awareness, the project tended to reinforce
students’ propensity to see history as a linear narrative, with events relayed chronologically without
a sense of causation. To illustrate, a typical example might be:‘School lunches originated in Yamagata in the Meiji era and then they became
common in Japan, and it used to be common to have whale meat and bread. Now
there is more variety of food and also now some local governments have problems
because parents don’t pay. In the future, there might be insects in school lunches
because insects have a lot of protein.’Moreover, students did not recognize competing narratives or different perspectives about changes,
nor did they recognize that history is a product of choices and not predestined. Projects commonly
lacked broader themes and concepts, making it difficult to see meaningful connections between thepast, present, and future, as well as between their topics and other changes in Japan or abroad.

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Students’ difficulties were partly a product of shortcomings in the design of the original project, which
did not include explicit steps to ensure that students identified aspects of change and continuity,
nor did it require students to address different perspectives. This made it difficult for students toovercome a kind of historical determinism or “naive realism” (The Decision Lab, n.d.), apparently notuncommon among contemporary university students.1 Although the marking criteria included using
a variety of different sources, the project instructions themselves did not require showing different
or competing perspectives. As such, the use of different sources tended to be superficial rather thana way to broaden understanding of an issue. Description through examples tended to dominate at
the expense of conceptual analysis of change. Additionally, the segmentation into past, present, andfuture commonly resulted in groups allocating one section to each member, resulting in students
researching different aspects independently and an overall lack of cohesion.
Based on these experiences, we decided to overhaul the project entirely and set about reestablishing
our goals, shifting from chronology to breadth of understanding. To help students visualize theexpectations, we provided our own example with a presentation using a contemporary, controversial
news topic. This modeled the final product for students, explicitly presenting the requirements.
Students were also provided with a list of sentence frames that they could use for the presentation.
These provided important scaffolding, as few students had created an English-language, researchoriented presentation before.

CHANGES IN FOCUS

We made five main changes from the original, outlined in the table below:
Previous projectStudents conduct a chronological investigation in
the change of an issue over time

Current projectStudents identify a contemporary, controversial
issue in the news and focus on a range ofperspectives
Focus on past, present, future
Focus on identifying stakeholders andtheir different, competing, and overlapping
perspectives
Requirement to use different sources, but no in-depth Long-term focus on developing the habit ofexplanation or evaluation of the merits of sources using different sources, and different types ofsources and explaining why they chose them
Chronological focus that does not require conceptual A clear focus on identifying the concepts andlinks between events
issues within a story
Loosely structured presentation with accompanying Structured presentation with sentence frames
report.
provided

THE FOUR UNDERLYING PRINCIPLESIn re-making the project, we wanted to foster skills that are applicable to a wide variety of situations
and have students produce work that is more analytical and coherent. To achieve this, we decided
that the project needed a more systematic approach by breaking research skills down into discreteparts, and introducing them incrementally over the semester. This approach is founded on four
research principles.
The first principle is that knowledge is necessary to understand and think critically. Students
are encouraged to read widely to build their knowledge. In the preparatory stage, students are
introduced to the idea of different types of sources. This endeavor is supported by the university
library, which provides student-oriented introductions to accessing books and online databases. At
this stage, we also introduce the merits and demerits of social media, going to experts, and finding1

Our thanks to Ken Ikeda for this insight.

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the original source of information. Students research a news story from different types of sources
to raise awareness of the way they can be used and their limitations. Noticing the differences
between the ways news stories are told prepares them to question sources.
Having drawn attention to knowledge, the second principle is the importance of sourcing knowledge
from different media in order to get different perspectives on the same issue. We provide examples
with strong contrasts to highlight the importance of this. For example, we compare the Japaneseand Korean government’s respective websites about Takeshima/Dokdo. In a domestic example
of differing views, students compare the front-page reports of the state funeral of former Prime
Minister Abe from six Japanese newspapers. The broad spectrum of opinion helps students
understand the dangers of relying on a single source and impresses the need to research fromdifferent sources and different types of sources and to interrogate the information they find.
Furthermore, providing concrete examples of differences in perspective according to the media
source helps students to understand why clearly referencing information is so important.
The third principle is issues having multiple stakeholders, and the idea of stakeholders having
different perspectives on the same issue. Students can understand this through the hypotheticalexample of an easily imagined campus issue (i.e., potential sales of alcohol on campus). They
can use their own experiences to imagine multiple perspectives on one issue and how different
groups might have different concerns (i.e., those of students compared to staff compared to local
neighborhood residents). Critically, the assignment requires students to look for stakeholders’common interests as well as their points of disagreement. This helps students move beyond
entrenched opinions to a mindset where they can bridge differences, fostering a constructive
mindset for problem solving in the face of conflict and opposing interests.
The final principle is focusing on identifying broader issues within a story. The ability to identify
issues in their targeted news stories helps students apply what they are researching to othercontexts in different times and places. As a requirement of the project, we have students identify
the underlying issues in their story. Issues that they identify may include political concepts, suchas globalization; sociocultural concepts, such as justice, gender, human rights; or environmental
concepts, such as sustainability, pollution, global warming, etc. For example, a group of students
researching the foreign trainee program in Japan may identify a concept such as labor rights, andconnect it to sweatshop labor in Bangladesh, or human rights, through which they may identify
similar issues in the treatment of foreign labor in the Middle East or Singapore. Students may
also identify the issue of immigration and compare the situation of the trainees to those of otherimmigrant groups in Japan, such as foreign students. As trainee labor arises from combining theneed to supplement a declining labor force with providing foreign aid, students may compare
Japan’s system to alternative foreign trainee labor schemes such as the one in South Korea, or
alternative forms of development aid. Drawing out the issues to find comparable stories helps totrain the students to think from a broader perspective and consider their topic more deeply andwith greater connection to the international sphere. This stage is challenging, as students often
lack knowledge of current affairs and are not accustomed to identifying broader issues, let alone
doing so with a view to compare, and therefore still needs refining in design and implementation.

THE PROJECT

For the research project, students are split into small groups (2 or ideally 3 students per group)and choose a news story to investigate. The project is completed as a group in keeping with
Course I objectives to create “a learning community that requires communication, cooperation,and collaboration” (Fujishima & Johnson, 2023, 139). Students have weekly tasks to develop theirunderstanding of the news story, and present their research in the form of an oral presentation in
week 14 or 15 of the semester.

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Students are given a rubric to ensure the objectives of the project are clear. The rubric is split into
two sections: content and presentation. For content, students are required to: (1) identify their topic
and explain its importance, (2) identify multiple stakeholders, (3) identify different perspectives, (4)identify issues that can be connected to other stories, and (5) use different sources effectively. For
presentation skills, students are required to (1) present information in an easy-to-understand way, (2)have good expression and delivery, (3) have good eye contact and engagement with the audience,and (4) have good preparation, fluency, and confidence overall. Importantly, we are judging on
presentation skills and not on English ability (inasmuch as their presentation is understandable). The
reason for not focusing on English is that this seminar is designated as a content class, specificallyseparate from language classes where language proficiency and acquisition are assessed.

OUTCOMES SO FAR

At present, we have only completed one semester with the new project and are in the process of
doing it for a second time. Although the project design can still be improved, students are developinga better awareness of research skills than they did in previous iterations, based on the content of
their presentations and student reflections.
All groups fulfilled the basic requirements of using a variety of different types of sources (for example,
academic articles, mainstream media, social media, and official government websites). All groups
also identified different stakeholders and their perspectives. Most groups were able to find andexplain points of agreement and differences between stakeholders. One factor contributing to most
students achieving these goals is that the project is highly structured. Because the rubric also serves
as a checklist for tasks to do, students are more easily able to see whether they have addressed
each requirement. Most groups were able to identify issues in order to make connections to othercontexts. One group, for example, connected the issue of the coverup of Johnny Kitagawa’s abuse ofminors with the coverup of abuse in the Boy Scouts in the United States. Students verbally expressedsurprise that it was not just a “Japan issue.”Having students able to shift from seeing a news report as just a “story” to being a story with perspectives
to be understood and issues to be analyzed suggests evidence of progress. However, not all groups
were able to make links effectively. Whether students will be able to apply this to future projects inseminar and elective classes within the course remains to be seen.
There has been no attempt yet to quantify student understanding using a questionnaire; however,students have been given project reflection cards which have open questions such as what they
enjoyed, found difficult, and learned about researching through the project. Students’ reflections
show an understanding of the need to source information widely. For example, a first-year student
commented:“I have learned how to gather information from various sources rather than making
decisions based on one article alone” (Student A).
Students show an understanding of the fact that different people have different points of view, andthat consciously considering issues from the perspective of various stakeholders is something they
will be able to apply to future projects (and hopefully life):“I have never thought about anything from the perspective of a stakeholder or that
person until now. This time, I was able to think about stakeholders and research themand learn research topics with various opinions that I couldn’t think of myself, and I
learned that there is also this way of research” (Student B).
At the same time, the reflections also contained comments that showed these strategies were
unfamiliar and challenging for some students: “I struggled to get information from various sources.”(Student C).
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In addition to comments about the research aspects of the presentation, students, particularly firstyears, wrote in their reflection cards that they were nervous and lacked confidence to present inEnglish.

FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS & BROADER APPLICABILITY

We have four main ideas for how to improve in the future. First, spend more time on the projectthroughout the semester. If we can rewrite the class materials to integrate the research strategies
of knowledge, sources, stakeholders, and issues more explicitly inside the core class materials
rather than as a separate research project, it would reduce cognitive load and allow more time forstudents to expand their thinking through research.
Second, we could add a questioning component into the project.2 Good research relies on goodquestions. Integrating questioning into the project more explicitly is likely to help students’ overall
understanding of the purpose of research and develop their curiosity. Brainstorming questions
about their news story is also likely to deepen engagement with the project.
Third, we could highlight the transferable skills students develop through the research project.
Greater understanding of the relevance of the task would hopefully lead to increased student
motivation (c.f. Frymier & Shulman 1995) and also help them recognize that they can use the skills
in other contexts.
Finally, we need to consider alternative ways of scaffolding to enable students to gain a deeper
understanding of what they are doing, decrease cognitive load, and shift focus towards skill
development. With more scaffolding, students can potentially focus on developing skills rather thanspending time worrying about how to present, which can be a barrier for learning as noted above.
Overall, this project, which introduced research skills incrementally, has improved students’ ability
to approach research, take account of a wider range of sources, and develop a consciousness
to look from various perspectives, all abilities needed not only in academic contexts but also inlife more generally. Although this paper is a case study of an EMI seminar, educators working
to cultivate similar skills may benefit from engaging in these incremental, concrete-foundation
approaches irrespective of teaching language.
The LD30 conference theme urged us to action by making a difference for the future. The theme
echoes a growing international awareness that education needs to evolve so that it prepares
students to be able to contribute to a rapidly changing world and solve global problems (OECD,2020). In light of this, it is our hope that students will be taught to interrogate complex social issues
from various viewpoints and develop a habit of questioning and looking for more information to bebetter equipped to meet the needs of society. The wide variety of projects shared at LD30 both byeducators and students reaffirmed the importance of coming together to innovate and exchange
ideas. We hope that the project outlined here can be a helpful step to understanding and solving
problems based on a strong foundation of respect, understanding, and a will to improve.

REFERENCES

The Decision Lab. (n.d.). Naive realism. The Decision Lab. Retrieved January 8, 2024, from https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/naive-realism
Frymier, A. B., & Shulman, G. M. (1995). “What’s in it for me?”: Increasing content relevance toenhance students’ motivation. Communication Education, 41(1), 40–50.
https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529509378996
Fujishima, C. S., & Johnson, A. (2023). A practical pedagogical framework for internationalizing thecurriculum: Preparing students for an international society in an EMI course. 白百合女子大学研究紀要,
59, 127–158.
2

We thank our colleague Keiko Hirao for insight on this point.

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MEXT. (n.d.). Higher education in Japan. Retrieved January 20, 2024, from https://www.mext.go.jp/
en/policy/education/highered/title03/detail03/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/06/19/1302653_1.pdf
OECD. (2020). What students learn matters: Towards a 21st century curriculum. OECD Library.
Retrieved January 20, 2024, from https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/d86d4d9a-en/index.
html?itemId=/content/publication/d86d4d9a-en
St. Louis Community College Libraries. (2023, December 20). LibGuides: Fake news & misinformation:
How to spot and verify: Research skills. LibGuides at St. Louis Community College. Retrieved
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