ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at misunderstandings emanating from the level of deeply embedded ideologies regarding teaching and learning when two very different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, namely those of Japan and Britain, interact in higher education. It also looks at some Japanese proverbs for learning and teaching and explores how they both outline traditional structures of understanding and explain continuing patterns of contemporary behaviour. The chapter examines the apparent reluctance of the Japanese students to talk about their work as a pragmatic problem of elaboration and devised a discourse completion task (DCT) to investigate strategies of elaboration among Japanese and British students. It looks at underlying cultural values in educational ideologies as a source of explanation for socio-pragmatic misunderstanding in an intercultural tutorial context. Frameworks of understanding are ideologically entwined and teaching and learning is always to some extent teaching and learning ideologies.
