The broad relationship between students' self-efficacy and interest has been highlighted for decades. This, along with the inherently developmental nature of learning, calls for a more thorough examination of the way fluctuations in students' self-efficacy influence their interest in learning within a single course over an academic year and…

Sociocultural theory (SCT) is a powerful basis for exploring and guiding L2 (second/foreign language) learner development. For the most part, however, the focus of classroom SCT-L2 has been on single activities, for example, teacher mediation of learners' writing process or peer scaffolding. In this paper, we expand on these studies, building on…

This study examined the results of a post-internship survey and a follow-up survey and interviews with 11 undergraduate students from the University of California in Davis, who worked as volunteers in a ten-week unpaid internship in Japan to examine their perceptions of the challenges and gains of working abroad. The results of the post-internship…

This study explores the factors of study abroad programs that contribute to cultivating intercultural competence. Through an empirically based quantitative examination of 303 Japanese study abroad students, it attempts to gain an understanding of the factors that enhance the development of intercultural competence. Considering that many previous…

Self-efficacy is the belief in one's own ability to carry out a given task, and has been shown to be a powerful predictor of performance. Although researchers have considered self-efficacy within language learning, it remains a relatively underused and unexplored construct. This longitudinal mixed-method study set out to address this, by…

This case study examines the goals of 13 Japanese graduate students who studied abroad, and situates those goals in the larger context of Japanese society. The study abroad objectives of the Japanese government and some Japanese universities are compared and problematised. The authors conducted three interviews of each study abroad participant…

In 2014, 24 Type B universities were selected as part of the Top Global University Project to act as institutional role models of internationalization in Japan and as gateways for the development of global human resources, that is, globally competent human resources. The increasing pressure to internationalize, perceived as a major solution to…