留学生の生活指導相談 : 留学生担当教員と専門教育教員の課題

Discussion about foreign student a di vising in Japanese universities has mostly been concerned with the establishment and organization of the systems of services for foreign students in the universities: it has neglected discussion of how well the system has functioned.

One of the reasons this system malfunctions is due to the lack of communication or meaningful conversation between and among the faculty who work with foreign students in the different sections in a university, that is faculty who are affiliated with the foreign students' education section as well as the academics who are mainly engaged in professional education in the different academic fields in the university.

Using three case studies of foreign student advising the author in this paper outlines the possibilities and limitations of both academic faculty and faculty specializing in the education of foreign students specifically. These faculty include foreign students advisors, counselors, and teachers of Japanese as a second language. In addition, the author raises the issue of advising foreign students from a new perspective and proposes a way of solving some of the problems in this area and pointing toward future directions.

Three cases are used to examplify the differences in the relationship between foreign students and faculty in the context of foreign student advising.

In the first two cases, this author was acting as a member of the foreign student education faculty; in the third case, the author interacted with a student as an academic faculty member. Reactions of the students varied depending on my faculty role, even though I tried to take the same approach to the students in all three cases.

Compared to the first two cases, the third case indicates the extreme difficulty of intervening in a student's crisis management. A foreign student who seeks a degree or admission to graduate school often feels very threatened by the academic faculty who assess and evaluate his or her academic competency. A student's academic evaluation is very significant for foreign students' academic futures. Foreign students consequently find it very difficult with to seek help academic faculty when they are faced difficulties.

In foreign student advising there is no doubt that all the faculty must be accessible to their foreign students on campus so that both academic faculty and foreign student faculty need to suppliment with each others' possibility and limitation due to their vocational role limitation, and should cooperate with each other. At the same time, it is also significant for them (both academic faculty and foreign student faculty) to educate both domestic and foreign students, so that all the students (both domestic and foreign students) will also be able to function as the transcultural mediators. While academic faculty are more accessible to domestic students, foreign students' educators (including Japanese language teachers and faculty in foreign students' education centers) are more accessible to foreign students. Thus each type of faculty member has to utilize more fully their advantages when educating any students assigned to them, and to expect that each faculty member, regardless of type perform their role to the best of their ability.

The author sees the following points are important as of utmost importance in order to improve the quality of foreign student advising.
(1) Personnel for the foreign students service section must be reconsidered. Simply hiring young, uninterested and untrained graduate school graduates will not provide professional staff.
(2) In the field of Teaching Japanese as a Second Language, the professionals must realize the importance of developing their trainees' competency as transcultural mediators, and emphasize the nurturance of competency in teacher training as well as in-service education.
(3) Open discussion by all faculty across different sections in an university must be held. Especially the communication gap between and among the faculty across sections must be established or restored in order to realize meaningful understanding and exchanges in transcultural education.