Short-term Study-Abroad Experience Reflected in Journals : A Quantitative Content Analysis

This paper reports on an exploratory study of 13 sophomore Japanese university students study-abroad journals that they wrote weekly during a six-week study abroad in the US.Our research questions focused on their lived experiences, as reflected in their journals, with particular emphasis on their journaling focus with respect to time sequence, English proficiency, and prior overseas experience.Quantitative content analysis, or text mining, was used to determine the characteristic words and frequency, co-occurrence network, and group discrimination within these participant journals.Ten topics emerged from the co-occurrence network and were categorized into three themes as follows: 1) being a student at an American university (tackling class assignments, difficulty of using English for study, class and instructors, size of university facilities), 2) encountering new cultures (attitudes of local people, new cultural experience, cultural awareness), and 3) turning anxiety into gratitude (anxiety, friends as external resources, gratitude for the studyabroad opportunity).Differences in journal entries by time sequence were also identified.