Introduction

This book seeks to examine the issue of identity construction and its implications for the process of learning a foreign language. As many researchers have argued, any discussion of 'identity' is fundamentally based on one's personal experience and is inescapably subjective. This is true for me as well. My interest in this subject is, first, rooted in my background as a returnee (kikokushijo). Returnees are sons and daughters of Japanese governmental officials and business people who have lived aboard for a certain period during their childhood and adolescence before returning to Japan (Block, 2006a; Kanno, 2003). Second, my interest stems from my professional experiences as an English teacher and language educator in Japan for nearly two decades. During this time I have observed that language learning is more than a cognitive and individual phenomenon, but one that needs to be addressed from a broader perspective, to take into account the dialectic relationship between learners and their social milieu.

Kanno's now famous longitudinal study of returnees (2000, 2003) was of special and poignant interest to me. Reflecting on my experiences as a teenager attending a high school in New York three decades previously, I found that they resonated with those of Kanno's participants, who also struggled to claim their identities in their new environments abroad, as well as upon their return to Japan. Identity issues are also at the centre of ethnographic case studies by Angelia-Carter (1997), Haneda (1997), Pierce (1995), Toohey (2000) and Willet (1995). These works have investigated the experiences of those who migrated into their new educational contexts, where themes of mainstreaming, participation and language socialisation emerged as central issues. Such studies not only informed my general understanding that learning a language is 'an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice' (Lave & Wenger, 1991: 31) but they also showed me how identity is intertwined with social and affective dimensions.

Until quite recently, I held to an essentialist point of view regarding identity as a static and stable entity. However, my frequent trips to and from London and Tokyo over the last decade or so have prompted me to re-evaluate my thoughts on identity from a slightly different perspective. For example, upon landing at Heathrow Airport, the first encounter on British soil is usually with immigration officers. As many foreigners arriving in London have experienced, one is required to submit to a routine set of questions, such as the purpose of one's visit and the intended length of stay. To me, this ritual symbolises my status as an outsider and as a 'visitor' who does not 'belong' to the British community. In contrast, on my return to Japan, and in fact even as soon as I set foot in a Japanese-owned airline, I am greeted with a flight attendant's bubbling words of welcome, 'okaerinasai!' The literal English translation is 'welcome home', but okaerinasai tends to have a special connotation, as it is used only for people who are considered to be insiders, and it carries a subtle message that one is considered to belong to that group. Such experiences at airports are of course not unique – they are shared by thousands of other Japanese people making similar journeys. However, the irony for me is that although my appearance might define me as ethnically 'Japanese', I am aware that some in Japan would not consider me to be truly, wholly or purely Japanese, because of my upbringing as a returnee. These contradictions would not make sense if I viewed identity as unchanging. My travels abroad, as well as my experiences of living both in and out of Japan, have thus influenced me to change my understanding of identity, which I now perceive as fluid, dynamic and multifaceted.

This broadened understanding of identity motivated me to reflect on the issue of identity with students who are studying English at a liberal arts college in Japan. Observing the struggles these students undergo during their first year of college, I discovered that the difficulty was not only to do with language, but was also linked to the changes in their sense of self. In class and during tutorials, I noticed that their emotional responses in learning a language figured prominently in their perceptions of themselves. This stirred my interest in examining how emotions influence the construction of identity. However, I am interested not only in what kinds of identities develop, but also in how, why and in what contexts the students construct their identities and, furthermore, how the affective dimensions of learning a language are implicated in this process. In particular, I focus on learners' experiences by examining what the learners themselves present to me. This study, therefore, takes a participant-relevant perspective, where the aim is to investigate learners' language learning experiences from their perspective. Research in this field should not be limited to presenting an account of participants' experience, but should also clearly show how the learners themselves perceive and articulate these experiences. For this reason, I decided to work within a qualitative paradigm; more specifically, I adopted a narrative-oriented approach to explore the process of the construction of identities of Japanese learners studying English within higher education in Japan.

Overview of the Enquiry: The Rationale and Aims of the Research

Prioritising a more socially oriented approach in the conceptualisation of second language acquisition (SLA) is not new. It was explored as far back as the 1960s (Lafford, 2007; Swain & Deters, 2007), even if for many years there was no overt conflict between what we might call in very general terms cognitive versus social approaches to second language learning. However, with the publication of Firth and Wagner's landmark article in 1997, the social perspective to second language learning gained prominence. A large number of studies that include the social and contextual dimensions have since emerged in SLA and language learning research. These studies have paved the way for researchers to draw upon a wide range of disciplines and include various theoretical perspectives in their work (Block, 2003).

One example is Firth and Wagner's article (2007) where their expanded understanding of 'learning' is presented, where learning is framed as a social process. They contend that the central tenet for making the distinction between the ideas of language 'acquisition' and 'use' emerges from one's conception of learning. Drawing on Lave and Wenger (1991: 807), they view the process of learning as an 'inseparable part of ongoing activities, situated...