Speaker
Description
This study explores how intercultural understanding and practical language competencies emerge through dinner-table discourse in a short-term rural farm-stay in Akita, Japan. Drawing on an interactional-ecological and Communities of Practice perspective, it examines how international students, Japanese students, and host farmers co-construct meaning through cooking, serving, eating, and post-meal talk. Narrative interviews and questionnaires reveal shifting roles (mediator, apprentice, storyteller) and highlight how shared food practices foster belonging, collaboration, and real-world communicative competence.
Abstract
This paper examines how language and intercultural competencies are built through community participation in a short-term rural farm-stay program in Akita, Japan. Focusing on interactions among international students, Japanese students, and host farmers, we investigate how interculturality is co-constructed through shared cooking and dinner-table discourse. Adopting an interactional-ecological view of homestay learning, where participation and membership shape what counts as input (Greer & Wagner, 2023), we treat mealtimes as dense sites for observing real-world communicative competence in action.
We conceptualize mutual understanding not as an individual trait but as a relational achievement emerging through everyday domestic routines. Data include narrative interviews with international students (2024) and Japanese students (2025), complemented by multi-year questionnaires. Reported episodes of meal preparation, serving, eating, and post-dinner talk highlight how cooking activities foster apprenticeship-like collaboration, while dinner talk enables storytelling, evaluation, and spontaneous comparison of values, norms, and life histories. Across these moments, participant roles such as mediator, apprentice, and storyteller shift, revealing how learners develop competencies for negotiating meaning, coordinating action, and sustaining affiliation beyond classroom interaction.
By foregrounding host farmer agency and rural household rhythms, this study extends mealtime discourse research with a host-inclusive, community-embedded perspective (Kinginger et al., 2016). The findings suggest that even brief, well-designed community experiences can accelerate practical language and intercultural development, showing how shared food practices create inclusive communities of practice that rapidly foster belonging and communicative growth (Goldstein, 2022). Practical implications are discussed for designing short, community-based programs that translate participation into durable real-world competencies.
Special scheduling requests
Since I will be traveling far from Akita, I would appreciate it if you can schedule my presentation on Saturaday afternoon.
Keywords
Dinner-table discourse,
Communities of Practice,
Intercultural competence,
Community-based learning
Short summary
This study explores how intercultural understanding and practical language competencies emerge through dinner-table discourse in a short-term rural farm-stay in Akita, Japan. Drawing on an interactional-ecological and Communities of Practice perspective, it examines how international students, Japanese students, and host farmers co-construct meaning through cooking, serving, eating, and post-meal talk. Narrative interviews and questionnaires reveal shifting roles (mediator, apprentice, storyteller) and highlight how shared food practices foster belonging, collaboration, and real-world communicative competence.
References
Greer, T., & Wagner, J. (2023). The interactional ecology of homestay experiences. Second Language Research, 39(1), 85–113.
Goldstein, S. B. (2022). Short-term study abroad and intercultural competence: A systematic review. International Journal of Intercultural Relations.
Kang, H.-S., & Shively, R. L. (2024). Language-focused study abroad through an equity lens. Language Teaching, 57(3), 377–398.
Kinginger, C., Lee, S. H., Wu, Q., & Tan, D. (2016). Mealtime talk in short-term Chinese homestays. Applied Linguistics, 37(5), 716–740.
| Scheduling preference | Special request (enter below) |
|---|---|
| Title | Around the Table: Dinner-Table Discourse and the Building of Community |