NANA KAMIMURA (TAMAGAWA UNIVERSITY)

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE AS A PROMOTION STRATEGY OF UNIVERSITIES IN JAPAN: A CASE STUDY : INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND GLOBAL COMPETENCIES

This paper discusses an ongoing study on how English departments of Japanese universities use intercultural communicative competence as a strategy to attract applicants for admission. In recent years, many universities have increasingly stressed “intercultural communicative competence.” However, very few of them define the term. In other words, many universities tend to use the term without any references. This case study aims to find out how universities relate learning English to the discourse of intercultural communicative competence as a strategy. A preliminary study of three universities indicates how three private universities of foreign studies describe intercultural communicative competence and what they do to acquire or improve it. While there is no form of definition of what each university grasped in intercultural communicative competence, there are descriptions of how to foster it. Moreover, the three private universities shared the commonality of cultivating cross-cultural understanding through communication with native English speakers, such as international students and instructors. In other words, cross-cultural understanding and native English speakers are often associated. It can be said that intercultural competence at these universities is based on the presence of native-English speakers and that they still use implicitly native English speakers as a commodity. This case study will conclude an increasing number of Japanese universities mention improving intercultural communicative competence; however, university advertisement strategies still rely on the implied presence of native English speakers as a promotion tool.

Nana Kamimura is a MA student in ELT at the Graduate School of Humanities in Tamagawa University, Tokyo, Japan. Her interests include English as a lingua franca, Intercultural Communication, and Project Based Learning.