In EFL contexts where students' chances to use English are limited to the classroom, minimizing their use of L1 to develop fluency in English is often encouraged in instruction. However, recent studies have reported that students' partial use of L1 in code-switching or translanguaging offers various pedagogical advantages. This research examines…

This study utilises comparative case studies of three Japanese third-culture kids (TCKs) living in Singapore aged 16, each from a different school type (international school, Japanese school, and local Singapore school). It explores if the home language, language used in school, language used in social circles, and language of media consumed of…

This article focuses upon the Japanese government's decision in 2009 to direct an 'English-only' strategy for English language education in senior high schools from 2013. In the "Course of Study 2009," and more recently again in the "Course of Study 2018," the Japanese government implicitly blames the local grammar-translation…

This study adds to the research on the education of Asian immigrant adolescents by situating how generation, language, nationality, and race complexly impacted how a group of 1.5-generation Japanese youth have made sense of their multiple "non-dominant" identities as immigrant Americans and transnational students within an urban high…

This qualitative study analyzes the use of translanguaging in co-learning activities involving four junior-one students in an English remedial class. The school advocates a policy of English immersion in the regular English class, although students may have difficulty understanding the teachers and interacting with them during the classes. In the…

In this article, a team of university-based researchers and ESL teachers describes how English learners in a high school responded to Poetry Inside Out -- a poetry -- and translation-based literacy curriculum.

Language immersion programs, which are a form of bilingual education, are shaped by multiple factors, including the specific characteristics of the region, the language, the community and the learners, as well as national and regional policies on language education. While the underdeveloped production skills of immersion students have been…

Though generally under-utilised in spoken English, the passive voice plays a crucial role in formal, written English (Biber et al., 1999). An understanding of how the passive voice operates in English writing is therefore a vital skill for EFL learners in secondary and higher education so that they may be able to both understand and produce fluent…

Translanguaging pedagogy offers a way to differentiate between students' varying linguistic repertoires when embedding an additional language across the curriculum. In this article I draw on positioning theory to show the relevance of teacher positioning to translanguaging pedagogy and differentiation. Differentiation is discussed in relation to…

Despite the social turn in views of language and the increasing attention to an application of genre theory in teaching languages, the field of Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language (JFL) has not yet found genre a valuable resource for approaching learners' writing ability. Writing is still practiced as a psycholinguistic space to check learners'…

In this study, we test the assimilation thesis by comparing the academic achievement between native students and first and second generation immigrant pupils. It is the first empirical study that systematically analyzes the native-immigrant achievement gap in Japan. Although numerous studies have examined the achievement gap, most of them are…

The papers in this volume offer a sampling of contemporary efforts to update the portrayal of study abroad in the applied linguistics literature through attention to its social and cultural aspects. The volume illustrates diversification of theory and method, refinement of approaches to social interactive language use, and expansion in the range…

Despite having studied English for some 33 months, the students at the private junior high school in Japan described in this paper had never before been asked to write original compositions in the language. The researchers undertook a quasi-experimental pilot study in which the 156 (n= 156) participants were each asked to write four compositions,…