Membership in an Imagined Home Community and Stance Toward English among University Students in Japan

ABSTRACT

This article was prompted by my experience teaching a Japanese university English course in which students journaled about their English learning. In doing so, they drew heavily upon perceived membership in an imagined community associated with being Japanese as a means to explain their relationship with English. Analyzing this body of students’ work, I tease out important aspects of selfhood meaningful to these individuals in understanding their stance toward English. These include being a speaker of the Japanese language, a resident of Japan, a stakeholder in the Japanese nation-state, a student in Japanese formal education, and a guardian of Japanese culture. While much scholarship has considered the imagined community associated with the target language, this study highlights the importance of an imagined “home” community for language learning. These findings shed light upon relationships among identity, the role of imagined communities for language learners, ideology, and Japanese English education.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical applied linguistics
• EFL
• English education
• identity
• imagined communities
• Japan
• language and ideology
• language and society
• Nihonjinron

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Since it is understood that these excerpts represent learner language, I refrain from the use of [sic] to denote deviations from mainstream English conventions.

2. A Japanese-language phonetic writing system.