ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a study that aims to inform institutional practices to bring about richer exchange study abroad experiences for English-speaking Australian undergraduate students in Japan – a linguistically and culturally non-cognate destination – and therefore to contribute to a more geo-culturally equitable, directionally balanced examination of global student mobility. Our study investigated the learning experiences of 20 Australian undergraduate Japanese Studies majors who went on Japanese exchange between 2016 and 2018. Employing semi-structured interviews, the study examined how individual students navigated both language and cultural challenges. Our findings advocate the need for a systematically structured institutional approach to consolidating students’ academic readiness and cultural awareness prior to exchange. Furthermore, such an approach necessitates equitably balancing institutional responsibilities with individual students’ responsibilities to specifically prepare those students embarking on study abroad in non-English speaking, culturally more distant countries.
