Digital Citizenship Education (DCE) has emerged as a supranational priority, as has been strongly affirmed through recommendations issued by the Council of Europe. This educational initiative seeks to empower younger citizens to participate actively and responsibly in a digital society and to foster their skills of using digital technologies effectively and critically. However, in order to facilitate the implementation of DCE in schools and in curricula across Europe, subject-specific adaptations are required, which are still lacking. This would include a thorough adaptation of DCE principles and objectives into foreign language education (FLE) – a field at the heart of a unified vision of European and global education that involves the fostering of foreign language competencies needed for intercultural communication, mutual exchanges and civic action. The project, Dice-Lang, a three-year Erasmus+ project aims at integrating digital citizenship education into the field of foreign language education.

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This paper is a report on the SMILE project (Students Meet Internationally through Language Education project) and some other projects utilizing ICT. This project centralizes multiple small-group collaborative lessons in English among young people of the same generation who do not share a first language. After illustrating the whole program and the organizational support it requires, focusing on programs between Ichihara Chuo High School and Pingtung High School (Taiwan) in AY2020, and between Chuo University and Universiti Tekonologi Malaysia in AY2021, we describe the project characterized by its systematic design from preparation to reflection. In addition, an application called Dialogbook, developed specifically for this project, is used to share information between paired schools, conduct rubric-based formative evaluations, and conduct and record learner-teacher interactions. These data are easily downloaded to reflect on activities throughout the entire program. We also introduce initiatives conducted in similar ways, sharing the same basic concept of the SMILE project. We then consider the potential for such project-based learning, including how learners change through the experience of repeatedly interacting in English with their international peers.

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This paper reviews the significance and the development of Intercultural Collaborative Learning (ICL), an educational practice that incorporates learners' cultural and linguistic diversity as a learning resource, then goes on to discuss its future prospects. ICL has been developed in a variety of forms at universities within Japan and abroad, and is significant in enabling the acquisition of generic skills, offering preparatory learning for global citizenship, reinforcing the learning effects of studying abroad, and providing opportunities for the formation of learners’ communities of practice. While responses to COVID-19 have forced major changes in the design of ICL, new ICL practices that incorporate digital technology have also offered greater potential. Further contributions to the quality assurance of university education and a new educational design that combines online and face-to-face environments, as well as study abroad and on-campus learning, are necessary perspectives for post-COVID ICL. Both perspectives require sophisticated leadership for comprehensive internationalization in university education reform.

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This paper reports on an interview survey of students and examines the environment in which learners feel more comfortable participating in conversations when using the target language (English) with other learners in the process of foreign language acquisition. The author is in charge of a short-term study abroad program at the University of North Georgia (UNG) in the U.S., where students in Japanese language classes at UNG and students at Nanzan University in Japan engage in online collaborative learning remotely before they meet in person at UNG. In the academic year of 2021, due to the spread of the new coronavirus, the on-site activities were replaced by transpacific online activities. After the program, more than half of the participants said the interaction with Japanese language learners left the biggest impression on them, while one student compared her affective aspects: English discussions with Japanese students in her undergraduate classes and English discussions with other students including UNG students in this program. Based on the interview, the author will discuss and report on the various factors that influence one's feelings when participating in a conversation in the target language.

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Though writing style manuals published some decades ago urged the avoidance of personal pronouns in academic texts (e.g., Devlin, 1910; Herbert, 1965), recent research has argued that personal pronouns can serve to build a relationship between the author and the readers, projecting “authorial presence” in the text. The use of pronouns can thus play an important role in convincing readers of the author’s point of view (Hyland, 2005). This study examined the self-mentions (“author” and the first/third-person pronouns) in 100 dissertation abstracts written by Japanese graduate students in engineering. The analysis showed that Japanese students used 1) self-mentions, especially the first-person pronouns, 40% less often, 2) indirect self-mentions (“author” and the third-person pronouns) about 10 times more often than their counterparts in America, and 3) they used the first-person pronouns with particular verbs mainly to describe the purpose and method of the study.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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