Standardizing Ethics East and West

A basic element that separates primates from Homo sapiens is language, which serves as a socializing catalyst for interpersonal and intercultural communication. Linguistic rules can be regarded as the ethics of communication. Without such rules, encoding and decoding of communication between a speaker/writer and a listener/reader would be impossible. Etiquette and the social emotion of shame, which have dissimilar connotations in Confucian heritage cultures of the East and Socratic or Judeo-Christian cultures of the West, are examples of moral qualities having different attributes and applications for diverse peoples. Whereas distinctive societies, cultures, and civilizations define morality based on their particular history and culture, including religion, humans everywhere are the same. Thus, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 Social Contract, the current reality of globalization requires a cultural contract that harmonizes the morals and ethics of Eastern and Western civilizations.

Standardizing Ethics East and West

A basic element that separates primates from us Homo sapiens is language, which serves as a socializing catalyst for interpersonal and intercultural communication. Linguistic rules can be regarded as the ethics of communication. Without such rules, encoding and decoding of communication between a speaker/writer and a listener/reader would be impossible. Etiquette and the social emotion of shame, which have dissimilar connotations in Confucian heritage cultures of the East and Socratic or Judeo-Christian cultures of the West, are examples of moral qualities having different attributes and applications for diverse peoples. Whereas distinctive societies, cultures, and civilizations define morality based on their particular history and culture, including religion, humans everywhere are the same. Thus, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 Social Contract, the current reality of globalization requires a cultural contract that harmonizes the morals and ethics of Eastern and Western civilizations.

Learning-Oriented Assessment in a Testing-Oriented Culture

The last decade has witnessed increasing attention being paid to the way in which assessment promotes learning in various cultural contexts. Even so, there has been very little scholarly discussion coming from Japan, where it appears that methods of assessment are oriented around high-stakes summative testing. One theoretical model of formative assessment that is gaining traction worldwide is learning-oriented assessment (LOA). Although LOA has been tried and tested in the Hong Kong context for implementation in Confucian heritage cultures, its suitability for Japan has not yet been explored. There are three core components of LOA praxis: learning-oriented assessment tasks, developing evaluative expertise, and student engagement with feedback. The aim of the present study is to apply this theoretical model of learning-oriented assessment as a conceptual lens to examine existing research from the Japanese context. By doing so, it is hoped that a firm contextual grounding could be established that would support and guide the practice of learning-oriented assessment in EFL education in Japan. 近年、様々な文化的文脈の中で、評価がいかに学習を促進するかに注目が集まってきている。しかし総括的評価と一発試験が重要視されている日本では、評価をめぐる学術的論議は極めて少ない。世界で普及しつつある形成的評価の理論モデルの1つに、学習重視の評価learning-oriented assessment (LOA) がある。LOA は、儒教の伝統文化圏では香港での導入が試みられているが、日本での適合性については未だ検証されていない。LOAの実践には3つの重要な要素がある。すなわち、学習重視の評価タスク、評価能力の向上、そしてフィードバックに対する学生の関心である。本論の目的は、既存研究を日本の状況から検証するための統合的手法としてLOAの理論モデルを適用することである。それによって、日本の評価方法の背景が明確になり、日本のEFL教育におけるLOAの応用が推進される。