Paper short abstract:

The presentation reports an implementation of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) whereby Japanese students interested in Japanese education at a Japanese university learned from Italian students about the benefits and potential problems of "foreigner talk" and "Yasashii Nihongo".

Paper long abstract:

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) has been endorsed in Japan in order to internationalise Japanese universities and prepare students for a globalised world. It is perhaps most commonly used for language learning via language exchange. However, this language exchange may inadvertently promote native-speakerism (Holliday, 2018), the belief that it is the native speakers of a given language who know best and are thus entitled to teach the language. In reality, non-native Japanese speakers often know better about learning Japanese, and those who are interested in Japanese language education can learn a great deal from them. For this reason, I designed COIL activities whereby students at a Japanese university who were enrolled on a Japanese language education module collaborated with postgraduate students majoring in Japanese at Ca' Foscari University of Venice via SNS (e.g. Line, Whatsapp) to discuss the benefits and potential problems of "foreigner talk" and "Yasashii Nihongo (plain Japanese)" in Japanese. Both Japanese and Italian students based their discussion on Shin Eun-Jin's (2007) and Kimura Goro Cristoph's (2019) papers on "foreigner talk" and "Yasashii Nihongo". The Japanese students' records of their COIL activities and learning showed that they found that the second language (L2) learners of Japanese were knowledgeable and experienced discussion partners and that they learned a great deal from the learners' perspectives. In particular, the activities focused on L2 learners' affective dimensions such as anxiety and joy associated with using L2. For this purpose, Japanese students wrote about using English as L2 in English and shared their writing with the Italian students (proficient in English) to receive feedback. The Italian students shared their experience of feeling disappointed or hurt when spoken to in excessively slowed-down or simplified Japanese despite their ability to use Japanese. The Japanese students learned that it was important not to use simplified language merely based on the interlocutors' appearance (suggesting their "foreigner status") and that it was crucial to accommodate the language by judging their needs on a case-by-case basis.