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…

In this paper, through a personal narrative discourse, I explore the influence and the contribution of my cross-cultural study experience in China on my development as a young researcher. Through the Chinese academic culture, I learned some best practices that I consider essential for the blossoming and development of a student. Nonetheless, I…

This study utilises the 'small story' approach to investigate metaphor in mobile students' narratives of intercultural experience. Metaphor in narrative is seen as a dynamic, discursive, and sociocognitive phenomenon. The narrative accounts presented in this paper derive from interviews conducted for mobility project evaluation. The participants…

This narrative inquiry highlights the experiences of three high school students labeled Long-term English learners (LTEL) in a North Texas high school. This narrative inquiry study uses semi-structured interviews to restory the students' lives, emphasizing the emergent themes of family (the strongest pillar) and the language of the home (Spanish).…

This narrative inquiry examines why a well-respected English as a Second Language teacher quit teaching in an urban middle school in advance of her retirement. The work provides interpretive accounts of what attracted the teacher to start teaching ESL, what caused her to stay in the profession and the circumstances that drove her to quit. In the…

This study delineates two Taiwanese TESOL teachers' efforts of combining English writing with entrepreneurship education to cultivate English majors' interdisciplinary competence in academic writing classes. An integrated business-and-writing approach was proposed to foster English majors' academic writing skills and entrepreneurial capacities. In…

Sociolinguists have recently employed the notion of spatiotemporal scales to explain the changing social status of linguistic codes across social and geopolitical domains. Scales enable us to address the portability of semiotic resources in migration with great insight. In addition, unlike romanticized orientations to globalization and…

This paper forms part of a wider research project which examines how the Kantian concept of "Mundigkeit" or "maturity" may be represented in subjective accounts of language learning, known as "language learner narratives". It is shown that the metaphors used in these texts frequently do not so much represent congenial relations of hospitality…

While knowledge of what constitutes fluent speech has developed over the past several decades, it is still unclear how language teachers can facilitate its acquisition by second language learners. Fluency is generally accepted as being a function of temporal variables of speech such as rate of speaking and the number of words or syllables uttered…

In a case study, I applied philosophical hermeneutic principles in an advanced level EFL writing class in Taiwan. A "fusion of horizons" occurs at the junction of two intertwined interpretations: one from our socio-historical tradition and the other from our experience of novel phenomena. I explored students' hermeneutic horizons in…