Award Winners for Volume 19
Concept Collapse of “Active Learning” in Japan: Mixed Analysis of Newspaper Articles
This study examines the concept of “active learning” in Japan. We explore the context in which useful and comprehensive concepts are replaced with subordinate concepts, called narrow interpretation. The concept of “active learning” collapsed in 2016 and was replaced by its subordinate concepts in Japanese educational curriculum. This study used newspaper articles as data, logistic regression analysis to consider the top thirty-five words, and a qualitative classification process to analyze the discourse associated with the narrow interpretation of active learning. We observed that “Japan” and “oneself” were associated with the narrow interpretation of “active learning” and were analyzed contexts where they were used qualitatively. Moreover, we found that the contexts of overgeneralization and synecdoche (a kind of figure of speech) affected narrow interpretation. This conclusion suggests that further research should be conducted to investigate the trends and patterns beyond 2017, including the period of decline, and explore potential strategies to ensure the continued relevance of important concepts.
This research is highly relevant to the field of language education, as it highlights the dangers of adopting foreign concepts without a deep understanding of their meaning. It examines how “active learning,” introduced from the U.S. to Japan, lost its original depth and was reduced to a superficial interpretation. This phenomenon is especially concerning in language education, where accurate comprehension of concepts and terminology is crucial for effective teaching and learning.
The study serves as a critical reminder that language education is not just about adopting new methods or borrowing terms but about fully understanding their academic foundations. The careless use of loanwords without grasping their original meaning can lead to misinterpretations that weaken pedagogical effectiveness. By emphasizing the importance of preserving conceptual integrity, this research provides valuable insights for educators and policymakers. It advocates for a more thoughtful and academically grounded approach to integrating foreign educational practices, ensuring that language learners benefit from truly effective methodologies.
This paper also makes an important contribution to the field of educational research more broadly. It revealed that the term “active learning” used in Japan had contained a narrower meaning than originally intended, leading to a corruption of its conceptual integrity. Furthermore, this distortion occurred at a very early stage of its introduction. This finding exemplifies how Japanese educators tend to use foreign concepts superficially, without sufficient analysis. Although this study is based on quantitative methods, it also underscores the importance of qualitative approaches—such as conceptual history and pedagogical theory—when educational ideas are transferred across national or linguistic boundaries.
Methodologically, this paper distinguishes itself by going beyond typical descriptive text mining techniques. While previous studies often focus on word frequency or co-occurrence networks, this research employs logistic regression to make statistical inferences, allowing for an explanatory understanding of relationships between variables. Specifically, it models the appropriateness of how “active learning” is defined in newspaper articles as the dependent variable, using the presence of specific words as predictors. Moreover, recognizing that text mining can strip away context, the study returns to the original text for qualitative analysis—a mixed-methods approach that grounds computational findings in interpretive depth.
—Ryo Onozuka, Mika Igarashi, and Yoshihiro Hara