Employing Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological model of development, this ethnographic study investigated six Japanese middle school expatriate students in the United States (4 boys and 2 girls) from Autumn 2009 to Spring 2010 to better understand their linguistic environment, their beliefs and values in English, and how those beliefs and values were nurtured. All the students stayed in the host country for more than three years and they were all toward the end of their sojourn in America. In order to qualitatively reveal how the students learned and used English, and what views they had toward English, weekly interviews with the students inquired about their social networks and access to linguistic resources such as textbooks and television. At the same time, I visited one of the students’ schools to investigate how he was socialized to use English during casual conversations with his peers at the lunch table.
The first half of this study is based on the interviews to describe the Japanese students’ linguistic environment. The environment where the students used English was broadly divided into four domains: home, school, peer, and media. Despite overlap across domains, the students’ typical use of English and their values in language showed distinct features in each domain. Following the argument about the domains, this study further discusses a model where the contradictory values related to cussing, pronunciation, and proficiency test in each domain affected the students’ multiple and contradictory identities.
The second half of this study is based on audio-recorded observations of a Japanese boy and his peers at a middle school. During observation of casual peer conversation at his lunch table, there were few explicit remarks in the Japanese student’s English as he had learned the language in America for three years. Due to the lack of overt teaching from his peers, this study focused on the Japanese student’s self-repair practices to understand how he interpreted his utterances in interaction with his peers and how he modified them following his peers’ open class initiators, particularly “huh?” and “what?” These modifications indicated subtle traces of the Japanese student’s second language socialization; his modification was made based on his “imagined community of English speakers,” which had been constructed through his past experiences.
Based on the analyses of the Japanese students’ English learning and language environment, this study argues that a variety of personal, linguistic, and material resources interdependently construct amorphous linguistic ecology for second language learners in society. However, by examining how language ideologies are transmitted and absorbed in a variety of contexts, including taking a Japanese language proficiency tests of English in America, this study also considers the notions of language ideology and imagined community as forces that give order to the complex relationships in second language learning.