Improving Study Abroad Programs for Japanese University Students : Partner University and Student Perspectives

Study abroad (SA) programs benefit participants’ personal growth but also present challenges as students adapt to new sociocultural contexts (Allen & Ramonda, 2023). Successful pre-departure preparation is essential to provide students with the academic, cultural and emotional foundations (Humphreys & Baker, 2021). Moreover, host university SA managers and coordinators play critical roles in facilitating successful sojourns, but their voices are underrepresented in the literature (Allen, 2023). To fill this gap, the authors surveyed 28 mobility staff from seven countries, asking how the SA experience can be improved for Japanese students, and triangulated their data with responses from 105 English majors who sojourned in 2023. Results highlighted that, although Kansai University Faculty of Foreign Language Studies (KUFFLS) students are comparatively well-prepared for their SA experience, four main themes arose from the coordinators related to preparation, student empowerment, acculturation and extracurricular integration. While student responses generally affirmed the partner universities’ positive observations about their preparedness, they also highlighted challenges related to differing expectations of student independence, cultural nuances, and integrating extracurricular activities with academic demands. These results suggest that before SA, home and host universities should cooperate in developing realistic student expectations about their independence, cultural differences and extracurricular engagement