The present article reports on a comparative study of foreign language learning objectives pursued by secondary school learners in Japan and the United States based on a survey conducted in Global Partnership Schools Project 2002, K-12 teacher exchanges built on existing relationships between teacher education programs in universities in Japan and the State of North Carolina, U.S. to identify and solve problems in school education. Through a comparative study of secondary school students' awareness of FL learning objectives in learning English and Japanese, several interesting similarities and differences were identified in terms of the learners' perspectives in the two cultures; for example, a sociocultural influence upon the way learners give priorities to their learning objectives. Consequently, it is hoped that these results will contribute to designing a learner-centered approach to language and culture teaching/learning in the foreign language classroom.