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Paper short abstract:

Our presentation will focus on our experience of creating a pedagogical material for Japanese language teaching aiming at an intercultural understanding. We will discuss the process of elaboration in which we reflected on how we can make a personal experience into a text for pedagogical use.

Paper long abstract:

In our presentation, we will report our experience in elaborating a pedagogical material for Japanese language teaching, which aims at an inter-cultural understanding.

What can language teaching do for the language learners who are in a constant process of changing their own identity through the encounter with new cultures brought by learning a language? It can provide them opportunities to see the diverse aspects of cultures and the various attitudes, which we can adopt when facing the differences. These practices allow them to know diversified points of view that we can have toward the differences.

The presenters had the opportunity to interview a karate master, who is teaching in France for about 40 years, about the conflicts between two different cultures. He had grabbed in a conscientious way conflicts between French culture and the one of karate, that takes origin in Japanese culture, and have been teaching this martial art positioning himself as an intercultural mediator. Since the cultural differences he had understood and the mediations between these two cultures are very instructive for Japanese learning/teaching, we proceeded to a "case writing", making it accessible for language learning/teaching context.

The case writing is a part of a process in which we create pedagogical materials for "the case learning" proposed by Kondoh et al (2013). In the case learning, participants collaborate to understand a text that describes a real situation and seek together solutions to resolve the identified problems. This way of active learning corresponds to our perspective and thus we chose it as our method for the inter-cultural understanding.

In our presentation, we particularly focus on the case writing, preparative process of the case learning. As Kondoh et al (2015) indicates, a text based on a personal experience is subject to have prejudice or stereotype, which is not insignificant to the learners nor to the teachers. The text should allow nevertheless the learners to experience the situation as if he/she were in it. We would like to share what we did or discussed and do the same with participants of the symposium.