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This article explores the interaction between civil society organizations in Japan and incoming international students to illustrate how the nonprofit sector can be conducive to social capital generation in diverse groups in the short-term. Based on interviews, participant observation and document analysis, this study examines motivations of nonprofit staff and volunteers to get involved with international students and connects them to students' expectations and needs. The paper suggests ways of improving engagement between Japanese civil society organizations and international students to benefit all the stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have shown that translanguaging as a knowledge-construction process can be utilized to decolonize curricula that privilege English-mediated, class-specific knowledge and foster epistemic justice in educational settings. This study focuses on the process whereby translanguaging was mobilized by teachers, tutors, and international students to decolonialize the English-Medium Instruction (EMI) curriculum on an indigenous discipline in a top-rated Chinese university. Drawing on nexus analysis, this study delineates the ways the implemented EMI curriculum was shaped by two processes/practices: (1) intercultural translation as interdiscursive translanguaging, and (2) Chinese philosophy as an embodied way of life, as witnessed in both the teacher-directed interaction order in the classroom as well as in the dialogic interaction order in tutorial sessions, and mediated through the historical bodies of the participants. The analysis reveals that translanguaging provides valuable transknowledging opportunities that encourage negotiations among a plurality of discipline-specific knowledge systems and the construction of decoloniality-informed knowledge production and learning ecologies situated within the unequal geopolitics surrounding knowledge production; this aligns with translanguaging scholars' decolonial agenda and contributes to developing an operational definition of "transknowledging" based on extant decolonial studies that emphasized the intertwined relationship between transknowledging and translanguaging in decolonializing the EMI curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominance of English in academic discourses is well established, with increased English publication used to evidence its increasing use at the expense of national language publication. However, while English publication frequency has increased over time, few studies have examined how university faculties outside higher education’s Anglophone center have changed their language of publication frequency. Thus, in this investigation, we analyzed a Japanese national university’s medical faculty’s overall frequency of publication along with publication frequency by language medium, expanding on an earlier diachronic analysis of university publication reports. We previously found English language publications largely replaced Japanese language publications for journal articles and that overall publication frequency dramatically increased. However, that initial diachronic analysis did not show when those changes manifested. The current investigation explores this through a decennial time trend historical document analysis of publication reports from 1979 to 2020. This analysis elucidates how publication frequency, type, and language medium have changed. Specifically, we find that the largest change in the overall frequency of publication is between 1989–1990 and 1999–2000. These changes are primarily driven by conference papers and other publications, publication types not typically examined in analyses of journal citation databases. Our findings establish a foundation to discuss potential causes of the trends we identify in this Japanese national university’s medical faculty’s publications.

The internationalization of Anglophone universities could allow English-dominant students to benefit from experience with English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds, but US students have often complained of difficulty communicating with such instructors, especially International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Research has largely focused on helping ITAs assimilate linguistically and culturally, although many applied linguists suggest that ITAs' students would also benefit from training in skills for communication across linguistic difference, through attention to their language attitudes, familiarity with diverse Englishes, and communication strategies. We report on an intervention designed to address all three, here focusing on students' willingness to engage in collaborative communication strategies. The intervention, conducted in a computer science department and reaching over 300 first-year students from varied linguistic backgrounds, included an online and an in-class component, each lasting about an hour. This brief intervention resulted in small but significant gains in domestic undergraduates' (n = 174) stated intention to engage in collaborative behavior with their ITAs, although our detailed examination of qualitative responses suggests important areas for continued improvement of the intervention. We discuss the potential for such interventions to facilitate institutional and cultural change, encouraging the recognition of the shared responsibility for successful communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]