Abstract
This is an introductory chapter to this book, which aims to explore English as a lingua franca (ELF) phenomenon in Japanese contexts from the perspectives of multilingualism. This chapter first provides a brief history of ELF research, and a recent shift in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics research from monolingual norms to multilingual norms where translanguaging and transcultural practices are ordinary. Sociocultural rationales of Japanese society are also described: that is becoming multilingual and multicultural by the force of the current globalisation. The chapter then reviews latest studies of ELF interactions in multilingual contexts by summarising key concepts found in descriptive research on ELF and discusses what ELF research from multilingual perspectives can offer to change the monolingual mindset, which is still prevalent in Japanese society. The chapter ends with an overview of existing ELF research in Japanese contexts and a preview of the contributions to this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
People from China (28.1%), South Korea (17.2%), and Vietnam (11.1%) consist of more than fifty per cent of the foreign residents as of the end of June 2018 (MOJ, 2018).
- 2.
The two top countries which international students come from are China (38.4%) and Vietnam (24.2%) as of January 2018 (JASSO, 2018).
- 3.
The VOICE corpus includes transcribed ELF interactions in social, academic, business/workplace settings in Austrian contexts, in which not only Austrian and other European people but also Asian people are included.
- 4.
Pitzl (2018) argues that the concepts like CoPs (Wenger, 1998) and TIGs are more appropriate to capture the socially dynamic nature of ELF because they transcend geographical boundaries that speech communities presuppose and take long-term or transient language contact situations into consideration (see also Seidlhofer, 2011; Widdowson, 2015).
- 5.
Considering this point, the term ENL per se is problematic because its use can result in promoting the concept even if it is unintentional. A scare quote, therefore, will be added to the term and the like wherever it is used throughout the volume.
- 6.
Seargeant (2013) points out that “[t]he ideology of monolingualism informing the concept of native speaker is … historically specific to societies where ideas of linguistic homogeneity have been promoted, usually part of the nation-building process” (p. 237).
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Konakahara, M., Tsuchiya, K. (2020). Introduction: English as a Lingua Franca in Japan—Towards Multilingual Practices. In: Konakahara, M., Tsuchiya, K. (eds) English as a Lingua Franca in Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33288-4_1
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