Institute of Arts and Sciences, Noda Division

This paper draws on a thematic discourse analysis of the written accounts about “English” produced by 32 Japanese college students. A constructionist psychological framework is used to explore the intermediary function of language in the construction of language attitudes. The study investigates how the respondents construct their multiple different attitudes as they interact with the social meanings and representations of the global language and the cultural context which reconstitute these representations. It is evidenced that the respondents’ language attitudes are occasioned in the social and political parameters of the cultural context of which they are a part. The respondents’ positions in this cultural context, their past, present, and future images of self, and their alignment with socially induced ways of thinking about English together exert influences on language attitudes construction. The paper shows the immense complexity of the contestation processes between language learners’ attitudes and the rapidly changing social climate in and around Japan.

Language policy often dictates a collective identity of a nation. The aim of the study is to understand the ways in which people perform the nationhood ideology in identity construction as regards language policy. The article explores the construction of attitudes and identity amidst the local and global flows of English. The data were produced as expository essays by Japanese university students. Discursive psychology was used to analyse the data. The finding suggests the policy and popular discourses on English do interact with each other, while people actively exercising agency in constructing their identity. The article closes noting the popular discourse evinces the sign of emergent postnational consciousness within a nation-state society.

This mixed-methods inquiry begins with the supposition that students' choice of tertiary subject area and their former school experience might attract those with similar individual traits, including beliefs about second language (L2) learning. This study aims to explore the latent factorial structure of language learning beliefs of 253 engineering students in Japan, using Sakui and Gaies' Beliefs about Language Learning Questionnaire (Sakui & Gaies, 1999). The students' beliefs were organized into a five-factor structure and differed according to their school career. The results were different from earlier studies that involved non-engineering undergraduates in Japan and suggest that the organization of these engineering majors' L2 learning beliefs differs significantly from that of non-engineering majors. However, a qualitative interview revealed that two individuals from within the same university discipline can have contrasting learning beliefs. The findings suggest that it is necessary to raise foreign language teachers' awareness of the ways in which L2 learning beliefs can influence students' learning behaviours and preferred learning styles.

The aim of this study was to understand adult learners' strategy use in foreign language learning. It also explored how such strategy use relates to learners' sense of self-efficacy, self-regulated learning, and language proficiency. Two questionnaires were administered to obtain data from 90 education majors in a Japanese university. Differences in strategy use in relation to self-efficacy, self-regulatedness, and proficiency were examined using Kruskal-Wallis H tests. Whilst some preferred and less preferred strategy items were identified, the findings suggested that possession of a high self-efficacy profile and self-regulatedness related to both greater use of language learning strategies and a higher level of language proficiency. However, a closer look detected a nuanced, important difference in the magnitude of the effect, whereby self-regulatedness may be more yielding than self-efficacy. Namely, self-regulatedness played a substantial role in differentiating use of several strategy items among different proficiency groups, whereas self-efficacy seems to play a smaller part than self-regulatedness in this respect, considering the effect sizes. Thus, this empirical study contributes to the ongoing discussion of the different roles and nature of the self-efficacy and self-regulatedness constructs in the context of language learning and teaching. Implications for language teaching are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.