The writing center and international students in a Japanese university: a language management perspective

ABSTRACT

One of the institutional challenges of taking in large numbers of international graduate students is supporting their academic literacy skills. To accommodate a large population of international students, Japanese universities offer various services to support their academic studies and life-related issues, such as hiring international student advisors, offering Japanese language courses, and implementing peer-support programs. As a type of academic support for writing for international students, writing centers have caught the attention of universities in the last decade. To examine the institutional role of the writing center at a Japanese university, this study employs a language management lens to compare the beliefs and interests among administrators, tutors, and international students in improving international students’ Japanese writing. Interviews with the three groups of participants displayed incongruences between the administrators’ interests aligned with institutional goals, the educational philosophy of the writing center, and international students’ language learning needs. The findings point to the tutors' crucial role as language specialists who inform organized language management, and the necessity for collaboration between academic support units and faculty members in providing sufficient academic socialization environments for international students.

KEYWORDS:

• Japanese as a second language
• writing center
• language management
• international students

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the editor, anonymous reviewers, Drs. Ryuko Kubota, Patricia Duff, Ling Shi, Anthony Paré, André Mazawi, and Christine Casanave for their comments on the earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank Dean Jorgensen for suggestions for increasing readability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Tomoyo Okuda http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0037-3870

Notes

1 Scholars have been critically re-examining the ‘noting’ stage, especially on what kind of linguistic phenomenon is considered deviant and who evaluates it as so (Marriott & Nekvapil, 2012).

2 All university and participant names are pseudonyms. Pseudonyms were chosen by the researcher if there were no requests for specific pseudonyms by participants.

3 I use upper case ‘Writing Center’ to denote my research site, and lower case ‘writing center’ to refer to writing centers in general.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The International Research Foundation for English Language Education.