| Summary: | English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is a field that is gaining increasing
prominence in Japan. As Japanese universities are charged with
becoming more international in order to improve their performance in
international university rankings, so the need to equip Japanese
students to participate in English-medium courses of study abroad has
grown. However, as well as the well-documented lack of confidence and
ability in general English skills amongst young Japanese people, there
is another factor which may hinder the teaching of EAP to Japanese
university students, the vastly different culture that prevails in
Japanese higher education institutions as opposed to those of the
universities in English-speaking countries in the West. Therefore, this
study was designed to assess the exact nature of these cultural
differences in order to more fully understand what influence they have
on the teaching of EAP in a Japanese university context. By conducting
semi-structured interviews with EAP instructors, and questionnaires
with EAP students, at a private university in Tokyo, this study is able to
identify four general factors that illustrate the differences between
Western and Japanese academic culture, and also to point to areas in
which these differences may cause problems in the EAP classroom.
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