Internationalization in a Japanese University
Applications for Canadian Higher Education

Sally Rehorick & David Rehorick

Miyazaki International College (MIC), located in southern Japan, is a small liberal arts institution which began operation in 1994. MIC represents an experiment in Japanese higher education which endeavours to educate its students, mainly Japanese, to participate in the globalization and internationalization of Japan. Emphasis is placed on critical thinking while studying liberal arts subjects through the medium of the English language.

The Educational Philosophy of MIC
and Its Challenges
The goals and philosophy of MIC are articulated in the college's Bulletin (http://www.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp/): "The fundamental purpose of MIC is to develop international citizens conversant in Japanese and foreign cultures and fluent in English. […] The College's program emphasizes social responsibility for and moral commitment to protecting the environment, enriching human experience, improving social conditions, and encouraging world peace. Academic activities emphasize an international and comparative perspective and are designed to help students explore and be engaged with the improvement of communities both at home and abroad."

This educational model is quite unique in Japan where "learning the facts" characterizes most of the Japanese educational system including the approach to foreign language learning. The challenge of convincing the first class of students and parents that the MIC approach could work was increased when the incoming students had much lower levels of English language proficiency than had originally been anticipated. The college initially endeavoured to recruit students whose level of English, although far from perfect,would be sufficiently high (minimum TOEFL score of 500) to follow liberal arts courses whose content would be equivalent to that of a Western university. The reality was much different, and the college had to admit students with TOEFL scores around 360 to 380, about a high novice to low intermediate level. Many of the faculty doubted that goals of the original mission statement could be achieved.

An Integrated curriculum design
and teaching model
The central perspective of globalization is expressed in all MIC’s courses through the theme of environmental issues. For example, Art History and Environmental Issues examines the effects of pollution on the preservation of art monuments; Sociology and Environmental Issues contains a thematic unit on the environment as a source of fear, and human response to natural disasters such as the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe in 1995.

All content classes in the first two years are cotaught by a discipline and a language specialist. This integrative team-teaching model requires extensive collaboration between the two faculty members who must meet regularly to design the course syllabus, to plan classes and to evaluate student progress. In contrast to other team-teaching models, the MIC faculty partners teach together at the same time in the same classroom. The key objective is to make

individual classes a seamless blend of content and language objectives and, in most cases, the casual observer would not know which faculty member is the discipline specialist and which the language instructor. In direct contrast to the passive learning model of most Japanese schools (particularly at the middle and high school levels) and universities, MIC’s courses are based on the principles of active learning. Students are taught skills in problem-solving, investigation, group research, and making presentations. Thus traditional lectures are kept to a minimum in favour of cooperative group learning and individual projects.

Does the MIC experiment speak
to the Canadian context?
The simultaneous learning of subject matter and a second language is familiar in Canada through school immersion programs and in university programs such as the sheltered courses at the University of Ottawa. However, discipline-based language learning at the university level has been available only to students who already possess a high level of proficiency in the target language. By contrast, the first wave of MIC students began with a low English-language proficiency. Our two-year teaching experience at MIC demonstrated that through a carefully integrated curriculum and teaching model, students can learn content and language together at a university level. One might characterize the model as follows: (1) steady language and intellectual growth over the first three semesters, followed by (2) accelerated development during the fourth semester of Study Abroad at an English-language university overseas, ending with (3) sustained intellectual and critical thinking skills, reinforced with attention to language development, during their 3rd and 4th years.

MIC graduated its first class of students in March 1998. During their final year, each student researched and wrote in English a senior thesis of approximately 40-50 pages. The fact that the theses were written in English and dealt with wide-ranging topics speaks to the success of the college’s mission. English oral fluency had increased substantially and students had gained the abilities to articulate and debate issues of profound significance.

We were privileged to have contributed directly to this experiment, and to have witnessed the profound intellectual, cultural, and linguistic development of these young men and women. The MIC case provides directives for similar models and programs within Canada. The lesson is simple: effective integration of language and content objectives works even when students start with what many have thought to be "too low a level of language proficiency" to comprehend academic work.


Sally Rehorick and David Rehorick are founding faculty members of Miyazaki International College in Japan where they taught for two years (1996-97). At the present time, Sally is Professor of Second Language Education and Director of the Second Language Education Centre, and David is Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. They can be reached by e-mail at: sallyr@unb.ca and rehorick@unb.ca .


The Internationalist, Canadian Bureau for International Education - November 1998

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