Global citizenship education concept in Malaysian Japanese language education / Noriko Matsubara

Noriko , Matsubara (2024) Global citizenship education concept in Malaysian Japanese language education / Noriko Matsubara. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

The world today has been facing issues that affect the entire world such as climate change, poverty, and hunger as well as current problems such as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the Ukraine-Russia crisis. These situations remind us of the necessity for all nations, people, and stakeholders to collaborate and work together across countries. Global Citizenship Education (Abbreviated as GCE or GCED, hereafter referred to as GCE in this paper) which aims to foster individuals who understand and contribute to resolving those issues increasingly began to gain more importance and became one of seven outcome targets of Sustainable Development Goal 4 “Quality Education" adopted by United Nations in 2015. This research focuses on the contribution of language education in promoting GCE in Malaysia. This study aims to explore how GCE is reflected in the Japanese language textbooks used in Malaysian secondary schools by analyzing the contents of Japanese language textbooks and identifying the perceptions of Japanese language teachers regarding their awareness of integrating GCE into Japanese language education. The researcher analyzed the textbooks by using content analysis based on UNESCO’s framework of the culture of 2030 indicators (UIS, 2020a) as well as conducted teachers’ perceptions analysis by using a questionnaire survey. The findings of textbooks’ contents analysis revealed that Malaysian Japanese language textbooks have relatively many contents that address GCE mainly with the theme of “Cultural Diversity and Tolerance”, but GCE themes such as “Gender Equality” and “Human Rights” were not found. Thus, more GCE themes should be considered to be included in the contents of future Japanese language textbooks to stimulate critical thinking and wider perspectives of the world among students through language learning. The survey results indicate that many teachers are aware of GCE, but there are gaps in their knowledge. The findings also revealed that although teachers' responses regarding the importance of GCE and incorporating GCE into their teaching were very positive, obstacles such as lack of clear guidance to teachers and lack of inclusion of GCE in the curriculum were identified. From these results, suggestions were drawn that all teachers should be given equal opportunities such as workshops to learn about GCE, and that GCE should be explicitly included in the curriculum. The present research will make a new contribution to incorporating GCE into language education since most researchers analyzed integrating GCE in English Language Teaching (ELT) with little attention paid to other languages such as Japanese language education. In addition, while previous studies focused on either textbook content analysis or language teachers' perceptions, this study employed a combination of the two analyses to give more practical insights into applying GCE in classrooms. This will help syllabus makers and textbook authors in the future when they consider incorporating GCE into language education.

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