“Making It Your Own by Adapting It to What’s Important to You”: Plurilingual Critical Literacies to Promote L2 Japanese Users’ Sense of Ownership of Japanese

Abstract

The increasing mobility and visible multilingualism of society today make ownership of any named language a matter of contention. Yet the dichotomy between native speaker and non-native speaker remains ubiquitous across different language learning contexts. L2 Japanese learners in particular may find themselves positioned as subordinate to native speakers because of the myth of Japan being a homogenous nation of one race and one language. To help L2 Japanese students counter such positioning, we implemented "plurilingual critical literacies"-a plurilingual approach informed by critical literacy-in a Japanese language course at a U.S. college. Critical literacy aims to cultivate students' awareness that power relationships are implicated in language use, and plurilingual pedagogy valorizes students' multilingual resources. We argue that this combined approach can potentially help students gain a sense of ownership of language, which is a crucial component of language learning.Eleven high intermediate-level Japanese students of mixed cultural background participated. They read and discussed authentic texts by transcultural or "culturally mobile" writers (Dagnino 2015), examining how the transcultural writers expressed resistance to the status quo and made meaning creatively, as mediators between two languages/cultures. Students mobilized their linguistic and cultural resources in their discussions and textual analysis. We found that reading, analyzing, and discussing texts by transcultural writers motivated students to counter ideologies of native versus non-native speaker, and to own Japanese in the ways that best suit their transcultural identities.

A tale of two language ideologies: Discursive co‐construction of L2 learner identity in Japanese CMC interactions

“…The issue of the native speaker standard in L2 Japanese is further complicated by competing for local ideologies. Among Japanese people, the Japanese language is widely viewed as being essentially tied to a Japanese identity, and it is assumed that foreigners should not be able to speak Japanese (Burgess, 2012; Iwasaki & Kumagai, 2019). Hashimoto et al (2018a) and Hashimoto (2018b) argues that this concept of language ownership is closely tied to values of group membership in Japanese culture, reflecting a long‐perpetuated, sociohistorically constructed dichotomy of Japanese people versus “the Other.” Indeed, Rivers (2018) claims that the idea of an apposing “foreign native speaker” has contributed toward notions of a “homogeneous Japanese speech community” and language ownership (p. 36).…”