Speaker
KEYWORDS
Agency
Ideologies
Japanese learning
Foreign English teachers
ABSTRACT
Recent research in Second Language Acquisition has called for an increased focus on the influence of context and ideologies on SLA (Douglas Fir Group 2016). Within Japan, ideologies about English learning bring foreign English teachers to Japan to teach English. This presentation examines how foreign English teachers exercise agency to step out of language ideologies in Japan when learning Japanese.
This presentation draws on narratives of language learning of newly arrived and long-term foreign English teachers in Japan. Nine newly arrived teachers participated in a 6-month diary study, while thirteen long-term teachers participated in two semi-structured interviews. Both data sets were analysed using NVivo separately before being merged at the final analysis stage.
Ideologies influenced how these teachers learned Japanese throughout their time in Japan. For both groups of teachers, the ecological influence of learning Japanese while working as an English teacher significantly influenced their language learning engagement. To step out of language ideologies and ecological influences in Japan, these teachers had to exercise agency about their language learning, the communities they socialised with and other aspects of their lives in Japan. This study shows agency is key to employment migrants learning the language of the countries they migrate to.
| TITLE | Exercising agency against language ideologies |
|---|---|
| RELEVANT SIG | Bilingualism |
| FORMAT | Research-oriented Oral Face-to-face presentation (25 minutes, including Q&A) |
