The author outline the origin of the concept of narrative and the way in which psychology has focused on it. Then Bruner's two modes of thought: logico-scientific & narrative are compared with each other. These two concepts are not conflicting, but complementary. Lastly, the Trajectory Equifinality Approach as a new methodology for narrative mode is introduced.

This paper explicates the significance (and danger) of narrative in practical research by clarifying the concept of narrative. The clarification is based on the theory of the narrative mode (Bruner), which is augmented by the theory of meaning (Luhmann and Arendt) and the theory of historical writing (White). The narrative is characterized in contrast to the argument in the logico-scientific mode in terms of form, theme, stuff, plot, language, tone and reality. Also characterized is the concept of meaning which is capable of dealing with the issues of complexity and plurality of our human world. The narrative is crucial both in practical research and historical writing in that it addresses the important question of "what should we do?" However, it may be abused when excessive dramatizing, moralizing or ideologizing is applied. The narrative possesses reader/user generalizability, which, unlike generalization in science, requires imaginative thoughts from its readers.

Since its start in Denmark in 2000, the Human Library has rapidly spread to over 90 countries throughout the world. Based on the last decade of hosting the Human Library at Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan, the author examines the results of a survey sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) to measure the role the program plays in reducing prejudice amongst the “readers,” and the effect the program has had on the students in the Yokota Seminar who serve as “Librarians.” The author suggests that the inherent structure of the Human Library generates a rich narrative that leads to a multitude of potential outcomes and a wealth of learning applications. The author closes with a compilation of potential applications of the Human Library based on his experience.

Since 2014 graduate students have translated one testimony of atomic bomb survivors a year in their Japanese-German translation class with extraordinary high enthusiasm. This is presumably caused by the empathy for the survivors resulting from the testimonies. To explore this assumption a superordinate concept called“contemporary witness”is applied to atomic bomb survivors and their testimonies are analysed as narratives showing the following three aspects. From the viewpoint of history studies the testimonies are statements about social and historical events following atomic bombing. Psycologically seen they are the results of individual survivors’struggles to integrate their experiences into their (new) identity after bombing. Sociologically they should be seen as the stories that the survivors, as social actors, use to make sense of their life, which is a precondition for knowing how to act in society. Findings conclude that in accodance with the“narrative empathy theory”in literary studies the testimonies contain features which cause empathy to their readers. It is the process of translation which intensify the empathy for the translators. To further enhance the debate, the auther proceeds to investigate empirical examples where narrative empathy gave a big impact on policy making and contrasts it with a case where it did not. To make voices of people having gone through traumatic experiences heard in the future she calls readers to adopt a narrative cycle: listening to a narrative, understanding it deeply and retelling it as one’s own story.

Narrative research into Japanese language education, in which most narrators are nonnative speakers of Japanese, is rife with narratives of“selfishness”experienced by narrators. This research seeks to redefine Yoshii’s(2013) concept of“selfishness,”in the light of“becoming”as a movement for critically rethinking norms posited by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (2010), using this framework to review my“stance”as a researcher in an interview with an international student. This research aims to show the possibilities of narrative research as an opportunity for researchers to reconsider their position in relation to narrators. As a result of this reflection, the conflicts expressed within the narratives of the international student was avoided. However, by sticking to a particular“stance”I missed opportunities for“becoming”that I myself had noticed in others. In relation to the problem of“selfishness”which Japanese language education researchers can be prone to, it seems that there is the possibility of creating“becoming,”deriving new meanings in narrative research and practice in the process of working together towards a solution, whilst placing oneself within the conflicts or doubts of narrators.

This research aims to clarify characteristics of the recogniton of otherness from interview surveys for the farmers who have successfully accepted foreign tourists to agritourism in Semboku City, Akita Prefecture. The results of surveys show the reasons for their success and provide reference cases for most of the Japanese who can not avoid close contacts with foreigners in the near future, although they can neither have enough opportunities to interact with foreigners nor to learn foreign languages as preparations. Analysis of interview data shows that the farmers find special value in the otherness of tourists and this positive recogniton of otherness motivates them to keep communicating with and accepting the tourists. However, in this way of the recognition of otherness, no special weight is given to being foreigners. Willing to build relationships with others is not born from emphasizing particular categories. Nuturing the new way of recognition of otherness which does not push people into particular categories will be rased as the new challenge for the language and culture education.

There is a knowledge gap concerning how Japanese language teachers choose to work in primary and middle education institutions overseas. This paper, focusing on two Japanese language teachers working in primary and middle schools in the oblast of Sakhalin in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in Russia, attempts to analyse the process they used to determine their identities as Russian-born teachers of Japanese. Previous research on teacher identity has mainly concentrated on self-concept or feelings of self-esteem; therefore, this study analyses the identity-forming processes, finding common themes among the identity fluctuations. By using the Trajectory Equifinality Approach to analyse their identities, we found how each teacher formed his/her teacher identity. The analysis further found that overseas Japanese language teachers were passively affected by the regional linguistic policies, as well as by the national policy, while being influenced by individual factors as they formed their identities. In addition, the paper proposes useful language policies that could be used in the future to support Japanese language teachers overseas.

This research aims to clarify the meaning of the use and learning of multiple languages such as Vietnamese and Japanese for Vietnamese refugees living in a Vietnamese settlement area in Japan. I conducted participation observations and semi-structured interviews in the Vietnamese community and pieced together the life story of a Chinese Vietnamese refugee. When first settling in Japan, he lost his dream because of his lack of Japanese language ability, but he improved his life by using the Vietnamese network. Also, his motivation for learning Japanese increased after he started to work for a company that encouraged him to recognize the value of learning Japanese. Even though he could not do the job that he wanted to, he was able to achieve his dream of establishing a temple of Vietnamese Buddhism and attending a junior high school at night. From his life story, I was able to reconsider the meaning of using and learning Japanese, and the meaning of living in a Vietnamese settlement area from the viewpoint of Vietnamese refugees.

This paper investigates the assessments used in learning activities of international students and their Japanese tutors at a Japanese university, focusing on the process of Japanese language socialization. Audio-visually recorded data were collected from 8 pairs of students, totaling 15 hours of observations, and relevant reading and writing materials were collected from 6 to 9 months. In this paper, I focus on the ways that native Japanese speaking tutor made assessments on the spoken and written language use of these international students and third parties in the conversations. The findings show the following three things: 1) negative assessments were used more frequently than positive assessments, 2) the turn and sequential design of assessments, such as assessments + explanations, and assessments + objection were observed, and 3) through these assessments, Japanese tutors convey to the international students the appropriate use of language in Japanese as well and the normative rules and cultural knowledge of Japanese society. In addition, international students co-construct the learning activities with their tutors, including aligning with the assessments, questioning them and showing disagreement to the tutors’assessment. In their conversations, tutors convey to international students how to act appropriately as a member in Japanese communities by making negative assessments about the third parties who act in an inappropriate manner. This research shows that assessments contributes to both“socialization to use language”and “socialization through the use of language”proposed by Schieffelin and Ochs, and that assessments are a central practice for international students to become enculturated into appropriate language use, cultural knowledge and social norms of Japanese society.

Whereas various peer-learning studies for L2 learners including peer-reading have been conducted and their effects have been reported in the literature, little is known about the procedures for constructing peer interactions which produce educational effects. The purpose of this study is to reveal how L2 learners construct interaction through peer reading activities intended to nurture critical reading skills, what kind of interactional competence they use for it, and how the effects of peer reading appear in their interaction. This study examined this issue using the methodological framework of“conversation analysis”(CA) as a central tool of analysis. The analysis indicated that in the peer interaction in which one of the learners didn’t have a clear opinion, or both of them had different opinions about the task, they constructed their interactions in order to equalize the epistemic imbalance. In addition, the logic of their opinion was refined through the learners’cooperative, interactional work.

This study investigates the life experience of returnee children, within the Brazilian Nikkei community, whose parents worked in Japan. Child returnees to Brazil have often been analyzed in the context of education. However, this study envisages the everyday experience of these children who actively lead their lives within the regional Nikkei community using their knowledge of Japanese. This is analyzed qualitatively, based on research interviews and observations conducted in one Nikkei community. From the interviews, it became apparent that their desire to return to Japan was their purpose in studying Japanese. A memoir of one of the returnee children, now a university student, was reconfigured as her life story. This enabled her account of her experience of moving and Japanese language studies to be related to a much larger picture of her family history. The circumstances of how her experience led to her participation in the Nikkei community are depicted.

The learning of Japanese in China played an essential role in forging the relationship between the two countries, which was confronted with quite a few tensions in the post-war period, through the enhancement of an“understanding of Japan.”Now and in the future, the learning of Japanese shall undoubtedly play an important and continual part in cultivating leading people for the maintenance of Japan-China relations. From a quantitative and qualitative viewpoint, China leads the world in Japanese language education with both a prominent number of students and highly qualified human resources. This study sheds light upon a new facet of the two countries’history of mutual understanding and cultural exchange by considering the role of media circulated in Japanese in China’s Japanese language education scene and its relative realization. The study investigates an unexplored oral history of announcers from broadcasting offices and reporters from newspaper and magazine companies – media which contributed to the exchange and transmission of information in Japanese before the normalization of diplomatic relations in China.

We planned a panel entitled“Consideration of the gaps between career consciousness and career support for international students, as reported by international students at Japanese-language schools, two-year colleges and universities,”and presented as a panel with discussion at the 4th annual meeting of the Association for Language and Cultural Education in March 2018. In this reserch, based on annual meeting results, as well as research on the situation from the vantage point of language educators, we report the present situations of these gaps at Japanese language schools, two-year colleges and fouryear universities (Tokyo metropolitan area and local regions) and point out problem areas. First, from self-reportings of actual international students, we introduce how students assessed their careers and conducted themselves, and from languagage educators, we report on the gaps between the ideal career supports that international students require and the actual career supports that are being provided. Then, in order to close these“gaps,” we offer the information that language educators shared in the panel discussion that is designed to engage both international students and educational institutions and improve the situation. In the end, based on the above research, we point out possible future issues in order to reduce these“gaps.”

So far, researchers on language and language education have regarded the objectiveness (third-person perspective) of language meaning as so vital that they made efforts to exclude the subjectiveness (second-person perspective) as much as possible. As a result, the engaging aspect, or engagingness of language, which should be considered inherent in language, has also been easily excluded by the researchers. The editors and authors questioned this and mention that engagingness has to be considered as critical in the various fields which deal with language, including developmental psychology, pedagogy, social anthropology, national language education, English language education and Japanese language education. As we have arrived in the globalized era, we keep in contact with others from different languages, cultures, and identities on a daily basis. This book proposes that this age has met with a refashioned turn on language and language education. It provides us with suggestions for considering language education for and language education research on fostering“citizenship”for us to live together in this era, as well as raising people as“critical beings”to actively participate in their societies and communities.