Transcultural Competence and Empathy in Language Education: Imagining the Unimaginable

The 2007 MLA report offered guidelines and competencies for foreign language majors at American universities in the age of globalization. The notion of translingual and transcultural competence suggests that today’s foreign language education is not merely a matter of language acquisition, but humanistic learning. The ultimate goal for foreign language learners should be to gain alternative ways of seeing the world, namely, “imagining the unimaginable” (Ozick, 1987). This underscores the central importance of empathy in foreign language education. Yet the true challenge lies in how to assess such an abstract concept. Even eighteen years since its initial publication, the report remains highly relevant, especially today, as we witness cultural, ideological, political and socio-economic divisions and the accompanying conflicts rooted in a failure to imagine the perspective of “others.” This paper explores a new approach to assessing learners’ transcultural competence, focusing on the role of empathy in understanding the cultural “other.” Discourse analyses of two student final papers were conducted and compared, drawing on poststructuralist theories and a sociolinguistic analytical framework. The results show that one student constructed an imagined Japanese “other” through a process of projection and initiated an empathetic dialogue beyond time and space, whereas the other inadvertently reproduced an Orientalist discourse by negatively stereotyping Japanese people, culture and society. This study advocates for discourse analysis as an effective formative tool for assessing and improving existing syllabi and curricula.