This study empirically investigated the invisibility, or symbolic annihilation, in Japanese English education of social groups at risk of marginalization. To do so, I assembled a corpus of 3746 English teaching materials selected because they involved world social group representation and because they were disseminated through the JET Program, a…

Increasing linguistic and cultural diversity has led to an increased need for plurilingual pedagogy in the language classroom. This study expands the scope of the existing literature on plurilingual pedagogy in a different context: a Japanese language classroom at an English-medium instruction (EMI) university in Japan. It focuses on students'…

This mixed-methods study explored the effects of employing a genre-based approach (GBA) to descriptive report writing on the understanding of text structure and ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings among Japanese university students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) over a 15-week course divided into three units. Applied within a…

Addressing the root cause of Japanese higher education problems, the present literature-based study explores Japanese higher education's power relationship with one of the most influential stakeholders, the business world. It first draws attention to the incongruity between the business enterprises' proclaimed struggle with the securement of human…

Teaching styles in science and engineering instruction were compared by analysing corpora of transcripts of lectures delivered in English and Japanese at leading universities in the United States and Japan, respectively. Our findings were compatible with cultural differences related to power distance and field dependence, which have been reported…

The current study had two objectives: (a) to quantitatively investigate whether Japanese language learners of English have inclusive second language (L2) self-related motivations, and how inclusive L2 self-related motivations contribute to English learning effort and self-rated English ability, and (b) to qualitatively examine how Japanese…

Internationalisation is a polyvalent policy discourse, saturated in conceptual and ideological ambiguity. It is an assemblage of commodification, exploitation and opportunity and is a container for multiple aspirations, anxieties, and affordances. It combines modernisation, detraditionalisation, and expansiveness, with knowledge capitalism,…

Sociolinguistic and sociocultural features of the source language can be ideally transferred to the target language when the translator's cultural background knowledge has a high overlap with the source language culture. This signifies the crucial role of national cultural distance from the source language society in the quality of translation of…

The 22nd EUROCALL conference was held at the University of Padova from the 26th to the 29th of August 2015, the first time that EUROCALL has been held in Italy. The event was organized in collaboration with the University Language Centre and the support of the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies. Over 300 delegates…

This article examines a case of what Olssen et al. (2004) call "managerial oppression" set in a faculty of international studies of a Japanese university. Japanese universities have, in recent times, been facing the financial pressures of a falling birthrate and dwindling enrolments. To remain solvent, some universities have had to…

The pursuit of higher education has become increasingly popular among students of many different backgrounds and cultures. As these students embark on higher learning, it is imperative for educators and universities to be culturally sensitive to their differing individualities. "Student Culture and Identity in Higher Education" is an…

This paper examines student-faculty communication by email and the lack of clear guidelines that leads to misuse of email in student-faculty interaction, whereby status-incongruent pragmatic markers are employed, resulting in impoliteness and inappropriateness. The main objective is to bridge the gap in research on other than requestive speech…

There has been a widespread belief that teachers in Asian contexts including Japan and China are well protected by a tradition that reveres teachers. However, in Chinese contexts, cultural traditions have been found to undermine the teaching profession, together with educational reforms and societal changes. This paper reports on an inquiry that…

In Japan critical views of the dominance of English are only infrequently voiced, and the use of English is promoted for the benefits associated with it. This paper discusses the issues of language and power in intercultural communication on the basis of a case study on the Ship for World Youth, an intensive "international exchange"…

Traditionally, the goal of foreign language education has been to teach learners linguistic and cultural knowledge so that they could function successfully in the target language and cultural environment. But does demonstrating knowledge always help learners accomplish their interactional goals? To explore this question, this study investigate…