Contemporary Australia is an evolving nation of diverse cultures, but in the past various understandings of national identity were held, first as part of the British empire, then as part of an assimilationist monocultural British society and subsequently as a nation where integration allowed different cultures to be celebrated but within the…

We report on international research that compares linguistic ecosystems, that is, socially constructed public attitudes and ideologies concerned with foreign-language (FL) learning, in Canada and Japan. Analyzing responses to three interview questions from 125 interviews with five categories of respondent in each country, we suggest that there are…

This paper suggests that when a course is planned within one culture for delivery to members of another culture, appropriate quality control of assessment becomes an issue of major proportions. Based on their experience of presenting an Aid Agency-funded Masters course in a developing country in the Pacific, the authors describe the processes to…

In order to improve their abilities in cross-cultural communication, language learners should develop not only their language competence, but also communicative competence. This paper presents an understanding on the general cultural differences between the west and China by applying the cultural dimensions of Hofstede and Bond, and points out…

Discusses some problems encountered in doing cross-cultural research and reports on the approaches used to solve the difficulties. (HMV)

The article compares classical Greek and Chinese conceptions of education. This comparison is made by dealing with Chinese and Greek philosophers on philosophical issues. (Author/MF)

Programs sponsored by the Bicentennial Committee on International Conferences of Americanists (BCICA) are described that were held in Salzburg, Tokyo, Shiraz, Iran, San Antonio, and the Ivory Coast. The values of increased understanding and the effectiveness of the comparative approach are discussed. (LBH)

Describes the programs at the East-West Center, an international educational institution located at the University of Hawaii, involved in research on reorientation cross-cultural seminars; or helping people return home after an extended stay in a foreign country. (PG)

This study questioned the importance of literature for fostering international understanding in junior high school, sought to find those attributes of literature which promote international understanding, and attempted to define criteria for selecting such literature. Questionnaires were sent to all American state education departments and to 18…

New directions are suggested for cultural education that provide more than information about foreign culture; emphasis is placed on student acquisition of an interpretive framework for comparing his/her own culture with that under study. (MSE)