Most L1 (first language) Japanese speakers in Japan seem to think that they are monolingual. While it appears that Japanese people accept monolingual-ness as normative in the nation, there is little situated understanding of what makes up this Japanese monolingual-ness. This study reports on repeated, long, and mostly unstructured interviews with…

Many universities in non-English speaking countries have been adopting English as a medium of instruction to internationalize their education. We set out to compare the language policies of a Finnish and a Japanese university using the lens of language ideology -- a set of normative beliefs about the social dimension of language. Data were…

This study explores how Japanese EFL students engaged in translingual practices during a telecollaborative project that connected two college classrooms in the US and Japan. The project aimed at encouraging the students' creative uses of languages, promoting an appreciation for their multiple linguistic resources, and nurturing their sense of…

With the development of language corpora, linguists have been able to identify how often specific words, phrases, and expressions are used, and in which contexts. However, applications of corpora in the wider domain of language teaching have remained limited. This article presents an approach to utilizing corpora, combining principles from…

Addressing the root cause of Japanese higher education problems, the present literature-based study explores Japanese higher education's power relationship with one of the most influential stakeholders, the business world. It first draws attention to the incongruity between the business enterprises' proclaimed struggle with the securement of human…