Preface
Some research projects are carefully planned in advance. Others are more serendipitous and grow out of a culmination of circumstances. The project described in this book was of this latter kind, so it is perhaps worth explaining this here before setting it in the broader contexts of previous research and the educational and cultural context as I do in the body of the book itself. The impetus to explore what I call the “translingual identities” of language learners as they emerge in the narrative learning history peer interviews of a class of Japanese students began both as a next step to a project described in a previous book concerned with local and foreign language teachers in Japan. It also offered an opportunity for me to get deeper into the experiences of a specific class of learners that interested me at the time who also happened to be taking an English based course focused on educational issues.
After writing my first book Narrative identity in English language teaching (Kiernan 2010), in which many of the teachers talked about experiences of learning languages, it occurred to me that a relevant follow-up would be to focus on the experience of learners, particularly those in Japanese classrooms. The idea was to change perspective and instead of exploring the experience of teachers and teaching to investigate the experience of those on the other side of the desks: the students. Taking the role of the interviewer myself seemed to work for me in the context of the first project because I myself was a teacher. However, for a project focusing
on learner identities it seemed more appropriate to work with studentstudent interviews. This was not because I thought that doing so would eliminate the influence of the researcher on the data (and aspects of researcher/teacher impact on this interview is explored in this book) but I did believe that it would allow the learners themselves more opportunity to shape the focus of the interviews as well as an opportunity to share and reflect on their educational experiences. As it was, the Japanese university students who took part in this study were taking an English medium course in educational issues at the time, making it a relevant educational as well as research exercise.
Transcribed audio recordings (originally tape recordings) still seemed to me the obvious way to conduct research interviews at the time I began my study of teachers, in 2002. By the time this project was envisaged in 2009, though, video and digital media were already widely used in the classroom and a video project whereby learners within the same class interviewed each other seemed a much more suitable way to go. I was also fortunate in having video cameras available through the media centre at the university where I worked at the time and media staff willing to coordinate the project. This also meant that the approach to narrative analysis proposed in the book for dealing with audio data needed to be reformulated to account for the multimodal dimensions of communication available in video data.
It is perhaps shameful to admit it but over the course of a teaching career, memories of classes and students can begin to fade, and a class from one year may even seem to blur into another as all those names and faces, if not mentally shredded at the end of the year, are filed away in less easily accessible corners of the mind, so that only the most meaningful relationships or special classes really stand out. This book, in a sense, is the story of one particularly memorable class that attracted my attention in the first place because they did not fit the stereotype of obedient but unresponsive students typically found in university English classes in Japan. Instead, the students were highly communicative both with me and among themselves. Not only did I get live direct feedback on the class but, when watching video clips, they openly laughed or exclaimed at the events depicted. The class was a refreshing change. Moreover, they were interesting to me because they seemed to represent what a successful
freshman class of university learners of English as a foreign language in Japan could look like. On the one hand they proved to be skilled at key tasks such as the challenge of academic writing in English, engaging in class discussions and preparing and giving presentations, and indeed conducting the interviews discussed in this book. At the same time, and also referenced throughout the interviews, they became a vibrant community of learners whose identity was intimately linked to what, for want of a better term, I call a shared translingual experience. This experience was generally, though not always, interrelated with the transcultural experience of growing up in more than one country. But the range of translingual experience discussed here spans a range from those who spent most of their childhood moving between or among countries to those who grew up with English in Japan. Teaching a course on Educational Issues to them turned into an opportunity to have them share and reflect on these experiences, while also allowing me to learn more about them. It is these experiences and how to frame and learn from them that is the focus of this book.
The project was therefore one that was very much about my current teaching context of university students in Japan at that time. As such, it seemed rather ironic that I should actually come to be writing up this project while on study leave as a visitor to University of Birmingham in the UK, far away from this context. Ever the procrastinator, I even considered postponing the writing until I got back, perhaps only the publisher’s deadline prevented me. However, as it turned out, the stories of these students’ experiences of growing up and acquiring English across cultures and languages took on a new relevance to my family and myself. My two children, Leon (10–12) and Emma (8–10), who accompanied me during the two-year visit went through their own translingual experiences of overcoming the barriers of language and communication presented by life in the UK. To a lesser extent, so too did my wife who had studied and lived abroad for extended periods already, but nevertheless built new kinds of social networks, chiefly among other overseas visitors and those who welcomed them as well as among my family and friends. For me too, living in the UK as a middle-aged returnee having spent half my life in Japan immersed in Japanese language and culture impressed on me my own sense of translingual identity. For all of us but particularly the
children, there was a sense of continually negotiating a sense of identity still connected to Japan but increasingly immersed in the challenges of life and language in the UK. As such, listening to the stories of my students in Japan, I was also provided with some useful reflections as a parent on translingual experience and encouraging stories to share with my children.
I hope that the personal serendipity of this project nevertheless means that the stories and approach to exploring them described in this book will also be relevant to readers in their own teaching or translingual contexts and perhaps even lead to the development of similar projects focused on the narrative exploration of translingual identity.
Tokyo, Japan
Patrick Kiernan
1
Introduction
Aiko: On school property, you can’t speak any Japanese. And like when you are at that age, you don’t want to stick with the rules, you just want to break the rules so, I was kind of naughty.
Yoko: (laughs)
Aiko: That’s why, um I’d speak English in front of my teachers, then spoke Japanese outside. Like, you know, while they’re not watching. So, like my English was kind of Japanese mixed English. So like…
Yoko: So international, so international. (both laugh)
Aiko: What are you doing kyo mitai na [like today], kyo [today] what are you doing? (both laugh) Just one word’s like Japanese, and then my mum, I didn’t even realise, I was speaking it. Like, “That’s so omoshiroi [interesting].” Omoshiroi desu ne mitai na [like, that’s so interesting]. I thought it was, and apparently, it was really weird, listening to it so my mum told me “Oh, my god, Aiko you speak weird language!”
Yoko: (laughs)
© The Author(s) 2019
P. Kiernan, Learner Narratives of Translingual Identities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95438-7_1
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Aiko was recounting her experience of attending an English-based international elementary school in Japan. This short extract illustrates how her use of Japanese and English was a focus for evoking her childhood identity. She framed her use of Japanese as “naughty” and naughtiness itself as a natural childish reaction to the English only rule imposed on her by her school. However, her story also shows how this childish act of independence leads her unconsciously into an apparently deviant habit which even her own mother, who gave birth to her in the US so that she would be able to grow up with dual nationality, regarded as “weird.” She suggested that she acquired an unconscious habit of mixing Japanese and English, a practice referred to by linguists as codeswitching (Nishimura 1995, 1997), code-mixing (Muysken 2004), or the term most closely associated with the focus of this book: translanguaging (Canagarajah 2011; García and Li 2013). These would not be terms known to the students themselves even though the practice was one which I believe resonated deeply with the sense of personal identity that Aiko and her classmates shared.
To Yoko, the classmate and friend who was interviewing Aiko, this practice was “so international” but also funny. Part of the reason she probably regards it as funny is because she recognized it as an unconventional but familiar practice that she shared with Aiko because, like her, Yoko spent her childhood between schools in Japan and overseas. For such people, practices like translanguaging are not simply a mode of communication made possible by knowing two languages but are intimately related to who they are. Practices such as translanguaging reflect a sense of identity they share in contrast to the majority of students at their university. This turned out to be an experience and sense of identity that was also shared in various ways by all of the students in their freshman English class and this book is about that experience which I call translingual identity.
An abstract conception such as translingual identity is inevitably a messy phenomenon to describe, especially when attempting to do so in relation to the specific narratives and words of actual people in a context as specific as the interview quoted above. Nevertheless, at the risk of initial over-simplification, in order to develop as clear a definition of translingual identity as possible, I will try to situate the approach taken in this
book in relation to some relevant parameters. While there are numerous potential dimensions of identity, three clines that are appropriate for situating the study described in this book would be what might be called the psychological-sociological cline; the essentialist-transient cline; and the individual-community cline. At the extremes of the psychological-sociological cline would be (at the psychological end) an account of identity as a product of the mind and (at the sociological end) a socially determined account of identity. Likewise, the essentialist-transient cline would have hypothetical extremes whereby identity was (at the essentialist end) viewed as permanent unchanging sense of self, and (at the transient end) as something in a constant state of flux. Finally, the individual-community cline would be concerned with identity understood as a property of individuals versus identity in relation to communities. Having posited these three dimensions and their extremes as a heuristic, we can then broadly differentiate approaches and trends describing identity by mapping them in relation to these three clines. So, for example, Marxism could be positioned as an account of identity which was sociologically and community oriented and towards an essentialist account of identity; Erik Erikson’s (1980) account of the way identity changes over the course of a life time could be located as individual and psychologically oriented, while emphasizing an essentialist core that focuses on a specific dimension of transience—the transformation of aging; and Zymunt Bauman’s (2005; Bauman et al. 2011) notion of liquid identity is one that is explicitly transient but concerned with individual identity from a sociological perspective.
This book explores identity as it is evoked in individual narratives in the ongoing talk and semiotic context of video recorded student interviews which are concerned with their life histories. This approach means that I inevitably engage with some broad spans along these spectrums. So the interview focuses on an individual life story of the interviewee but also reveals something of the experience of the interviewer and is implicitly connected to shared points of reference with the class as a whole. Hence this study is concerned with exploring identity both as an individual phenomena and as one connected to the intimate community of a class. This study draws primarily on sociolinguistic resources such as Halliday’s (2003a; Halliday and Matthiessen 1999) Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL), which is sociological in orientation, linked for example to Bernstein’s (2000) code theory through Ruquia Hasan’s (2005) work on language and society. Yet, through the narratives the learners also illustrate how their experiences have impacted their psychology, particularly their sense of self. Finally, while the topic of the interviews is concerned with a developing sense of personal identity and so overlaps, in some sense with Erikson’s (1980) idea of life stages, the interviews and the approach to analysis is focused on identity as it is evoked through the transient medium of spoken language. Perhaps the best way to reconcile such conflicting notions of translingual identity is to suggest visualizing the speech act as the stone hitting the pond, creating ripples which spread out in the minds of the speakers and potentially beyond, in this case, potentially extended to the readers of this book.
This book is, therefore, about translingual identity as explored through narratives of language learning histories—in this case those of a class of Japanese freshman university students. Translingual identity is used in this book to refer to the positionings of those who, like the students in this class, grew up between two or more languages, often, though not necessarily, as a result of spending periods of their childhood overseas. One of the aims of this book is therefore to map these interrelated experiences of translingual identity onto a continuum from those in the earlier stages of developing a sense of translingual identity through to those most confident and/or ambitious in their translingual aspirations. A continuum might be envisaged, for example, ranging from a hypothetical monolingual/monocultural non-translingualism towards a bilingual/ bicultural or multilingual/multicultural ambi-translingualism (see Fig. 1.1).
One advantage of focusing on a continuum to describe the range of experiences within this class is the implication that, while the translingual identities of the participants in this study are, in many ways, remarkable
1.1 A continuum of translingual identity
Fig.
and special they are also potentially linked to the experiences of other students in Japan, and indeed elsewhere. Such identities may also anticipate the kind of identities we may expect to see more of in the future as globalism increasingly pervades people’s lives (Grunitzky 2004). In contrast to studies that have highlighted the uniqueness of returnees (Kanno 2003) or children of mixed parentage (Kamada 2009) or the transformative experiences of study abroad students (Benson et al. 2013; Kinginger 2004; Jackson 2008), this book highlights what such individuals have in common—also the key components of their community identity for the class explored here—and how their identities potentially form a continuum with other forms of translingual identity emerging in the context of increasing globalization.
The idea of exploring a continuum of experience is not a new one and a range of cultural or linguistic experience is often represented as describable on some kind of scale. Kanno (2003), for example, represented her study participants as growing up between Japanese and an English culture and with a language bias towards one or the other which over their development into early adulthood gradually balanced out. This is certainly an enticing idea and depicts an enviable path towards a balanced bilingualism and biculturalism that is exemplified by Kanno herself, among many others researching in this area (see also Miyahara 2015). However, this enticing view of an inevitable growth towards linguistic equilibrium in later life at the end of all the struggles seems far from what I am used to seeing in Japanese classrooms, where many students who have had some overseas experience are far off attaining such a balance. Indeed, while growing up as a more or less balanced bilingual may be natural and inevitable in some contexts, this is considerably harder for Japanese learners of English in Japan. In this book though, I consider students along a broader range of a spectrum of translingual experience in order to better understand how childhood experiences may be seen as formative of translingual abilities and impact on a sense of identity. Besides the exploration of translingual identities, this book has a methodological focus. It is also about an approach to exploring learner histories through video recordings of peer interviews. With this in mind, it outlines and illustrates an approach to analyzing such interviews which draws on Hallidean Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL)
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(Halliday 2003b) to consider the interviews from the three complimentary perspectives (known as metafunctions) of ideational, interpersonal and textual resources. The ideational encompasses the meaning content of the interviews as it relates to the world—in this case, the experiences described by the participants, including the life story and identities evoked by both interviewer and interviewee. It also describes the logical rationalization of these experiences. The interpersonal is concerned with the relationships that are established in the interview including between interviewer and interviewee but also the evaluation of (and hence attitudes towards) other people, events and phenomena. Finally, the textual dimension focuses on the way that the interview itself is structured. It highlights the language used to organize the interview itself such as the question and answer format, the sequencing of the questions, the structuring of narratives, ordering of information and indeed the framing of the interaction as an interview, among others. In addition, since the video interview is a multimodal text that shows much more than a written interview transcript, I propose a way in which the non-verbal meaning making resources of gesture, facial expression and proxemics can be described as integral resources in this context. This approach is suggested as a way to build a more broad-based semiotic approach to the narrative analysis of video interviews that adds greater contextualization to the investigation of social and educational issues through narrative interviews. Finally, this book addresses issues in education. It is particularly concerned with language learning in Japan as the context of these interviews and the specific issues raised in the interviews but they are concerns which also have relevance elsewhere, both in neighboring East Asian countries and in English Foreign Language (EFL) learning contexts around the world where translingual identity is a potentially valuable personal resource.
The project that is the focus of this book was conceived of as both a research project and an educational out-of-class exercise which allowed participants to reflect on educational experiences as well as providing a challenging task to stretch their use of English. I therefore consider some of the many student perspectives on language learning and Japanese education that arose in their interviews. Their views on everything from grammar teaching, to how to combat language attrition, to the merits of
study abroad and many other concerns converge towards a consensus that is nevertheless a fresh outlook when compared with the views on such issues espoused by teachers, researchers, administrators and policy makers.
The educational perspective also considers the value of this project or the use of similar narrative and reflective practices within education both in terms of promoting language use, particularly self-expression in foreign language contexts and as a way to reflectively engage deeper motivations for learning a foreign language and indeed building a sense of translingual identity.
Why Translingualism and What Is It?
I use translingualism as an alternative to, but also in contrast to both bilingualism and transculturalism. Since my concern here is with the narratives or people who have grown up with more than one language, it is concerned with experiences of bilingualism—the ability to use two or more languages. Bilingualism is therefore an important concern here that is worth briefly mentioning both as it relates to the subject of this book and in so far as it can be seen to overlap with translingualism. Similarly, while this book is primarily concerned with investigating language, translingualism also overlaps with notions of transculturalism.
The most often quoted definitions of bilingualism appealed to notions of an ideal cognitive or functional language competence that resonates with lay usage (at least in Japan) as an ideal rather than a reality. However, such exclusive definitions have also been counterbalanced by broader definitions which embrace a cline of language abilities. Leonard Bloomfield’s “native-like control of two or more languages” (1933, 56); Maximilian Braun’s “active and passive comprehensive proficiency of two or more languages” (1937, 111 quoted in Hufeisen and Jessner 2009, 113); or Oestreicher’s “complete mastery of different languages without interference between the two language processes” (Oestreicher 1974, 9 quoted in Skutnabb Kangus 1981, 81) set a high bar for bilingualism which even in the context of more liberal definitions of native-speakerism would seem to depict an ideal target rather than descriptive reality. Some
of the students in this class could, relatively speaking, be described as approaching this ideal and certainly for them such definitions of their long-term language goals seem relevant, but for most such a definition would seem to undermine their remarkable command of languages compared with their peers. Skuttnabb-Kangus has suggested that a continuum of bilingualism may be a valuable heuristic according to which as she puts it:
It should be possible to accommodate …[bilinguals] at points extending from the moment of an individual’s first contact with a word in a foreign language to a state of complete bilingualism, if it exists. (Skutnabb-Kangus 1981, 82)
Even if “complete bilingualism” is a theoretical ideal that is as impossible in practice as Chomsky’s (1965, 1) “ideal speaker-listener,” in a “completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly” and broader definitions of bilingualism that embrace the “incipient bilingualism” of early encounters with a foreign language (Diebold 1964) or “receptive bilingualism” of those in the early stages of understanding a foreign language and even extensions to multiple competencies within a single language such as the social code switching observed by Gumperz (1971) are so vague that they embrace all language users, the spectrum between these extremes is a potentially useful heuristic. After all, language development and therefore teaching and learning take place along this cline and so it should arguably be of more interest to educators than a theoretical endpoint goal beyond which no progress can be made. Skutnabb-Kangus (1981) explained that she fashioned her own definition of bilingualism to fit with her specific concern with the development and maintenance of the languages spoken by immigrants. She wrote of “the sociocultural demands made of an individual’s communicative and cognitive competence by the communities or by herself.” (1981, 86), a criterion which, while subjective is relevant to the kind of narrative exploration of language learning experience undertaken in this book.
Accordingly, rather than attempt a competence-oriented definition of translingualism, this book, which explores the much narrower range of translingualism represented by the study participants, highlights an experience
which is both about the movement between and across languages and cultures but also potentially falling between them. This involves the blending of languages through practices such translanguaging (Canagarajah 2011; García and Li 2013) and the merging of identities into hybrids (Kamada 2009) or third places (Papastergiadis 1999, 94) that challenge positionings that attempt to marginalize, or discriminate against them. Indeed, it is such practices that have led to more transient post-structuralist notions of identity as something evoked through discourse (Block 2007). Nevertheless, the continuum of translingualism explored in this book is also intended to be one which rather than merely separating and celebrating the identities of returnees, those with dual-nationality parents or even overseas students as unique and different from other students is intended to highlight a realm of experience that is potentially relevant to a much broader range of bilingual or translingual people in Japan and elsewhere today.
Translingualism implies not so much mastery of two languages as the idea of being able to traverse or move between languages. In preferring translingualism as a more suitable term to frame the experiences described here, I follow Alastair Pennycook (2008) who has suggested it as an alternative to bilingualism which moves beyond nationalist conceptions of language to embrace concepts such as “transcultural flows” (Pennycook 2007), and the embracing of “hybrid identities” or “metroethnicity” (Maher 2005). Such concepts are more relevant to the identities explored in this book than traditional bilingualism. Those who grew up between Japan and other countries or with parents of different nationalities indeed could be said to have hybrid identities (Kamada 2009) that are intimately related to their use of language which is more fluidly integrated than “bilingual” may imply. Pennycook (2007) explored how hip-hop, a musical genre developed in the US, emerged in new localized forms around the world. Likewise, Maher (2005) proposed that for Japanese youth, ethnicities have been absorbed into a Metroethnicity whereby, while respected, ethnicities have become identities for play involving “cultural crossings, self-definition, made up of borrowing and do-it-yourself, a sfumato of blurred ethnic ‘identities’” (Maher 2005, 83). More generally, projects focused on the use of language in contemporary global urban environments have shown that translingual mixing and blending of languages available to users is an increasingly normal way to communicate,
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meaning that national languages and identities may be bypassed by local contextual needs (Block 2006).
A number of researchers have drawn attention to fact that the results of such macro-processes as immigration or more generally globalization have given rise to the increasingly complex multilingual environments. These environments are discussed in terms of superdiversity (Blommaert 2013) and metrolingualism (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015), but explored from the bottom up, as it were, through linguistic ethnographies (Copland and Shaw 2015; Copland and Creese 2015) which highlight the ways in which languages, landscapes and identities are used as fluid resources in day-to-day communication. Such bottom-up ethnographic observational and descriptive accounts of translingual practice not only consider a very different form of data from the formalized interview project discussed in this book, (not least because the interviews were supposed to have been conducted in English!) but also employ very different analytical frameworks indicative of a different approach. Despite this, in practice, these interviews take place in temporal and physical spaces that are only barely separated from the fluid translingual space of the university and the ongoing lives of the students themselves. The multimodal approach to exploring these interviews may therefore be seen as a way to situate interviews within an urban landscape which encompasses educational institutions, practices and communities. Although the study described here is quite unlike these ethnographic studies in so far as it is not so much going out into the city to observe language in the wild, and instead uses a more conventional sociological tool of narrative interviews, it also brings ethnographic sensibilities through the use of a linguistic and multimodal framework of analysis. The student interviews, in other words, are treated as social and semiotic events worthy of investigation in their own right. The analytical approach taken here means that the interviews are not simply trawled for relevant content but are deconstructed as sociosemiotic texts.
Pennycook and Otsuji (2015), posit a metrolingualism which, in contrast to Blommaert’s macro account of superdiversity in cosmopolitan centres, they argue, offers a bottom-up perspective on the way both language and the associated spaces and identities are translingual in an everyday sense (2015, 33–34). This fluid focus on traversing and moving
between languages is more in harmony with my observations in this book of the (multiple) identity positionings shared by the learners discussed in this book. The narratives discussed here reveal a range of translingual abilities and experiences which are also subject to such things as the framing of the interview. The idea of multiple positionings itself while deriving from Haré and colleagues (Harré and Langenhove 1999; Harré and Moghaddam 2003) is explored here through a linguistic discourse analysis derived from SFL (Martin and Rose 2003, 2008).
Translingualism potentially draws on associations accumulated with other “trans” words such as “transport” moving something from place to place; “translation” moving between languages; or “transcend” moving to a higher level. Translingualism is also closely associated with translanguaging—the blending of languages. Translanguaging is a practice through which translingual identity is evoked even in these interviews ostensibly conducted in English. These associations with moving between and blending of languages seem particularly well suited to the learning histories discussed here, many of which concern childhoods characterized by moving between countries and with it, languages and cultures (Yamada 2002). As such, transculturalism embraces meanings which are useful here, such as the idea of being able to move between cultures and an identity positioning which in many of the narratives do indeed span cultures.
Transculturalism also embraces identities that may not fully belong to either, existing in a third space between cultures. However, my interest here is more in language specifically than culture in general, particularly as the third space of the university class which these narrators shared was explicitly one which spanned Japanese and English.
Translingual Identity in Japan
The specific context for the study described in this book is the language learning life narratives of a class of undergraduate freshman students of business at a university in Tokyo who were taking a course in Educational Issues as part of their freshman English requirements. The class was chosen because it was one whose individual members had grown up with
English and Japanese (and in some cases other languages). It was particularly appropriate that they should be studying educational issues as a key element of their shared experience. I believe that one thing that made them bond as a class was that they had all experienced being on the edge of a culture, struggling to integrate with inadequate resources, and often being misunderstood or discriminated against as a result. By contrast, in this class, they found a community where they belonged. Beyond a shared empathy for the experience of overcoming the cultural and linguistic barriers of living overseas, however, they also shared the experience of a self that had grown up between or across languages. In other words, a part of what defined them both individually and as class was their translingual identities.
The stories of these students overlap with the kind of learner histories that have been reported in previous research into language and identity, particularly in relation to Japanese returnees or kikokushijou (Pang 2009; Sueda 2014) and children of mixed parents known as hafu or doubles (Kameda 2009; Okamura 2017) but also includes a broad range of educational experiences in Japan and overseas. This spectrum of experience helps to bridge the gap between the studies of returnees and those concerned with English as a foreign language education in Japan (Goto Butler 2005; Hood 2001; McVeigh 2002), or the growing body of literature concerned with the impact of study abroad programs (Benson et al. 2013; Iwasaki 2008). Focusing on a complete class also makes it possible to explore the university classroom as a community, allowing for consideration of both community and individual narrative identity and how they intersect.
The experiences of translingual identity discussed in this book are different from translingualism in countries such as Canagarajah’s home of Sri Lanka, or for that matter Singapore, Malaysia or India where the use of more than one language is well established. In such multilingual countries, speaking more than one language is integral both to education and society and therefore normal. In contrast, in Japan, the only language besides Japanese of real importance is English which is taught as a foreign language at school but does not have any official status. Unfortunately, despite regular publications of guidelines from the Japanese ministry of education (MEXT 2007, 2011; Toyama 2003) espousing the importance
of communicative English education, English generally continues to be taught as an academic (rather than practical) subject focused on the kind of pedagogic grammar that can be easily tested in university entrance exams. As a result, fluency in languages other than Japanese tends to be limited to immigrant populations or a kind of translingual elite who learn English or other languages as a result of parents who either bring their families with them during extended postings overseas or make deliberate educational choices (including sending their children to schools overseas) to ensure that they learn English. It is this translingual elite which is the focus of the study described here.
In the context of university students in Japan, the students discussed in this book are privileged in so far as they were attending a prestigious private university. This privileged status might be contrasted with the multilingualism of immigrant children who acquired other languages “for free” rather than through attending expensive schools at home and abroad. Nevertheless, I use the term elite not to suggest that these students were children of a global elite or potential heirs to positions of global dominance but rather, they were designated as elite language learners within their context since they were assigned to the highest level English class at the university.
As noted above, for educators working in the classroom, the interview project described here might also be viewed as an educational project in itself. The analysis provides insights into how the project was undertaken and negotiated in accordance with the abilities of the learners. Although there is not space here to evaluate the project as an educational exercise within a task-based framework (Kiernan 2005; Gray 2017), I have included some discussion of this pedagogic role in the conclusion. Suggestions are provided for how such tasks can be used as a way of building oral narrative competence and providing an opportunity to reflect on learning experiences.
Finally, this book is intended as a student focused perspective on English education to complement my earlier study (Kiernan 2010) or others like it (Stewart 2006; Nagatomo 2012, 2016) which focused on the narrative accounts of teachers within the Japanese education system. The shift in focus meant that it seemed preferable to peer interviews, rather than ones conducted by myself as a teacher researching teachers,
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