Language attitudes and discursive positioning among Japanese youth on a study English abroad program

This paper reports a discourse-analytic study that sought to explore language attitudes and positioning among Japanese sojourners at an Australian university in one specific occasion: in the responses that they volunteered to write to a passage that argued some negative implications about the prevalence of English language both in Japan and on the global level. The study sought to identify the discursive repertoires participants drew upon when they constructed their stances and worldviews on the matter presented in the passage. The focus of this study, therefore, was the identification of discursive constructions of participants’ stances on the 'phenomenon of English' as well as their subject positions contained within them. There are different approaches to discourse analysis that emphasise discursive resources and discursive practices respectively, as Potter and Wetherell (1995) differentiate. Since the objective of this study was to understand the way in which stances on the phenomenon of English were discursively constructed, an analytic focus upon discursive resources was chosen. The instances of texts that participants produced were coded as either negative or positive in line with the psychological attitude theory, and several interpretative repertoires were identified in the respective attitudes with differing rhetorical constructions of their linguistic, social, and cultural positionings. The findings point to variation in the constructions of attitudes and subject positions from which participants’ justifications and criticisms on the matter argued in the passage can be launched, and in the uses of these interpretative repertoires with potential criticisms against their arguments envisaged