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Ideological Becoming Through Study Abroad: Multilingual Japanese Students in Turkey

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Abstract

Against the background of the current expansion in study abroad identity scholarship, this paper is situated within research on non-Western students enrolled in study abroad programs based in non-Western countries. Focusing on multilingual Japanese undergraduates who studied in Turkey for a year and returned home 3-4 years ago as highly advanced speakers of Turkish. We present findings from face-to-face interviews with 25 former study abroad students, and were audio-recorded and transcribed. Focusing on the Bakhtinian concept of ideological becoming that students experience as a result of their sojourn, we investigate how it is constructed across the three languages in the students' repertoires that are in play in their study abroad experiences: Japanese, Turkish, and English. Our findings demonstrate that ideological becoming in the case of study abroad students concerns multiple languages in which students take active roles drawing on various timescales of their sojourn experience.

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... Japanese learners' attitudes towards study abroad (SA) have also been described negatively and attributed to their self-perceived linguistic difficulty and foreign language anxiety. They have also been characterised as having inward-looking attitudes towards learning English (British Council, 2014;Erduyan, Bazar, 2022). Students' lack of oral participation in L2 interaction has also been considered a persistent issue, specifically in overseas SA contexts, where Japanese students are perceived as withdrawn from oral participation (Takahashi, 2021). ...
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... This variation may reflect the different attitudes of Chinese culture and British culture to death and soul, and some deep philosophical thoughts and attitudes towards life. (Ping) Furthermore, in alignment with previous research in study abroad experiences for students (Badwan & Simpson, 2022;Cai et al., 2022;Erduyan & Murat Bozer, 2022), teachers' language ideology underwent a transformation because of their exposure to this study abroad educational context. Specifically, some of them revised their perspectives on accents and varieties of the English language. ...
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Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil provides a critical overview and original sociolinguistic analysis of the African American experience in second language learning. More broadly, this book introduces the idea of second language learning as “transformative socialization”: how learners, instructors, and their communities shape new communicative selves as they collaboratively construct and negotiate race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social class identities. Uju Anya’s study follows African American college students learning Portuguese in Afro-Brazilian communities, and their journeys in learning to do and speak blackness in Brazil. Video-recorded interactions, student journals, interviews, and writing assignments show how multiple intersecting identities are enacted and challenged in second language learning. Thematic, critical, and conversation analyses describe ways black Americans learn to speak their material, ideological, and symbolic selves in Portuguese and how linguistic action reproduces or resists power and inequity. The book addresses key questions on how learners can authentically and effectively participate in classrooms and target language communities to show that black students’ racialized identities and investments in these communities greatly influence their success in second language learning and how successful others perceive them to be.
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This is an ambitious work, covering the whole breadth of the field from its theoretical underpinnings to research and teaching methodology. The Editors have managed to recruit a stellar panel of contributors, resulting in the kind of 'all you ever wanted to know about instructed SLA' collection that should be found on the shelves of every good library. " Zoltán Dörnyei, University of Nottingham, UK The Routledge Handbook of Instructed Second Language Acquisition is the first collection of state-of-the-art papers pertaining to Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA). Written by 45 world-renowned experts, the entries are full-length articles detailing pertinent issues with up-to-date references. Each chapter serves three purposes: (1) provide a review of current literature and discussions of cutting edge issues; (2) share the authors' understanding of, and approaches to, the issues; and (3) provide direct links between research and practice. In short, based on the chapters in this handbook, ISLA has attained a level of theoretical and methodological maturity that provides a solid foundation for future empirical and pedagogical discovery. This handbook is the ideal resource for researchers, graduate students, upper-level undergraduate students, teachers, and teacher-educators who are interested in second language learning and teaching.
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Book
Study abroad is often seen as a crucial dimension of language learning - developing communicative proficiency, language awareness, and intercultural competence. The author provides an overview and assessment of research on language learning in study abroad settings, reviewing the advantages and constraints of perspectives adopted in this research.
Book
This book brings together three important areas in language teaching and learning research by exploring the impact of study abroad on student’s second language identities through narrative research. © Phil Benson, Gary Barkhuizen, Peter Bodycott and Jill Brown 2013. All rights reserved.