This study explores a Japanese-Korean-English trilingual Asian-American child's identity negotiation in a multicultural book club. Drawing upon the conception of "figured world" (Holland et al. 1998. "Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds." Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), it investigates how the book club as "a…

To have a better understanding of the sociolinguistic surroundings of Japanese Brazilians as return migrants in Japan, this study investigates language use in their communities from a perspective of linguistic landscape (LL), paying particular attention to their ethnic identity as to how they are viewed by the host society, including language…

The study examined the role of Chinese-Japanese cognate awareness in Japanese vocabulary acquisition among college Chinese learners of Japanese. Thirty-seven college-level students participated in this study and they completed a bilingual cognate awareness test which covered both crosslinguistic similarities and differences. In addition,…

Most L1 (first language) Japanese speakers in Japan seem to think that they are monolingual. While it appears that Japanese people accept monolingual-ness as normative in the nation, there is little situated understanding of what makes up this Japanese monolingual-ness. This study reports on repeated, long, and mostly unstructured interviews with…

This study investigates the language learning experiences of a migrant child in an underprivileged migrant-marriage family in Japan through narrative inquiry. Data were collected over the course of a year through a migrant child survey, reflective journals and interviews with the migrant child and his mother, homeroom teacher and tutor to…

This paper compares direct measures of content knowledge for students studying Chemistry through English Medium Instruction (EMI) and Japanese Medium Instruction (JMI). It also examines a range of contextual differences between the two mediums of instruction. A total of 53 undergraduate students undertook pre-post course content tests at a…

The choice of language for publishing is a topic of particular significance for scholars of languages other than English (LOTE) due to the importance of publishing in the professional language for maintaining expertise in the written academic register of the respective language. While the multilingual ability of such scholars means they can…

This article presents the results of a small-scale study on the linguistic landscape in the two terminals of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Thirty-one digital photos of non-identical signs out of a total of 368 'top-down' signs identified in the public space were collected, and questionnaires were administered to airport users to gauge…

Drawing on data from a longitudinal linguistic ethnographic study of a trilingual (English, Japanese, Spanish) family in Australia, this paper suggests that rather than looking at their language use in terms of family language policy, better insights can be gained by exploring the translingual family repertoire. This repertoire is a central…

Language choices in the economic field of late capitalist societies are shaped by a combination of local, national, and global forces as well as historical, political, and economic factors. This study conducts an analysis of language choices in the linguistic landscape of Macao's heritage tourism (i.e. signposts of tourist attractions) and gaming…

Based on the dynamic and emerging nature of language aptitude, the paper reports an empirical study investigating the relationship between multilingual learning experiences and language aptitude through comparative analyses of language aptitude between second language (L2) and third language (L3) learners. Eighty-seven Chinese students who majored…

Fluent speakers of a target language choosing to enrol in beginner-level courses at tertiary institutes could be considered unfair. In this paper, however, based on data obtained from in-depth qualitative interviews with 12 students at a Hong Kong university, we show that fluent speakers of Japanese -- a widely-spoken foreign language in Hong Kong…

This paper examines the motivations of Chinese learners of Japanese across three different grades through Elicited Metaphor Analysis and semi-structured interview. Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3 Japanese majors (55 in total) in a Chinese university were asked to produce metaphors that reflected their motivations to learn Japanese. The metaphor data…

Informed by Dörnyei's L2 Motivational Self System and intended to fill a gap in learning motivation research on languages other than English (LOTEs), this study investigated learners' motivation for three language clusters -- Southeast Asian (Vietnamese, Thai and Malay), Northeast Asian (Japanese and Korean) and European (German, Spanish and…

To understand long-term motivations for second language (L2) learning/socialisation, this study analyses the biographical narratives of 30 Hong Kong Chinese who are proficient in Japanese by using ethnographic interviews. From a situated learning perspective, our research findings originate in the participants' transformational episodes and centre…