How Foreign Muslim Students Changed Their Attitude Toward Japanese Academic Environment After a Culture Assimilator

Abstract

The number of Muslim students from abroad is increasing after a plan launched to accept around 300,000 international students in Japan. In this research, we aim to create “culture assimilator”, a kind of cross-cultural training consisting of questions, answers and commentaries, which is instructive for helping their religious practice and supporting their study in Japan. We conducted our culture assimilator for Malaysian Muslim students who had already started their study in Japan. We report the results of the analysis based on the survey. According to their answers, at most 30 % students did not know coping strategies in critical incidents suggested in our culture assimilator. This meant our culture assimilator was instructive enough to support them. We also found from their comments they did not compromise their study for their religious practice, on the contrary, coped with difficulties flexibly within the limits of their faith. Though they got high marks in our culture assimilator as a whole, they selected wrong answers concerning “obligation” to some questions. To investigate how our culture assimilator influenced their attitude toward Japanese academic environment, we executed the same questionnaires before and after conducting our culture assimilator. By comparing their responses, we found a new response category “About Religion” in the latter answers, which included negative remarks about Japanese people’s attitude toward religion. They also learned to prefer easy communication like greetings to get along with Japanese people, and the ratio of “Apology” decreased dramatically in a category “Self-help” after our culture assimilator.



Author Information
Yu Sengoku, Shinshu University, Japan
Yumiko Ito, Pusat Bahasa Teikyo, Malaysia
Minami Matsumoto, University of Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia
Masahiro Watari, University of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Paper Information
Conference: ACCS2018
Stream: Education / Pedagogy

This paper is part of the ACCS2018 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon