This paper considers the significance of sharing educational practices, based on the　 discussion topic, “Reconsidering the Classroom, Learners, and Teachers” at the first symposium of the Association for Language and Cultural Education in 2015. The rise of the sociocultural approach in the 1990s was the turning point for reconsidering how the Japanese language should be taught. However, educational approaches in places of learning vary widely, and educational practitioners do not necessarily have a shared recognition of whether or how their methods differ from traditional methods. In order to “reconsider” these practices, a prerequisite is to define exactly what needs to be considered. The discussion at the symposium, which was held with an awareness of this issue, is set forth in this paper. Additionally, the role of teachers who create collaborative learning environments by departing from traditional beliefs about language learning and ability is considered. For teachers who are aiming to reform the status quo, collaboration with other teachers is essential. This paper asserts that in order to share issues with other teachers and discuss what direction to take that will lead to desirable practices, practical research, in which teachers critically reflect on their own practices, is necessary.

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Recent arguments over pedagogy in Japanese language education claim that it should be readdressed in Japanese society. Due to the Japanese universities’ globalization policy, the role of Japanese language teachers is expected to expand within Japanese society. As teachers are the ones who implement Japanese language education in the classrooms, educational reforms will never be achieved unless teachers reconsider their own roles in the society. In this study, examining the educational environment where teachers perform their educational practice, I will indicate the downside of the “self-directed teacher-ness” in Japanese language education. Tensions between teachers arise, because of the idea that Japanese teachers are “freelance-experts”, thus constraining their practice to established standards. I will conclude a sense of “collegiality”, which eliminates the tensions and restrictions between teachers, is needed in Japanese language teachers’ professional development.

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This action research analyzes the Open Campus carried out for Korean high school students at a university located in a rural area of Japan. While the faculty members, international students on campus, and people at the local community were collaboratively networking with high school students from Korea, all the participants were mutually learning their languages. New communication and community were also created through this collaborative practice. Furthermore, this experience brought some new learning to all the participants. International students at the campus experientially learned Japanese language that is needed in the local community they belong to and the community they would like to belong to in the future. Reflecting on this practice, I conclude that designing the place where people collaboratively and mutually learn their languages in a practice can be an aim for Japanese language education. Lastly, in order to make this happen, I argue that sharing our own practices is one of the significant roles for Japanese language teachers.

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This article is tried to expand discussion of language and cultural education by commenting to Ushikubo’s and Miyo’s article on this paper. At first, I analysed the direction of discussion on the journals of Studies of Language and Cultural Education (SLCE). And I indentified that the characteristics of SLCE are “reframing of the meaning of practices”. Then I showed the signification and limitation caused by membership of ALCE. Second, I mentioned the expanding the membership of ALCE beyond the Japanese as a second language education, and the posibblity to become language and culatural education as citizenship education.

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Employing a Jungian approach, this study aims to investigate what beliefs students reveal in drawings of themselves, their surrounding environments and mediating artifacts while they are engaged in language learning. To date, no study has applied a psychoanalytic approach to investigating learners’ beliefs. In this paper, how a Jungian approach can reveal students’ unconscious feelings and beliefs is discussed.

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In this paper, we explore how Ms. Ikeda (pseudonym), who worked at a Japanese language school in Hong Kong, experienced the commodification of education. As a part-time instructor, Ms. Ikeda followed the institutional policy that tries to commodify its Japanese language education by overemphasizing learners’ satisfaction. Thus, she was experiencing a dilemma about what she wanted to do, what her learners wanted to do, and what the institution wanted her to do. From our research findings, it is clear that the commodification of education poses a risk of producing educational practices that are biased to learners’ superficial interests. We need to include the teachers’ perspective in order to overcome the problems of the commodification and consumption of Japanese language education.

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This paper is explorative “action research” cooperating “educator” and “researcher” who are standing different position. Recently, Hosokawa and Miyo (2015) set up the theory of “action research” in language and cultural education based on Parker (2008). It has assumption that “educator” and “researcher” are same person in the practice. But we also have the situation that they have different role (divided “educator” and “researcher”) in the practice. In addition, the perspective of “meaning of practice for learners” is very important for academic ability and assessment of practice in recent years. But most of papers of this theme, they are researched as a survey. Therefore it little contribute to improvement of practice. This article find out about the impact of “educator” and “researcher” talking with educator’s former students they are in high school today in “round-table talk”. And we discuss the possibility of action research cooperating “educator” and “researcher”.

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This paper attempts to explore the causes of a shortfall in disaster prevention information gathering among foreign exchange students. For this purpose, we analyze the process of disaster prevention information gathering by foreign exchange students in Japan following the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake. The results of the analysis identify five factors, such as (1) anxiety in the Japanese language usage, (2) confusion of public officials who are unaccustomed to foreigners, (3) vertically segmented system inter/intra-public institutions, (4) indifference of officials toward to disaster prevention, (5) a deficiency of the manuals and multilingual audio guides. Previous research has suggested a lack of Japanese language proficiency is the main cause of disaster prevention information shortfall, however, the results of this study suggests other factors.

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The idiom “ashi wo arau” has a wide variety of uses, as it can not only be used in regard to evil deeds, but also in regard to good. Examples taken from corpora reflect the changes in the usage of this idiom, which are caused by both internal and external linguistic factors. Although to grasp the full picture of language change it is necessary to investigate a number of expressions, in this paper, we take the idiom “ashi wo arau” as a singular example, using it to test an approach to language change as seen from the perspectives of one’s state of mind and social environment. As shown in previous studies, corpora play an important role in the compilation of dictionaries. In this paper, it is confirmed that the usage of “ashi wo arau” can be reliably analyzed using corpora. Thus, corpus data will contribute greatly to both lexical description in the dictionary and the development of teaching materials.

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