This thesis project explored how study abroad program administrators can help Japanese students develop intercultural competence through predeparture and ongoing intercultural training so as to improve their capacity to adapt effectively to American cultural norms. The ultimate purpose of this thesis project was to help Japanese students who were studying in the U.S. balance their involvement with their peer group from Japan and build relationships with people in the U.S. in order to fully experience American culture. To provide a context for this study, a review of the literature was conducted regarding the challenges faced by Japanese students while studying in the United States. It also examined literature concerned with elements relevant to the experience of Japanese students as well as literature on the intercultural training that I put together at the end of this project; those elements included: cultural issues, intercultural competence, training design, transformative learning, and intercultural training. Interviews were conducted with international education professionals who work with Japanese students in study abroad programs to find out how their Japanese students adapted their Japanese cultural norms while in the U.S. Based on the literature, some existing intercultural training programs, and the interviews, I designed an intercultural training program for a group of Japanese students who will attend a ten-month study abroad program in the northwest part of the U.S. The training program includes the following elements: learning about ones own culture and other cultures, observing and experiencing switching cultural behaviors, and reflecting critically on the interactions with peer Japanese students as well as American students during the study abroad.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:05:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 3952.pdf: 2039842 bytes, checksum: 13562902fbbd07a996facebf66d35dd7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-10-21 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / In this research, we describe how common sense knowledge with machine translation can help the communication among people with different cultural background. In order to evaluate this possibility, we developed a bilingual chat called Culture-to-Chat or C2C that provides a communication channel and has resources that help its user to create messages in a second language. In the computer-mediated communication field, it is possible to notice that people are crossing geographic borders and having opportunities to share experiences among different cultures. Sharing information in a non native language can be difficult to some users. Some computational tools that support communication uses machine translation to aid users that need to work with different language. C2C also uses this approach and adopts a semantic network of cultural knowledge, collaboratively built on the Web through the Open Mind Common Sense in Brazil project (OMCS-Br) to work with cultural expression, in other words, terms whose meaning depends on user‟s culture. Following a user-centered design approach that focuses on prototyping, we present the development of C2C passing by low, middle and high fidelity prototypes. In order to observe how this computational tool is used and collect the opinion of target users, we perform a pilot study involving Brazilian and Canadian users. This study showed some enhancements for the tool and pointed evidences that this chat contributes to the communication between people with different cultural backgrounds. / Neste trabalho é descrito como o conhecimento de senso comum em conjunto com a tradução automática pode apoiar a comunicação entre pessoas de diferentes culturas. Para verificar a viabilidade do senso comum foi desenvolvido um chat bilíngue chamado Culture-to-Chat ou C2C, que, além de prover um canal de comunicação, possui mecanismos que auxiliam o usuário na criação de mensagens em língua estrangeira. No campo da comunicação mediada por computador, percebe-se que as pessoas estão cruzando as fronteiras geográficas e tendo oportunidades de troca de experiências entre diferentes culturas. Para alguns usuários, essa troca de informações é feita em uma língua não nativa, o que pode ser uma tarefa difícil para eles. Algumas ferramentas computacionais que apoiam a comunicação propõem o uso de tradução automática para trabalhar com usuários falantes de diferentes línguas. O C2C, além de adotar tal estratégia, adota a rede semântica de conhecimento cultural construida colaborativamente via Web do projeto Open Mind Common Sense no Brasil (OMCS-Br) para trabalhar com expressões culturais, ou seja, termos cujo significado depende da cultura do usuário. Utilizando uma abordagem centrada no usuário focando-se em prototipação, o desenvolvimento do C2C e suas funcionalidades são apresentados por meio de protótipos de diferentes níveis de fidelidade (baixa, média e alta). Com o intuito de observar o uso dessa ferramenta computacional e coletar opiniões de usuários, foi realizado um estudo piloto envolvendo usuários brasileiros e canadenses. Tal estudo mostrou possíveis melhorias pra a ferramenta e apontou indícios de que este chat contribui na comunicação entre pessoas de diferentes culturas.