Paper long abstract

This paper investigates how international students, Japanese students, and host farmers co-construct interculturality through cooking and dinner-table discourse in a short-term rural farm-stay program in Akita, Japan. Building on recent work that frames homestay learning as an interactional ecology—where participation and membership shape what counts as “input” and learning—we treat mealtimes as high-density sites for observing intercultural understanding in action (Greer & Wagner 2023). We further align this focus with current scholarship emphasizing the need to refine how language-focused study abroad is theorized and examined across diverse program designs and inequitable access conditions (Kang & Shively 2024).

While homestay research has shown that the dinner table is often the main arena of sustained host–student interaction and a key locus of language-and-culture learning (Kinginger et al., 2016), we argue that farm-stay meals intensify these affordances because food practices are embedded in rural labor, household rhythms, and intergenerational knowledge. We adopt a Communities of Practice perspective to conceptualize mutual understanding as emerging through participation in everyday domestic routines rather than through the acquisition of stable cultural facts. This framework allows us to position host farmers as experienced members who actively shape access, roles, and affective climate, while both Japanese and international students move through shifting forms of legitimate participation during cooking and dining.

Data consist of narrative interviews from international students (2024) and Japanese students (2025), complemented by multi-year questionnaires. Analytic attention is given to episodes of meal preparation, serving, eating, and post-dinner talk. Findings suggest that cooking tasks promote apprenticeship-like collaboration, enabling multimodal coordination across language gaps, while dinner conversations invite storytelling, evaluation, and spontaneous comparison of values, norms, and life histories, accelerating shifts from “visitor” to “family-like” member. These patterns resonate with recent discussions of intercultural learning in short-term programs, which highlight how program design and local interaction conditions shape outcomes beyond duration alone. By offering a rural, host-inclusive account of mealtime interculturality (Goldstein 2022), this study extends homestay and study-abroad literature with evidence that mutual understanding can be rapidly built through shared food practices as lived participation.

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References

Greer, T., & Wagner, J. (2023). The interactional ecology of homestay experiences: Locating input within participation and membership. Second Language Research, 39(1), 85–113.

Goldstein, S. B. (2022). A systematic review of short-term study abroad research methodology and intercultural competence outcomes. International Journal of Intercultural Relations.

Kang, H.-S., & Shively, R. L. (2024). Researching language-focused study abroad through an equity lens: A research agenda. Language Teaching, 57(3), 377–398.

Kinginger, C., Lee, S. H., Wu, Q., & Tan, D. (2016). Contextualized language practices as sites for learning: Mealtime talk in short-term Chinese homestays. Applied Linguistics, 37(5), 716–740.