Article Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "pk": 41209,
    "title": "Transcultural Competence and Empathy in Language Education: Imagining the Unimaginable",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "<p>The 2007 MLA report offered guidelines and competencies for foreign language majors at American universities in the age of globalization. The notion of translingual and transcultural competence suggests that today’s foreign language education is not merely a matter of language acquisition, but humanistic learning. The ultimate goal for foreign language learners should be to gain alternative ways of seeing the world, namely, “imagining the unimaginable” (Ozick, 1987). This underscores the central importance of empathy in foreign language education. Yet the true challenge lies in how to assess such an abstract concept. Even eighteen years since its initial publication, the report remains highly relevant, especially today, as we witness cultural, ideological, political and socio-economic divisions and the accompanying conflicts rooted in a failure to imagine the perspective of “others.” </p>\n<p>This paper explores a new approach to assessing learners’ transcultural competence, focusing on the role of empathy in understanding the cultural “other.” Discourse analyses of two student final papers were conducted and compared, drawing on poststructuralist theories and a sociolinguistic analytical framework. The results show that one student constructed an imagined Japanese “other” through a process of projection and initiated an empathetic dialogue beyond time and space, whereas the other inadvertently reproduced an Orientalist discourse by negatively stereotyping Japanese people, culture and society. This study advocates for discourse analysis as an effective formative tool for assessing and improving existing syllabi and curricula.  </p>",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives  4.0",
        "short_name": "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0",
        "text": "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\r\n\r\nNoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.",
        "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0"
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Empathy"
        },
        {
            "word": "discourse analysis"
        },
        {
            "word": "transcultural competence"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Article",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xq5q7sh",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Michiko",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Uryu",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "San Jose State University",
            "department": "World Languages & Literatures"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2025-01-15T17:07:56.105000-08:00",
    "date_accepted": "2025-06-16T07:40:29.120000-07:00",
    "date_published": "2025-09-15T15:04:00-07:00",
    "render_galley": {
        "label": "Final Galley 092025",
        "type": "pdf",
        "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/l2/article/41209/galley/39479/download/"
    },
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "Galley v1",
            "type": "other",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/l2/article/41209/galley/36968/download/"
        },
        {
            "label": "Final Galley",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/l2/article/41209/galley/38777/download/"
        },
        {
            "label": "Final Galley 092025",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/l2/article/41209/galley/39479/download/"
        }
    ]
}