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…

This book explores alternative approaches to foreign language education in a context which is traditionally dominated by English-only approaches, and widely viewed as highly monolingual. It examines the grassroots classroom practices of teachers and their assistants involved in plurilingual education in the first longitudinal research of its type…

Interpretive frameworks may be helpful to understand narratives, yet they also risk displacing unique information of the research context. In this paper, we argue that such is the case in narrative inquiry studies of English language teaching set in the Asian context, perhaps due to the pressure to use familiar interpretive frameworks that are…

The Purpose: The purpose of this study is to take a fresh look at language education from the perspective of positive communication (PC) as it contributes to the well--being of language learners. It explores a context that has received little attention: older learners. The lessons drawn from older learners can help practitioners in other contexts…

This paper reports on the narrative of Shannon, a Taiwanese Canadian female assistant language teacher (ALT) of the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, one of the world's largest government-sponsored programmes for recruiting English language teachers to teach overseas [Nagatomo (2016). "Identity, gender and teaching English in…

This paper examines how fleeting experiences exert a disproportionately powerful effect on the language learning motivation and behavior of university students. A thematic analysis of interview data is used to show how "significant incidents" have two principal consequences. The first, "anagnorisis," is an immediate, revelatory…

Recently, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has produced several internationalisation policies to develop their notion of "guroubaru-jinzai" (global human resources). However, a lack of clear direction regarding theories and approaches about how to achieve these initiatives has created a…

This article utilizes an autoethnographic story-telling perspective in which I situate myself as a critical participant observer. Through critiquing the "situatedness of the self and others" in context, I share a selection of narrative snapshots concerning place and positionality as a white male native speaker of English (i.e. an…

In the Japanese English education system, a distinct disconnect exists between the elementary and secondary education curricula. Elementary schools across Japan offer English classes, but adjusting to junior high English classes is often difficult for students. While the Japanese government reformed junior high school tests to aid student…

With the growth of English worldwide there have been numerous calls for a paradigm shift from teaching English as foreign language to teaching English as an international language (EIL). While there is a growing body of conceptual literature for teaching EIL, the voices of teachers remain severely underrepresented in this movement. As such,…

Translingual practice is an emergent theoretical perspective which emphasizes the capacity and disposition for meaning-making across linguistic boundaries. Following on studies of globalized workplaces that have focused on lingua franca English, this article explores translingual practice as represented in interview and blog narratives recounted…

This study is a qualitative inquiry of eight mid-career second language (L2) teachers' identity evolution. These teachers have or had full-time or tenured teaching experience in secondary schools in Japan. Since they were mid- and later career teachers, they have explored their development, what they are now, and why they keep growing.They have…

In this interview study involving the analysis of narratives collected from Japanese American professionals teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) who have lived more than ten years in Japan, I focus on how the participants negotiated their often contested identities in the TESOL context in Japan. I use the notion of identity…

The present study explores how scholars working in the field of applied linguistics, language policy and language education might best contest and negotiate the increasingly economics-driven language polices enacted at the institutional levels of schools and workplaces. The study focuses on Japan as an interesting case of incongruence between…

There has been an upsurge of interest in teaching second/foreign language (L2) pragmatics in recent years, but much of this effort has been targeted at adult learners. This article introduces small-scale informal instruction exploring the pragmatic development of 9-year-olds in Tokyo, facilitated through dialogic intervention on pragmatics using…