Is english our lingua franca or the native speaker's property? The native speaker orientation among middle school students in Japan

This paper reports the first empirical study to date that sought to examine the native speaker orientation among middle school EFL students in Japan. To this end, this preliminary study measured their language attitudes in this respect addressing age-stratified and gender variations. The data was elicited from an attitude survey with 318 eighth and ninth graders at a public middle school. The findings suggest that the students gave the highest evaluations to native than to nonnative varieties of English. Second, they opted for learning English for its currency and utility in the English as a native language setting, rather than for its transnational function as a lingua franca. Lastly, the finding indicated a possible developmental trajectory of their native speaker orientation