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 L E A R N E R N A R R AT I V E S O F
TRANSLINGUAL IDENTITIES

A M U LT I M O D A L A P P R O A C H T O E X P L O R I N G
LANGUAGE LEARNING HISTORIES

PAT R I C K K I E R N A N
Learner Narratives of Translingual Identities
 Patrick Kiernan

Learner Narratives of
Translingual
Identities
A Multimodal Approach to Exploring
Language Learning Histories
Patrick Kiernan
Kenkyuto
Meiji University
Tokyo, Japan

ISBN 978-3-319-95437-0    ISBN 978-3-319-95438-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95438-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951365

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

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 Preface

Some research projects are carefully planned in advance. Others are more
serendipitous and grow out of a culmination of circumstances. The proj-
ect described in this book was of this latter kind, so it is perhaps worth
explaining this here before setting it in the broader contexts of previous
research and the educational and cultural context as I do in the body of
the book itself. The impetus to explore what I call the “translingual iden-
tities” of language learners as they emerge in the narrative learning history
peer interviews of a class of Japanese students began both as a next step to
a project described in a previous book concerned with local and foreign
language teachers in Japan. It also offered an opportunity for me to get
deeper into the experiences of a specific class of learners that interested
me at the time who also happened to be taking an English based course
focused on educational issues.
After writing my first book Narrative identity in English language teach-
ing (Kiernan 2010), in which many of the teachers talked about experi-
ences of learning languages, it occurred to me that a relevant follow-up
would be to focus on the experience of learners, particularly those in
Japanese classrooms. The idea was to change perspective and instead of
exploring the experience of teachers and teaching to investigate the expe-
rience of those on the other side of the desks: the students. Taking the
role of the interviewer myself seemed to work for me in the context of the
first project because I myself was a teacher. However, for a project f­ ocusing
v
vi Preface

on learner identities it seemed more appropriate to work with student-­

student interviews. This was not because I thought that doing so would
eliminate the influence of the researcher on the data (and aspects of
researcher/teacher impact on this interview is explored in this book) but
I did believe that it would allow the learners themselves more opportu-
nity to shape the focus of the interviews as well as an opportunity to share
and reflect on their educational experiences. As it was, the Japanese uni-
versity students who took part in this study were taking an English
medium course in educational issues at the time, making it a relevant
educational as well as research exercise.
Transcribed audio recordings (originally tape recordings) still seemed
to me the obvious way to conduct research interviews at the time I began
my study of teachers, in 2002. By the time this project was envisaged in
2009, though, video and digital media were already widely used in the
classroom and a video project whereby learners within the same class
interviewed each other seemed a much more suitable way to go. I was also
fortunate in having video cameras available through the media centre at
the university where I worked at the time and media staff willing to coor-
dinate the project. This also meant that the approach to narrative analysis
proposed in the book for dealing with audio data needed to be reformu-
lated to account for the multimodal dimensions of communication avail-
able in video data.
It is perhaps shameful to admit it but over the course of a teaching
career, memories of classes and students can begin to fade, and a class
from one year may even seem to blur into another as all those names and
faces, if not mentally shredded at the end of the year, are filed away in less
easily accessible corners of the mind, so that only the most meaningful
relationships or special classes really stand out. This book, in a sense, is
the story of one particularly memorable class that attracted my attention
in the first place because they did not fit the stereotype of obedient but
unresponsive students typically found in university English classes in
Japan. Instead, the students were highly communicative both with me
and among themselves. Not only did I get live direct feedback on the
class but, when watching video clips, they openly laughed or exclaimed at
the events depicted. The class was a refreshing change. Moreover, they
were interesting to me because they seemed to represent what a successful
 Preface
   vii

freshman class of university learners of English as a foreign language in

Japan could look like. On the one hand they proved to be skilled at key
tasks such as the challenge of academic writing in English, engaging in
class discussions and preparing and giving presentations, and indeed con-
ducting the interviews discussed in this book. At the same time, and also
referenced throughout the interviews, they became a vibrant community
of learners whose identity was intimately linked to what, for want of a
better term, I call a shared translingual experience. This experience was
generally, though not always, interrelated with the transcultural experi-
ence of growing up in more than one country. But the range of translin-
gual experience discussed here spans a range from those who spent most
of their childhood moving between or among countries to those who
grew up with English in Japan. Teaching a course on Educational Issues
to them turned into an opportunity to have them share and reflect on
these experiences, while also allowing me to learn more about them. It is
these experiences and how to frame and learn from them that is the focus
of this book.
The project was therefore one that was very much about my current
teaching context of university students in Japan at that time. As such, it
seemed rather ironic that I should actually come to be writing up this
project while on study leave as a visitor to University of Birmingham in
the UK, far away from this context. Ever the procrastinator, I even con-
sidered postponing the writing until I got back, perhaps only the pub-
lisher’s deadline prevented me. However, as it turned out, the stories of
these students’ experiences of growing up and acquiring English across
cultures and languages took on a new relevance to my family and myself.
My two children, Leon (10–12) and Emma (8–10), who accompanied
me during the two-year visit went through their own translingual experi-
ences of overcoming the barriers of language and communication pre-
sented by life in the UK. To a lesser extent, so too did my wife who had
studied and lived abroad for extended periods already, but nevertheless
built new kinds of social networks, chiefly among other overseas visitors
and those who welcomed them as well as among my family and friends.
For me too, living in the UK as a middle-aged returnee having spent half
my life in Japan immersed in Japanese language and culture impressed on
me my own sense of translingual identity. For all of us but particularly the
viii Preface

children, there was a sense of continually negotiating a sense of identity

still connected to Japan but increasingly immersed in the challenges of
life and language in the UK. As such, listening to the stories of my stu-
dents in Japan, I was also provided with some useful reflections as a par-
ent on translingual experience and encouraging stories to share with my
children.
I hope that the personal serendipity of this project nevertheless means
that the stories and approach to exploring them described in this book
will also be relevant to readers in their own teaching or translingual con-
texts and perhaps even lead to the development of similar projects focused
on the narrative exploration of translingual identity.

Tokyo, Japan Patrick Kiernan

 A Note on Transcriptions

Throughout this book, transcriptions are included drawn from video

interviews among university students in Japan. The original transcrip-
tions where typed into NVivo, the tool which I used for analysis. NVivo
allows for the transcript to be synchronized with the video so that video
and transcript can be viewed simultaneously. This also means that, cod-
ing of the data was effectively applied to the video and transcript, rather
than the text alone. The transcript therefore focuses entirely on the verbal
mode and though it was intended to be a detailed transcription, includ-
ing things such as listener feedback (e.g. “Mm-hm”), I have stuck to writ-
ten conventions for ease of reading, and also to make it accessible to
readers from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds. Accordingly, I
depart from the practices of spoken discourse such as conversation analy-
sis which attempt to replicate such details as tone of voice, volume, speed
or other features which potentially change or disambiguate meanings on
the page. Where necessary, I have added supplementary information in
parentheses such as “(Laughs.)” Even so, the speech quoted in the tran-
scripts should be considered as a minimal representation and incomplete
record, which I have nevertheless attempted to supplement wherever pos-
sible in the discussions that accompany them. Unfortunately, I am not
able to share the actual videos (apart from limited segments in the con-
text of presentations) for reasons of privacy.

ix
x A Note on Transcriptions

For the sake of anonymity, pseudonyms are used in all quotations from
the data for all participants based on a random allocation of names. I
apologise in advance to the participants who doubtless feel that the names
I have given them are quite unsuitable. However, this step was necessary
to conform with general ethical concerns for privacy of participants in
academic and educational research. Other personal names used by the
participants are represented by a single capitalized letter to protect their
privacy. In addition, some place names have been omitted or changed to
keep things as confidential as possible. Since even these steps may not
make the participants completely unrecognisable, particularly to those
who know them well, I have avoided quoting some of the more sensitive
and personal topics discussed.
Where I have quoted extracts that included use of Japanese, the
Japanese has been represented in Romanised script followed by my trans-
lations [in square brackets]. Likewise, if an English word was deliberately
given a marked Japanese pronunciation as distinct from the speaker’s nor-
mal pronunciation of Japanese, I represented it according to Japanese
Romanisation with the English word following in square brackets.
 Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the help of a number of
key people. First and foremost, I would like to thank Rikkyo University
in Tokyo who employed me at the time of this project and also supported
me in undertaking the project. In particular, I owe thanks to Akiko
Kawasaki our English language program (ELP) director at the time. I
would also like to thank the media staff who coordinated the use of video
cameras with the students and produced both the DVDs I used for this
project and provided copies for the students to keep. No less important
are the students themselves who kindly agreed to participate in the proj-
ect as both an educational exercise and a research one. Finally, I also owe
a debt of thanks to Esme Chapman at Palgrave Macmillan who encour-
aged me to submit a proposal for this book and to Beth Farrow who acted
as my editor during the publication process, the anonymous reviewers,
and all the brilliant staff at Palgrave Macmillan who helped me shape this
book into a presentable form. With such wonderful support, any remain-
ing adequacies are entirely those of my own making.

xi
 Contents

1 Introduction   1

Part I Theoretical Concerns   29

2 Multimodal Resources in Face-to-Face Interviews  31

3 Three Perspectives on Gesture and Meaning  61

4 Ideational Meaning and the Experience of Translingual

Identity  89

5 Community, Identity and Interpersonal Resources 117

6 Framing, Narrative and Textual Semiotic Resources 149

xiii
xiv Contents

Part II Learner Narratives of Translingual Identity 177

7 Aspiring Translinguals 179

8 Confident Translinguals 209

9 Translingual Heritage 231

Part III The Translingual Community 255

10 A Translingual Community of Practice 257

11 Lessons from a Successful Translingual Community 283

12 Conclusion 307

Appendix 1: Interview Task 315

Appendix 2: Questions Provided as a Guide to Interviewers 317

Index 321
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 A continuum of translingual identity 4

Fig. 2.1 Multimodal resources in the SFL framework 36
Fig. 3.1 A visual representation of the valley described by Chikako 64
Fig. 3.2 Sequence of gestures used during the valley anecdote (0–5) 67
Fig. 3.3 Sequence of gestures used during the valley anecdote (6–11) 68
Fig. 3.4 Sequence of gestures used during the valley anecdote (12–17) 69
Fig. 3.5 Sequence of gestures used during the valley anecdote (18–21) 70
Fig. 3.6 Ideational gestural resources in “the valley”. (*“world at hand”
and “world with in sight” are the categories used by Streeck
(2009) to distinguish between deictics used for visible held or
touchable close objects, and those physically close enough to
gesture towards but not to touch) 76
Fig. 4.1 Summary of ideational processes 93
Fig. 5.1 Physical positioning in the interview 125
Fig. 5.2 An continuum of interpersonal resources in face-to-face inter-
views128
Fig. 5.3 Overview of gestural interpersonal resources 145
Fig. 6.1 Interview structure mapped onto the Sinclair-Coulthard
(1992) rank scale 153
Fig. 6.2 Inform subcategories in the interviews 155
Fig. 6.3 Micro and macro narrative 163
Fig. 6.4 A summary of interview frames 168
Fig. 7.1 Proximal zones for aspirational translingual identities 192

xv
xvi List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 The structure of Yuri’s narrative of her IB experience 250

Fig. 10.1 A continuum of translingual development 265
Fig. 11.1 Task difficulty and student engagement. (Based on
Csikszentmihalyi 1992) 303
 List of Tables

Table 1.1 Overview of the interviews and participants  17

Table 4.1 An overview of ideational resources and narrative 94
Table 6.1 A summary of the biscuit eating 172
Table 8.1 A Summary of Yoko’s language learning history 216
Table 8.2 A summary of Osamu’s language learning history 221
Table 8.3 A summary of Aiko’s language learning history 224

xvii
 1
Introduction

Aiko: On school property, you can’t speak any Japanese. And like when
you are at that age, you don’t want to stick with the rules, you
just want to break the rules so, I was kind of naughty.
Yoko: (laughs)
Aiko: That’s why, um I’d speak English in front of my teachers, then
spoke Japanese outside. Like, you know, while they’re not watch-
ing. So, like my English was kind of Japanese mixed English. So
like…
Yoko: So international, so international. (both laugh)
Aiko: What are you doing kyo mitai na [like today], kyo [today] what
are you doing? (both laugh) Just one word’s like Japanese, and
then my mum, I didn’t even realise, I was speaking it. Like,
“That’s so omoshiroi [interesting].” Omoshiroi desu ne mitai na
[like, that’s so interesting]. I thought it was, and apparently, it
was really weird, listening to it so my mum told me “Oh, my
god, Aiko you speak weird language!”
Yoko: (laughs)

© The Author(s) 2019 1

P. Kiernan, Learner Narratives of Translingual Identities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95438-7_1
2 P. Kiernan

Aiko was recounting her experience of attending an English-based inter-

national elementary school in Japan. This short extract illustrates how her
use of Japanese and English was a focus for evoking her childhood iden-
tity. She framed her use of Japanese as “naughty” and naughtiness itself as
a natural childish reaction to the English only rule imposed on her by her
school. However, her story also shows how this childish act of indepen-
dence leads her unconsciously into an apparently deviant habit which
even her own mother, who gave birth to her in the US so that she would
be able to grow up with dual nationality, regarded as “weird.” She sug-
gested that she acquired an unconscious habit of mixing Japanese and
English, a practice referred to by linguists as codeswitching (Nishimura
1995, 1997), code-mixing (Muysken 2004), or the term most closely
associated with the focus of this book: translanguaging (Canagarajah
2011; García and Li 2013). These would not be terms known to the stu-
dents themselves even though the practice was one which I believe reso-
nated deeply with the sense of personal identity that Aiko and her
classmates shared.
To Yoko, the classmate and friend who was interviewing Aiko, this
practice was “so international” but also funny. Part of the reason she
probably regards it as funny is because she recognized it as an unconven-
tional but familiar practice that she shared with Aiko because, like her,
Yoko spent her childhood between schools in Japan and overseas. For
such people, practices like translanguaging are not simply a mode of com-
munication made possible by knowing two languages but are intimately
related to who they are. Practices such as translanguaging reflect a sense
of identity they share in contrast to the majority of students at their uni-
versity. This turned out to be an experience and sense of identity that was
also shared in various ways by all of the students in their freshman English
class and this book is about that experience which I call translingual
identity.
An abstract conception such as translingual identity is inevitably a
messy phenomenon to describe, especially when attempting to do so in
relation to the specific narratives and words of actual people in a context
as specific as the interview quoted above. Nevertheless, at the risk of ini-
tial over-simplification, in order to develop as clear a definition of trans-
lingual identity as possible, I will try to situate the approach taken in this
 Introduction 3

book in relation to some relevant parameters. While there are numerous

potential dimensions of identity, three clines that are appropriate for
­situating the study described in this book would be what might be called
the psychological-sociological cline; the essentialist-transient cline; and the
individual-­community cline. At the extremes of the psychological-­sociological
cline would be (at the psychological end) an account of identity as a prod-
uct of the mind and (at the sociological end) a socially determined
account of identity. Likewise, the essentialist-transient cline would have
hypothetical extremes whereby identity was (at the essentialist end)
viewed as permanent unchanging sense of self, and (at the transient end)
as something in a constant state of flux. Finally, the individual-community
cline would be concerned with identity understood as a property of indi-
viduals versus identity in relation to communities. Having posited these
three dimensions and their extremes as a heuristic, we can then broadly
differentiate approaches and trends describing identity by mapping them
in relation to these three clines. So, for example, Marxism could be posi-
tioned as an account of identity which was sociologically and community
oriented and towards an essentialist account of identity; Erik Erikson’s
(1980) account of the way identity changes over the course of a life time
could be located as individual and psychologically oriented, while empha-
sizing an essentialist core that focuses on a specific dimension of tran-
sience—the transformation of aging; and Zymunt Bauman’s (2005;
Bauman et al. 2011) notion of liquid identity is one that is explicitly
transient but concerned with individual identity from a sociological
perspective.
This book explores identity as it is evoked in individual narratives in
the ongoing talk and semiotic context of video recorded student inter-
views which are concerned with their life histories. This approach means
that I inevitably engage with some broad spans along these spectrums. So
the interview focuses on an individual life story of the interviewee but
also reveals something of the experience of the interviewer and is implic-
itly connected to shared points of reference with the class as a whole.
Hence this study is concerned with exploring identity both as an indi-
vidual phenomena and as one connected to the intimate community of a
class. This study draws primarily on sociolinguistic resources such as
Halliday’s (2003a; Halliday and Matthiessen 1999) Systemic Functional
4 P. Kiernan

Linguistics (SFL), which is sociological in orientation, linked for example

to Bernstein’s (2000) code theory through Ruquia Hasan’s (2005) work on
language and society. Yet, through the narratives the learners also illus-
trate how their experiences have impacted their psychology, particularly
their sense of self. Finally, while the topic of the interviews is concerned
with a developing sense of personal identity and so overlaps, in some
sense with Erikson’s (1980) idea of life stages, the interviews and the
approach to analysis is focused on identity as it is evoked through the
transient medium of spoken language. Perhaps the best way to reconcile
such conflicting notions of translingual identity is to suggest visualizing
the speech act as the stone hitting the pond, creating ripples which spread
out in the minds of the speakers and potentially beyond, in this case,
potentially extended to the readers of this book.
This book is, therefore, about translingual identity as explored through
narratives of language learning histories—in this case those of a class of
Japanese freshman university students. Translingual identity is used in
this book to refer to the positionings of those who, like the students in
this class, grew up between two or more languages, often, though not
necessarily, as a result of spending periods of their childhood overseas.
One of the aims of this book is therefore to map these interrelated experi-
ences of translingual identity onto a continuum from those in the earlier
stages of developing a sense of translingual identity through to those
most confident and/or ambitious in their translingual aspirations. A con-
tinuum might be envisaged, for example, ranging from a hypothetical
monolingual/monocultural non-translingualism towards a bilingual/
bicultural or multilingual/multicultural ambi-translingualism (see
Fig. 1.1).
One advantage of focusing on a continuum to describe the range of
experiences within this class is the implication that, while the translingual
identities of the participants in this study are, in many ways, remarkable

Monolingual/ Bi-/Multi-lingual
Monocultural Bi-/Multi-cultural
Non-translingual Ambi-translingual

Fig. 1.1 A continuum of translingual identity

 Introduction 5

and special they are also potentially linked to the experiences of other
students in Japan, and indeed elsewhere. Such identities may also
­anticipate the kind of identities we may expect to see more of in the
future as globalism increasingly pervades people’s lives (Grunitzky 2004).
In contrast to studies that have highlighted the uniqueness of returnees
(Kanno 2003) or children of mixed parentage (Kamada 2009) or the
transformative experiences of study abroad students (Benson et al. 2013;
Kinginger 2004; Jackson 2008), this book highlights what such individu-
als have in common—also the key components of their community iden-
tity for the class explored here—and how their identities potentially form
a continuum with other forms of translingual identity emerging in the
context of increasing globalization.
The idea of exploring a continuum of experience is not a new one and
a range of cultural or linguistic experience is often represented as describ-
able on some kind of scale. Kanno (2003), for example, represented her
study participants as growing up between Japanese and an English cul-
ture and with a language bias towards one or the other which over their
development into early adulthood gradually balanced out. This is cer-
tainly an enticing idea and depicts an enviable path towards a balanced
bilingualism and biculturalism that is exemplified by Kanno herself,
among many others researching in this area (see also Miyahara 2015).
However, this enticing view of an inevitable growth towards linguistic
equilibrium in later life at the end of all the struggles seems far from what
I am used to seeing in Japanese classrooms, where many students who
have had some overseas experience are far off attaining such a balance.
Indeed, while growing up as a more or less balanced bilingual may be
natural and inevitable in some contexts, this is considerably harder for
Japanese learners of English in Japan. In this book though, I consider
students along a broader range of a spectrum of translingual experience
in order to better understand how childhood experiences may be seen as
formative of translingual abilities and impact on a sense of identity.
Besides the exploration of translingual identities, this book has a meth-
odological focus. It is also about an approach to exploring learner histo-
ries through video recordings of peer interviews. With this in mind, it
outlines and illustrates an approach to analyzing such interviews which
draws on Hallidean Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL)
6 P. Kiernan

(Halliday 2003b) to consider the interviews from the three complimen-

tary perspectives (known as metafunctions) of ideational, interpersonal and
textual resources. The ideational encompasses the meaning content of the
interviews as it relates to the world—in this case, the experiences described
by the participants, including the life story and identities evoked by both
interviewer and interviewee. It also describes the logical rationalization of
these experiences. The interpersonal is concerned with the relationships
that are established in the interview including between interviewer and
interviewee but also the evaluation of (and hence attitudes towards) other
people, events and phenomena. Finally, the textual dimension focuses on
the way that the interview itself is structured. It highlights the language
used to organize the interview itself such as the question and answer for-
mat, the sequencing of the questions, the structuring of narratives, order-
ing of information and indeed the framing of the interaction as an
interview, among others. In addition, since the video interview is a mul-
timodal text that shows much more than a written interview transcript, I
propose a way in which the non-verbal meaning making resources of
gesture, facial expression and proxemics can be described as integral
resources in this context. This approach is suggested as a way to build a
more broad-based semiotic approach to the narrative analysis of video
interviews that adds greater contextualization to the investigation of
social and educational issues through narrative interviews.
Finally, this book addresses issues in education. It is particularly con-
cerned with language learning in Japan as the context of these interviews
and the specific issues raised in the interviews but they are concerns which
also have relevance elsewhere, both in neighboring East Asian countries
and in English Foreign Language (EFL) learning contexts around the
world where translingual identity is a potentially valuable personal
resource.
The project that is the focus of this book was conceived of as both a
research project and an educational out-of-class exercise which allowed
participants to reflect on educational experiences as well as providing a
challenging task to stretch their use of English. I therefore consider some
of the many student perspectives on language learning and Japanese edu-
cation that arose in their interviews. Their views on everything from
grammar teaching, to how to combat language attrition, to the merits of
 Introduction 7

study abroad and many other concerns converge towards a consensus

that is nevertheless a fresh outlook when compared with the views on
such issues espoused by teachers, researchers, administrators and policy
makers.
The educational perspective also considers the value of this project or
the use of similar narrative and reflective practices within education both
in terms of promoting language use, particularly self-expression in for-
eign language contexts and as a way to reflectively engage deeper motiva-
tions for learning a foreign language and indeed building a sense of
translingual identity.

Why Translingualism and What Is It?

I use translingualism as an alternative to, but also in contrast to both
bilingualism and transculturalism. Since my concern here is with the nar-
ratives or people who have grown up with more than one language, it is
concerned with experiences of bilingualism—the ability to use two or
more languages. Bilingualism is therefore an important concern here that
is worth briefly mentioning both as it relates to the subject of this book
and in so far as it can be seen to overlap with translingualism. Similarly,
while this book is primarily concerned with investigating language, trans-
lingualism also overlaps with notions of transculturalism.
The most often quoted definitions of bilingualism appealed to notions
of an ideal cognitive or functional language competence that resonates
with lay usage (at least in Japan) as an ideal rather than a reality. However,
such exclusive definitions have also been counterbalanced by broader
definitions which embrace a cline of language abilities. Leonard
Bloomfield’s “native-like control of two or more languages” (1933, 56);
Maximilian Braun’s “active and passive comprehensive proficiency of two
or more languages” (1937, 111 quoted in Hufeisen and Jessner 2009,
113); or Oestreicher’s “complete mastery of different languages without
interference between the two language processes” (Oestreicher 1974, 9
quoted in Skutnabb Kangus 1981, 81) set a high bar for bilingualism
which even in the context of more liberal definitions of native-speakerism
would seem to depict an ideal target rather than descriptive reality. Some
8 P. Kiernan

of the students in this class could, relatively speaking, be described as

approaching this ideal and certainly for them such definitions of their
long-term language goals seem relevant, but for most such a definition
would seem to undermine their remarkable command of languages com-
pared with their peers. Skuttnabb-Kangus has suggested that a contin-
uum of bilingualism may be a valuable heuristic according to which as
she puts it:

It should be possible to accommodate …[bilinguals] at points extending

from the moment of an individual’s first contact with a word in a foreign
language to a state of complete bilingualism, if it exists. (Skutnabb-Kangus
1981, 82)

Even if “complete bilingualism” is a theoretical ideal that is as impossible

in practice as Chomsky’s (1965, 1) “ideal speaker-listener,” in a “com-
pletely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language per-
fectly” and broader definitions of bilingualism that embrace the “incipient
bilingualism” of early encounters with a foreign language (Diebold 1964)
or “receptive bilingualism” of those in the early stages of understanding a
foreign language and even extensions to multiple competencies within a
single language such as the social code switching observed by Gumperz
(1971) are so vague that they embrace all language users, the spectrum
between these extremes is a potentially useful heuristic. After all, lan-
guage development and therefore teaching and learning take place along
this cline and so it should arguably be of more interest to educators than
a theoretical endpoint goal beyond which no progress can be made.
Skutnabb-Kangus (1981) explained that she fashioned her own defini-
tion of bilingualism to fit with her specific concern with the development
and maintenance of the languages spoken by immigrants. She wrote of
“the sociocultural demands made of an individual’s communicative and
cognitive competence by the communities or by herself.” (1981, 86), a
criterion which, while subjective is relevant to the kind of narrative explo-
ration of language learning experience undertaken in this book.
Accordingly, rather than attempt a competence-oriented definition of
translingualism, this book, which explores the much narrower range of trans-
lingualism represented by the study participants, highlights an experience
 Introduction 9

which is both about the movement between and across languages and cul-
tures but also potentially falling between them. This involves the blending of
languages through practices such translanguaging (Canagarajah 2011; García
and Li 2013) and the merging of identities into hybrids (Kamada 2009) or
third places (Papastergiadis 1999, 94) that challenge positionings that
attempt to marginalize, or discriminate against them. Indeed, it is such prac-
tices that have led to more transient post-­structuralist notions of identity as
something evoked through discourse (Block 2007). Nevertheless, the con-
tinuum of translingualism explored in this book is also intended to be one
which rather than merely separating and celebrating the identities of return-
ees, those with dual-nationality parents or even overseas students as unique
and different from other students is intended to highlight a realm of experi-
ence that is potentially relevant to a much broader range of bilingual or
translingual people in Japan and elsewhere today.
Translingualism implies not so much mastery of two languages as the
idea of being able to traverse or move between languages. In preferring
translingualism as a more suitable term to frame the experiences described
here, I follow Alastair Pennycook (2008) who has suggested it as an alter-
native to bilingualism which moves beyond nationalist conceptions of
language to embrace concepts such as “transcultural flows” (Pennycook
2007), and the embracing of “hybrid identities” or “metroethnicity”
(Maher 2005). Such concepts are more relevant to the identities explored
in this book than traditional bilingualism. Those who grew up between
Japan and other countries or with parents of different nationalities indeed
could be said to have hybrid identities (Kamada 2009) that are intimately
related to their use of language which is more fluidly integrated than
“bilingual” may imply. Pennycook (2007) explored how hip-hop, a musi-
cal genre developed in the US, emerged in new localized forms around
the world. Likewise, Maher (2005) proposed that for Japanese youth,
ethnicities have been absorbed into a Metroethnicity whereby, while
respected, ethnicities have become identities for play involving “cultural
crossings, self-definition, made up of borrowing and do-it-yourself, a sfu-
mato of blurred ethnic ‘identities’” (Maher 2005, 83). More generally,
projects focused on the use of language in contemporary global urban
environments have shown that translingual mixing and blending of lan-
guages available to users is an increasingly normal way to communicate,
10 P. Kiernan

meaning that national languages and identities may be bypassed by local

contextual needs (Block 2006).
A number of researchers have drawn attention to fact that the results
of such macro-processes as immigration or more generally globalization
have given rise to the increasingly complex multilingual environments.
These environments are discussed in terms of superdiversity (Blommaert
2013) and metrolingualism (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015), but explored
from the bottom up, as it were, through linguistic ethnographies (Copland
and Shaw 2015; Copland and Creese 2015) which highlight the ways in
which languages, landscapes and identities are used as fluid resources in
day-to-day communication. Such bottom-up ethnographic observational
and descriptive accounts of translingual practice not only consider a very
different form of data from the formalized interview project discussed in
this book, (not least because the interviews were supposed to have been
conducted in English!) but also employ very different analytical frame-
works indicative of a different approach. Despite this, in practice, these
interviews take place in temporal and physical spaces that are only barely
separated from the fluid translingual space of the university and the
ongoing lives of the students themselves. The multimodal approach to
exploring these interviews may therefore be seen as a way to situate inter-
views within an urban landscape which encompasses educational institu-
tions, practices and communities. Although the study described here is
quite unlike these ethnographic studies in so far as it is not so much going
out into the city to observe language in the wild, and instead uses a more
conventional sociological tool of narrative interviews, it also brings eth-
nographic sensibilities through the use of a linguistic and multimodal
framework of analysis. The student interviews, in other words, are treated
as social and semiotic events worthy of investigation in their own right.
The analytical approach taken here means that the interviews are not
simply trawled for relevant content but are deconstructed as socio-­
semiotic texts.
Pennycook and Otsuji (2015), posit a metrolingualism which, in con-
trast to Blommaert’s macro account of superdiversity in cosmopolitan
centres, they argue, offers a bottom-up perspective on the way both lan-
guage and the associated spaces and identities are translingual in an
everyday sense (2015, 33–34). This fluid focus on traversing and moving
 Introduction 11

between languages is more in harmony with my observations in this book

of the (multiple) identity positionings shared by the learners discussed in
this book. The narratives discussed here reveal a range of translingual
abilities and experiences which are also subject to such things as the fram-
ing of the interview. The idea of multiple positionings itself while deriv-
ing from Haré and colleagues (Harré and Langenhove 1999; Harré and
Moghaddam 2003) is explored here through a linguistic discourse analy-
sis derived from SFL (Martin and Rose 2003, 2008).
Translingualism potentially draws on associations accumulated with
other “trans” words such as “transport” moving something from place to
place; “translation” moving between languages; or “transcend” moving to
a higher level. Translingualism is also closely associated with translan-
guaging—the blending of languages. Translanguaging is a practice
through which translingual identity is evoked even in these interviews
ostensibly conducted in English. These associations with moving between
and blending of languages seem particularly well suited to the learning
histories discussed here, many of which concern childhoods characterized
by moving between countries and with it, languages and cultures (Yamada
2002). As such, transculturalism embraces meanings which are useful
here, such as the idea of being able to move between cultures and an
identity positioning which in many of the narratives do indeed span
cultures.
Transculturalism also embraces identities that may not fully belong to
either, existing in a third space between cultures. However, my interest
here is more in language specifically than culture in general, particularly
as the third space of the university class which these narrators shared was
explicitly one which spanned Japanese and English.

Translingual Identity in Japan

The specific context for the study described in this book is the language
learning life narratives of a class of undergraduate freshman students of
business at a university in Tokyo who were taking a course in Educational
Issues as part of their freshman English requirements. The class was cho-
sen because it was one whose individual members had grown up with
12 P. Kiernan

English and Japanese (and in some cases other languages). It was particu-
larly appropriate that they should be studying educational issues as a key
element of their shared experience. I believe that one thing that made
them bond as a class was that they had all experienced being on the edge
of a culture, struggling to integrate with inadequate resources, and often
being misunderstood or discriminated against as a result. By contrast, in
this class, they found a community where they belonged. Beyond a shared
empathy for the experience of overcoming the cultural and linguistic bar-
riers of living overseas, however, they also shared the experience of a self
that had grown up between or across languages. In other words, a part of
what defined them both individually and as class was their translingual
identities.
The stories of these students overlap with the kind of learner histories
that have been reported in previous research into language and identity,
particularly in relation to Japanese returnees or kikokushijou (Pang 2009;
Sueda 2014) and children of mixed parents known as hafu or doubles
(Kameda 2009; Okamura 2017) but also includes a broad range of edu-
cational experiences in Japan and overseas. This spectrum of experience
helps to bridge the gap between the studies of returnees and those con-
cerned with English as a foreign language education in Japan (Goto
Butler 2005; Hood 2001; McVeigh 2002), or the growing body of litera-
ture concerned with the impact of study abroad programs (Benson et al.
2013; Iwasaki 2008). Focusing on a complete class also makes it possible
to explore the university classroom as a community, allowing for consid-
eration of both community and individual narrative identity and how
they intersect.
The experiences of translingual identity discussed in this book are dif-
ferent from translingualism in countries such as Canagarajah’s home of
Sri Lanka, or for that matter Singapore, Malaysia or India where the use
of more than one language is well established. In such multilingual coun-
tries, speaking more than one language is integral both to education and
society and therefore normal. In contrast, in Japan, the only language
besides Japanese of real importance is English which is taught as a foreign
language at school but does not have any official status. Unfortunately,
despite regular publications of guidelines from the Japanese ministry of
education (MEXT 2007, 2011; Toyama 2003) espousing the importance
 Introduction 13

of communicative English education, English generally continues to be

taught as an academic (rather than practical) subject focused on the kind
of pedagogic grammar that can be easily tested in university entrance
exams. As a result, fluency in languages other than Japanese tends to be
limited to immigrant populations or a kind of translingual elite who
learn English or other languages as a result of parents who either bring
their families with them during extended postings overseas or make
deliberate educational choices (including sending their children to
schools overseas) to ensure that they learn English. It is this translingual
elite which is the focus of the study described here.
In the context of university students in Japan, the students discussed in
this book are privileged in so far as they were attending a prestigious pri-
vate university. This privileged status might be contrasted with the mul-
tilingualism of immigrant children who acquired other languages “for
free” rather than through attending expensive schools at home and
abroad. Nevertheless, I use the term elite not to suggest that these stu-
dents were children of a global elite or potential heirs to positions of
global dominance but rather, they were designated as elite language learn-
ers within their context since they were assigned to the highest level
English class at the university.
As noted above, for educators working in the classroom, the interview
project described here might also be viewed as an educational project in
itself. The analysis provides insights into how the project was undertaken
and negotiated in accordance with the abilities of the learners. Although
there is not space here to evaluate the project as an educational exercise
within a task-based framework (Kiernan 2005; Gray 2017), I have
included some discussion of this pedagogic role in the conclusion.
Suggestions are provided for how such tasks can be used as a way of
building oral narrative competence and providing an opportunity to
reflect on learning experiences.
Finally, this book is intended as a student focused perspective on
English education to complement my earlier study (Kiernan 2010) or
others like it (Stewart 2006; Nagatomo 2012, 2016) which focused on
the narrative accounts of teachers within the Japanese education system.
The shift in focus meant that it seemed preferable to peer interviews,
rather than ones conducted by myself as a teacher researching teachers,
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