Japanese Exchange Students' Writing Experiences in a Canadian University

Abstract

This study investigated the learning experiences of 23 Japanese students in a one-year Academic Exchange Program at a Canadian university. The participants wrote either an opinion task or a summary task at the beginning of the program using two preselected source texts. They then revised the drafts at the end of the program and were interviewed to comment on what they had learned about English writing during their study in Canada. Analyses of the interview data and comparisons of the original and the revised texts indicate that participants revised their drafts to use more words of their own and to follow the more direct English style and linear rhetoric pattern. The narrative of how these students adopted English writing conventions and their perceptions of whether they would continue to use them when they returned to Japan suggests an impact of English training not only on their English but also on their Japanese academic writing.