Abstract
This study investigates the change of intercultural competency in E-mail exchanges and the causes of it. The participants were 139 4th graders (67 from Japan and 72 from Korea). After dividing them into two groups (automatic translation function and bilingual), each student from one country was paired with one and student from the other country (exceptionally some students had two partners) exchanged their paper-written self-introduction including their picture; then E-mail classes in each country were conducted 4 times. The results of factor analysis on the data of pre-post questionnaire of intercultural competency yielded two subscales: Receptiveness to Foreign Culture (RFC), and Receptiveness to Others (RO). Analysis of variance showed that (1) Development of RFC, (2) Japanese students' improvement of RFC compared to the before the intervention but Korea students' declination of RFC, (3) The group with bilingual showed declination of RO and development of RFC. Concerning this result (3), it is considered that the students with translation by bilingual need not so much receptiveness as the ones with machine translation do. And the cause for (2) was made clear by analyzing the E-mail records that show about 2 times higher number of sentences per 1mail in the Korean samples.
