Investigation of Cultural Identity of Students Who Study Japanese Language at British Universities Between 2012 and 2023

Abstract

In Japanese language classrooms, students have become more globalised in terms of the students' educational and life experience background. Teaching pedagogies which have been used before globalisation may not be appropriate and effective to students after globalisation.  The aim of this study is to investigate any cultural identity characteristics of students who studied Japanese at two British universities in the South of England between 2012 and 2023. The significance of this study is to investigate how students' individualist or collectivist cultural background may affect students' cultural identity. Participants were a total of 22 students who studied Japanese language through an Institution-Wide Language Programme. The majority of these students have studied Japanese for a minimum of 1-3 years. The data was collected between 2012/13 and 2022/23 academic year from two British universities. The research design to investigate students' cultural identity characteristics was a mixed method, using variables such as hometown, languages they speak, their values and their first name. Students' origin, where they were born and where they were educated were also taken into consideration to analyse the data. The key finding of students' characteristic was that students' identification was closely related to their sense of belonging in the results of students' hometown, languages they speak, their values and their first name, which is in line with other previous research results in the literature. Other findings included that some of the students found it difficult to determine their hometown, that the majority of students were multilingual who have experience in several language learning, that students' values were often influenced by their parents' individualist or collectivist cultural values, and that students' first names often showed the students' identification and sense of belonging. Taking into consideration of individualist or collectivist culture, recommendations discuss on how the language teaching practitioners may be able to support the sense of belonging of the current students who have diverse educational and life background.

Received: 19 December 2023 | Revised: 25 March 2024 | Accepted: 25 April 2024 

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares that she has no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in University of Sussex Research Data Repository which is powered by Figshare.

Author Contribution Statement

Junko Winch: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition.