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Paper short abstract:

This research is a joint case study with Malaysia aiming to develop a Japanese language education program for peaceful coexistence. Through online collaborative learning, we will clarify difficulties, dilemmas, and coping methods for differences in language, culture, and historical perception.

Paper long abstract:

For Japanese language education aiming at peaceful coexistence, how to overcome memories of war and promote mutual cultural understanding is a major issue. In Europe and the United States, efforts are being made to Content and Language Integrated Learning, but in Japan, the "content" of learning for peace tends to lean toward themes such as the history of damage caused by war, human rights, and poverty. For this reason, Japanese language education aimed at peaceful coexistence lacks a means of resolving the discrepancies in historical perceptions that hinder mutual cultural understanding and the perspective of cross-cultural understanding. In addition, since the history of international collaborative learning is short in Japan, there is a need to accumulate analyzes of collaborative processes among students. In this study, we take Malaysia as a case study, where ethnic feuds remain over memories of the Japanese occupation during World War II. Through international joint learning between Japanese university students and Malaysian university students studying Japanese, we will examine what kind of conflicts and dilemmas Japanese students have in terms of language, culture, and historical awareness. And how Japanese students try to deal with them will be clarified by recording and reviewing collaborative learning among students. As a result of the analysis, the Malaysian and Japanese students brought together their knowledge of both Japanese and English, and by making efforts to eliminate the barriers between the two by using written materials and SNS, collaboration and mutual understanding progressed. However, in the fusion of history-related learning activities and Japanese-language learning activities, which are fraught with conflicts and dilemmas, there remain issues of how far the history-learning activities need to be explored and how they should be integrated.