2018 Volume 47 Pages 100-115
Recently, Japanese universities have been actively pursuing intercultural exchanges and collaborative learning involving local and international students. However, not many systematic studies have been conducted to verify the effects of such educational undertakings, although verification needs to precede application. For universities to achieve internationalization, the development of teaching methods of intercultural collaborative learning is a pressing issue, and for this it is necessary to collect empirical data based on established theories. The contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954) and the common ingroup identity model (Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman & Rust, 1993) were considered as theoretical frameworks for this study. We designed an international co-learning course in which international students and Japanese students study together in a collaborative manner based on the contact hypothesis, and we investigated its educational effects on intercultural competence. Questionnaires were administered to 133 participants to measure their intercultural competence before and after the course. Through factor analyses of the responses, three factors were derived: “skills to recognize cultural differences,” “intercultural sensitivity and adaptation,” and “proactive attitude toward intercultural contact.” Subsequently repeated measure analyses of variance were conducted to examine if there were significant differences in scores of each factor between pretest and posttest. The results revealed significant changes in these scores, confirming that participants’ intercultural competence in these three aspects were enhanced after the course work. This suggested that applying the contact hypothesis and the common ingroup identity model as frameworks for designing intercultural collaborative learning may be useful.
