THE LEARNER DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL
学習者ディベロップメント研究部会誌

ISSN: 2433-5401
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The Learner Development Journal Issue 5: Engaging with the Multilingual Turnfor Learner Development: Practices, Issues, Discourses, and Theorisations
Author: Alison Stewart
Title: Exploratory and Critical Reading About the Multilingual Turn with Japanese Students:
Review of Conteh & Meier (2014) and May (2014)
Date of publication online: 2021
Author contact: <stewart1411@gmail.com>

Published by the Japan Association for Language Teaching
Learner Development Special Interest Group, Tokyo
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Copyright 2021 each respective author

The APA citation reference for this paper is:
Stewart, A. (2021). Exploratory and critical reading about the multilingual turn withJapanese students: Review of Conteh & Meier (2014) and May (2014). In A. Barfield, O.
Cusen, Y. Imamura, & R. Kelly (Eds.), The Learner Development Journal Issue 5: Engaging with
the Multilingual Turn for Learner Development: Practices, Issues, Discourses, and Theorisations(pp. 159-169). Tokyo: The Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) Learner
Development Special Interest Group.

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PRACTICE-RELATED REVIEW

Exploratory and Critical Reading About theMultilingual Turn with Japanese Students:
Review of Conteh & Meier (2014) and May (2014)
The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges. Jean Conteh & Gabriela
Meier (Eds.). Multilingual Matters, 2014. xvi + 312 pp. ISBN 978-1-78309-222-2
The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education. Stephen May (Ed.).
Routledge, 2014. x + 230 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-53432-1

Reviewed by
Alison Stewart, Gakushuin University, Japan <stewart1411@gmail.com>
This article is a review of two books on the multilingual turn, one an anthology of articles by prominent applied linguists (May,2014c), the other a collection of recent studies exploring multilingualism in different geographic and educational contexts(Conteh & Meier, 2014). The review is practice-related to the extent that the two volumes were used as course books for aseminar course at a Japanese university and thus includes the students’ reflections on the ideas they encountered in theirreading. I have written the review as a narrative account of how the students’ ideas developed over the two semesters, asevidenced by their posts in a course Moodle each week. I conclude the article with my own reflections on the challenge ofpromoting concepts of language and society that contradict current understandings in academia and in language education
generally in Japan.
本稿は，多言語的転回に関する2冊の書籍の書評である。1冊は著名な応用言語学者らによる論文のアンソロジー（May,2014），もう1冊は異なる地理的・教育的コンテクストにおける多言語主義を探求する最近の研究を集めたものである（Conteh & Meier, 2014）。これ
らは日本の大学のセミナーコースで教科書として使用され，その点で本稿は実践に即しており，学生たちが書籍の中で出会ったアイデアについての考察を含んでいる。ムードルに毎週投稿された内容に基づき，2学期の間に学生たちの考えがどのように発展していったのかをナ
ラテ ィブとして描写する。最後に，日本の学術界や言語教育の現場における現在の理解に相反する言語と社会に関する概念を推進する
ことの難しさについて，私自身の考えを述べる。

本文是一篇就两本关于多语言转向书籍的评论概要。其中一本是著名应用语言学家的文章选集（May,2014），另一本是最近在不同地域和教育背景
下探索多语言的研究集（Conteh & Meier,2014）。它是与实践相关的，因为这本书被用作日本大学研讨班课程教材，因此涵盖了学生对他们自身在阅读本书时遇到的想法和反思。这篇评论是以叙述方式写的，根据学生们每周提交至Moodle的文章，讲述了他们的思维在两个学期的课程中如何发
展。最后，我总结并讨论了在日本学术界和语言教育界中，推广与当前理解相悖的语言和社会概念所具备的挑战和困难。

Keywords

multilingual turn, student reflections, language ideologies, SLA
多言語的転回, 学習者の内省, 言語イデオロギー, 第二言語習得
多语言转向，学生反映，语言意识形态，第二语言习得During the 2020 academic year, my Language and Education seminar students in the
Department of English Language and Cultures and I read two books with similar
titles, The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and Bilingual Education, editedby Stephen May (2014c), and The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities andChallenges, edited by Jean Conteh and Gabriela Meier (2014). Multilingualism has been
relatively slow to catch on in Japan, where I work, and it is not something with which the
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Exploratory and Critical Reading About the Multilingual Turn with Japanese Students

undergraduate and graduate students at my university are generally familiar, or regard as
relevant in Japanese education. But insofar as Japan has changed and is changing to becomea more diverse society, I believe that there is much to be gained from discussing the latest
thinking, practices and research on multilingualism with my students, some of whom will
be future English teachers in this country. As Joseph Lo Bianco observes in the foreword toConteh and Meier’s anthology:
We have often lived in social realities well before we can talk about them. Only slowly
do we start to identify and name aspects of the setting we have inhabited, but as we dothey take on the sharp edge of recognition that allows them to enter our consciousness (LoBianco, 2014, p. xv).
Over the past decade or so, I have followed the multilingual turn in my own reading andresearch (e.g., Block, 2008; Kramsch, 2010; Li, 2018; Makoni & Pennycook, 2012) and have
tried to introduce the critical perspective it implies to my students in the hope that it will
influence how they think about language and language education. In this practice-related
review, I provide an overview of the two anthologies and describe how my students and I usedthem in our class. I then go on to discuss how our thinking about multilingualism evolved
over the course of the year, especially in the context of language education, and to raise someof the questions and puzzles that emerged in the process. This discussion is illustrated byextracts from reflections that the students and I posted to a class Moodle each week.

Overview of the Books
Published in the same year (2014), the two books reflect and encapsulate a growing emphasis
by applied linguists on diversity in language and language users. Both volumes emerged
from discussions at international conferences (AAAL 2010 in the case of May, and BAAL
2011 in the case of Conteh and Meier). Whilst the two books share common perspectives on
multilingualism, May’s book is made up of chapters by well-established theorists in the field,
whereas Conteh and Meier’s anthology features research by newer researcher-practitioner
voices in the field as well. A further contrast between the two is that the May volume isa collection of articles that present an explicit critique of mainstream research in Second
Language Acquisition (SLA), while the Conteh and Meier chapters focus more sharply on
multilingualism and multilingual approaches in languages education.
When I first read through the books, in preparation for the seminar, I noticed that thecontributors to the book edited by May (namely, in the order in which they appear in theanthology, Stephen May, Lourdes Ortega, David Block, Suresh Canagarajah, Bonny Norton,
Constant Leung, Ofelia Garcia and Nelson Flores, Wei Li, and Adrian Blackledge, Angela
Creese, and Jaspreet Kaur Takhi), as key thinkers in the field of applied linguistics, weresetting out their current positions on the nature of language in society. Whilst it wasinteresting to me to see how those positions, though broadly convergent, reflected different
emphases, I was also attracted by the opportunity it gave me to consider the authors
themselves and trace the development of their thinking over the past 20 years. There are, ofcourse, other proponents of multilingualism, but I wanted the students to get a sense of who
the key thinkers are in the field, and where their thinking regarding multilingualism hascome from.
The volume edited by Conteh and Meier is a more diverse collection consisting of threeparts: (a) societal perspectives on the multilingual turn in language(s) education, (b)perspectives on the multilingual turn in education, and (c) visions of the multilingual turnin pedagogy and practice. Consisting of new research, these articles, many of which areco-authored by new and established researchers, show multilingual practices in a variety of160

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contexts in education and around the world, in countries ranging from New Zealand to China
to the Alsace region of France. What appealed to me in this volume was precisely this variety,and I hoped that the students would be interested in the different contexts too, as well as in
the research methods and findings that are described.

Seminar Practice
The class for which I set the two volumes as required reading is an elective weekly seminarthat is open to both graduate and undergraduate students in their third or fourth year.
Although the course is listed in the university curriculum as a “seminar,” it is quite unlike
the zemi/ゼミナール [seminar], the two-year course that includes individual supervision towarda graduation thesis, which is typical in Japanese universities, including Gakushuin University,where I teach. The seminar described here is usually taken by graduate students who may
be studying literature or linguistics under the supervision of my colleagues, and who havelittle or no knowledge of applied linguistics. Both undergraduate and graduate students
are required to take courses across the four areas of study that we offer: English-language
Cultures, Contemporary Studies, English Linguistics, and English Education. Graduate
students and zemi students of English Linguistics, as well as students of English Education
who have taken lectures in Second Language Acquisition, tend to be strongly invested in a
traditional view of language and society that is challenged by proponents of the multilingual
turn. This raises—or rather, reveals—ideological differences within the department that pose
potential difficulties for the students and for my own relationship with my colleagues, as I
shall go on to discuss.
In the first semester (though not the second), the four graduate students (Yuichi, Maki,
Shota, and Michihisa) and three undergraduates (Akemi, Hirota, and Miho), who belong to the
Department of English Language and Cultures in the Faculty of Letters, were joined by twooutside students, one from the Faculty of International Social Studies (Ryutaro), the other aChinese undergraduate student (Rin) who was auditing the course as an external student, and
who was planning to take the university’s entrance examination the following spring. The
students’ names have all been anonymised for this article. Of the nine students in the firstsemester, Ryutaro and Rin were the most “multilingual” in terms of their life experience,since Ryutaro was a returnee student who had spent several years in the United States, andRin was aiming to pursue a degree in Japanese, her third language. None of the other students
had spent more than a few months in another country.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the class was conducted entirely on Zoom throughout
the year. The language of presentation was English, although the students were free to speakin Japanese, if they wished, in small group discussions. Each week, the students read one
chapter, or half a chapter, of the May volume as preparation for the class. In the class, I used
PowerPoint to talk through the main points and to pose questions about the concepts and how
they might relate to the students’ lives, to language learning, and to the Japanese context,
which the students discussed in Zoom breakout rooms and as a whole class.
In addition, in each semester three classes were led by the students themselves. Working
in groups of three or pairs, they presented a chapter from the Conteh and Meier book,which they selected from the table of contents. In the first semester, the students presented
Guangwei Hu and Sandra Lee McKay’s Multilingualism as Portrayed in a Chinese English Textbook,
Ken Cruickshank’s Exploring the -lingual Between Bi and Mono: Young People and Their Languages
in an Australian Context, and Andrea Young’s Looking Through the Language Lens: Monolingual
Taint or Plurilingual Tint, on language policy in the Alsace region of France. The chapterspresented by the students in the second semester were Ofelia Garcia and Naomi Kano’s
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Exploratory and Critical Reading About the Multilingual Turn with Japanese Students

Translanguaging as Process and Pedagogy: Developing the English Writing of Japanese students in
the US, Jean Conteh, Shila Begum, and Saiqa Riasat’s Multilingual Pedagogy in Primary Settings:
From the Margins to the Mainstream, and Enrica Piccardo and Joëlle Aden’s Plurilingualism
and Empathy: Beyond Instrumental Language Learning. For clarity, the schedule of the class is
displayed in Appendix A. The students used PowerPoint to present their chapters, and wereencouraged to follow my model of identifying issues or questions for discussion, which they
did in breakout rooms. An example of a student PowerPoint is provided here.
After the class, the students and I continued discussion on Moodle in posts of up to 200
words, summarizing what was interesting to them in the discussions and sometimes raising
new questions. These Moodle posts accounted for 30% of their grade (with 20% allotted forthe group chapter presentation and the remaining 50% for an individual research proposal,
class syllabus, or lesson activity that aimed to explore or apply a multilingual approach). In the
narrative account that follows, I describe what I see as an important change in the reflections ofsome of the students, and a shift in my own thinking about reading these texts with them.

Interrogating the Monolingual Bias
We began quite slowly, taking three weeks to read the introduction (May, 2014b) and thefirst chapter by May (2014a). In this chapter, May sets out the basic premise behind themultilingual turn: That mainstream SLA and TESOL are underpinned by a flawed conceptionof speaker identity (i.e., native or nonnative speakers) and “a monolingual bias.” As a firstquestion, I asked the students to consider multilingual influences on the Japanese language,
both in terms of the plethora of loan words and its complex writing system, which highlights
foreign words with katakana. If languages, such as English and Japanese, are formed andchanged by contact between different peoples, how about language speakers?
For only one of the students, the line of thinking taken by May in his chapter and by myquestions was already familiar. Shota had been reading literature on World Englishes and had
accepted the view that, since English is a global language, anyone who uses it in their life canbe thought of as a legitimate speaker:
When we Japanese think about the speakers of English, we tend to imagine the English speakers
in the countries, like the US and Britain. However, in other countries, like India, Kenya, Singapore,and Papua New Guinea, many people there also use English to communicate with someone, towatch the television, or to read books. (Shota)
Similarly, where May introduces Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field, and practice,and Bernstein’s classification and framing to explain why SLA has continued to resist themultilingual turn, Shota was quick to see how “classification” could be used in a similar
way to explain why Japanese education might also resist this kind of thinking. Standard
English is an ideological construct, Shota argued, but “…many Japanese people believe theexistence of it because the entrance examination plays a vital role in ‘evaluating rules’.” Despite
efforts over the years to focus more on communicative competence, school English
continues to be oriented towards university entrance exams, which in turn continue toprioritise accuracy (or luck) over fluency.
Yuichi and Ryutaro also were quick to grasp May’s critique of SLA, and could see how
a multilingual approach might have the potential to shape a more open, international,
and engaged form of language education in Japan. Other students in the class were more
ambivalent, however, reflecting some negative social attitudes toward multilingualism
in education and society. Maki, for example, felt that a multilingual approach meant that
schools should expose children to different English accents, but she had reservations about

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promoting language education at an early age. Hirota, for his part, noted an antipathy toward
multilingualism in Japan:
Some Japanese have considered multilingualism to be improper. Yuriko Koike who is the Governorof Tokyo, for example, has used a lot of “katakana” words, which was accused by members of theTokyo Metropolitan Assembly. (Hirota)
Moreover, another student, Michihisa, appeared to find it difficult to accept criticism
of SLA, a subject he had recently entered the university to study after completing an
undergraduate degree at a different university, and this is reflected in his continued
attachment to SLA concepts:
I’m interested to language identity and language acquisition. How do we study to get closer tonative speakers? But this question is a difficult task. Second Language Acquisition is affectedby Krashen’s theory. And, there are some problems in English education. English learners haveinterlanguage and fossilization. I need to adopt effective methods to teach. (Michihisa)
I wondered how Michihisa’s thinking, in particular, would be affected by reading the next
chapter by Lourdes Ortega. Of all the contributors to this volume, Ortega is the one who has
maintained her affiliation to the field of SLA. She admits the legitimacy of the charges laidagainst SLA of monolingual bias with its unrealistic and inequitable ideal of “native speaker”
as the benchmark of linguistic achievement. Seeking to move beyond the impasse created bysuch key concepts, she advocates an approach that is informed by Usage-Based Linguistics,
which prioritizes the role of experience in knowledge acquisition.
We spent two weeks reading and discussing Ortega’s chapter. Michihisa’s first Moodle poston this topic reveals that he was confused:
I don’t have ideas instead of SLA class in this situation. Should they study other language or othersubject? I don’t know how to do. When I’ll be teacher, I would find the answers. Experiences are
so important. (Michihisa)
Michihisa was not willing to reject staple SLA concepts, such as native speaker, interlanguage
and fossilization, that he had studied as an undergraduate and around which he had
articulated research questions that he wanted to pursue in his master’s degree. This was an
uncomfortable dilemma for me too. Do I have the right to impose views on him that might
conflict with those he has invested in and that might be supported by his own supervisor?
As time went by, I noticed that the students were gradually taking on board the concepts
and the vocabulary of the two books in their Moodle posts. They were also becoming more
confident in their own stances and arguments. At the end of the first semester, we readDavid Block’s chapter which argues for an expanded perspective on language. More than justa repertoire of all the linguistic resources we have accrued through our life experience, we
communicate and understand meaning multimodally (through image, gaze, posture and soon). Language is not just a cognitive capacity, it is also “embodied,” a phenomenon that isparticularly fascinating in the case of multilinguals. The discussion of multimodality in theclass was the liveliest yet. Yuichi contended that English speakers (he didn’t specify whichones) gesture more with their hands than Japanese do. I disagreed, as it struck me as astereotype, but maybe he has a point. This could be a topic for future exploration.

Multilingualism in Different Contexts
As I have mentioned, in addition to reading and discussing the chapters in May, the students
worked in groups of three or in pairs on chapters they selected from Conteh and Meier.
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Exploratory and Critical Reading About the Multilingual Turn with Japanese Students

The first group (Maki, Rin, and Hirota) presented Hu and McKay’s analysis of a Chineseelementary school textbook. For Rin, who up until that point had been rather reticent andan infrequent contributor to the Moodle, this was an opportunity to come out of her shell.
The textbook was one that she had used in her home city of Chongqing and she was able toshow the class her own annotated copy. Maki, too, was able to connect with this chapter, as
she had written her undergraduate thesis on junior high school textbooks in Japan. The main
findings of the chapter, based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of the textbook, werethat pedagogical practices, such as pair and group work, and cultural content tended to be
Anglo-American. The students commented in their discussion that Japanese textbooks reflectcomparatively more diversity. Shota remembers of his junior high school textbook,[…] it was composed of a lot of topics with full of diversity in the cultural differences around theworld. But I don’t think it’s either good or bad, since I think English education on early stage as
junior-high, should be simplified enough for the students to understand. (Shota)
I wonder what to make of this comment: Does it imply a criticism of the promotionof multilingualism at the early stages of English education? Does Shota believe that thesimplification of language required at this level means that cultural topics cannot be dealt
with in any depth or accuracy? Given his critical outlook on Japan’s adherence to the outdated“native speaker” ideal in English education in previous posts, I was surprised that he hadcome to the defence of Japanese textbooks in this way.
Cruickshank’s chapter (Exploring the -Lingual Between Bi and Mono: Young People and Their
Languages in an Australian Context) on the languages of young people in Australia presents
case studies of Arabic, Cook Island, and Chinese community language schools. The findings
support a critical view of language policy in New South Wales, since terms such as “heritage”
and “background” do not account for the complex and dynamic identities of the students who
attend these schools. Miho, who was one of the presenters of this chapter, found it hard toenvisage the context that was described in the chapter:I have never been to Australia, therefore I am not sure what difficulties peoples have and how
they communicate and deal with those problems or troubles caused by some differences. But,
through the research I did this time, people in each race use English with taking care of their first
tongues. Japan is not the country like Australia, so I think visiting Australia is the most effective
way to understand how they live together. (Miho)
I feel that Cruickshank’s main point—that the heritage schools are far more diverse thanmight be assumed—is missed by Miho, since she had been unaware that such schools existed
in the first place. In our class discussion, I asked the students if they knew of any community
schools in Tokyo, but they had no idea whether there were any or not. In retrospect, I could
have asked them to find this out—a missed opportunity for mutual learning.
The final presentation in the first semester was of the chapter by Andrea Young (Looking
Through the Language Lens: Monolingual taint or plurilingual tint?) on language education in
the Alsace region of France, an area that used to belong to Germany and where many of the
inhabitants are German speakers. Interviews with 46 head teachers shed light on their beliefs
about bilingualism and raise concerns and questions over language education and citizenshipin France. For the students in my class, this chapter provided an opportunity to consider
monolingual ideology in Japan, something that half the members of the class appeared to takefor granted and accept as natural.

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Critiquing Multilingualism
In the second semester, Ryutaro and Rin did not rejoin the class, and I initially wondered
whether their absence would have an adverse effect on the class, narrowing the range ofexperience and perspective in the group. I needn’t have worried. Certainly, the group dynamicchanged, but the class discussion and Moodle posts revealed that the remaining students were
becoming more confident in making claims and arguing for their positions.
We started the semester with Canagarajah’s chapter (Theorizing a Competence forTranslingual Practice at the Contact Zone) which re-examines the notion of “competence” inthe “translingual contact zone.” In their first post this semester, I asked the students tocomment on a table of conceptual “binaries” drawn up by Canagarajah, one of which was thedichotomy in SLA of target language/interlanguage. I was particularly interested in Michihisa’s
post. He starts by acknowledging that “students should notice multilingual aspects of English,
which in contrast to SLA,” since “most of English speakers use it as second language or foreign
language now.” But at the same time, the notion of “interlanguage” still has a role to play:
It is a unique language that only individual learners have. I think it is important. In my case I
have it. (Michihisa)
It could be argued that Michihisa fails to grasp the shared premise in the two books
that language is communication, something that people do, rather than a static body ofknowledge, something that people have. But this is Michihisa’s felt reality. A similar
insistence on the value of the concept of “interlanguage” is apparent also in Miho’s post:
I would like to claim interlanguage should be seen more seriously in the world which co-existenceis getting important. (Miho)
For Miho, co-existence requires tolerance and respect towards people who may be atdifferent stages of language development. Yuichi’s post is still more insistent on the merit of“interlanguage”:
Interlanguage is a really good word. We can allow students to make some mistakes and correct
properly. (Yuichi)
Contrary to the aims of the multilingual theorists we were reading, none of these students
saw interlanguage in a negative light—in fact, quite the opposite. Michihisa viewed it interms of his personal identity, Miho in terms of harmony in diverse societies, and Yuichi asa pedagogical concept. Thus, in different ways, they argued for the retention of a conceptthat the multilingual theorists in the two books we have used would like us to reject. For mypart, I have gone along with the polemical stance taken by the authors of the two books, notonly in accepting a multilingual turn, but also in rejecting SLA. The students, however, haveresisted this either/or type of thinking. Judging from their posts, a multilingual turn need notentail throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
As the second semester progressed, I found that the students were responding to thechapters in ways that were critical of the Japanese education system, and pessimistic about
its capacity to change. For example, responding to Bonny Norton’s chapter, Identity, Literacy,
and the Multilingual Classroom, which features four studies of multilingual literacy developmentof students in South Africa, Canada, Pakistan and Canada, Hirota points out that the goal of
digital literacy in Japanese schools is not “to join the world” but rather to protect children fromcybercrime.
Maki, too, was pessimistic about the potential for learning through digital practices:“In Japanese junior high schools and high school, time is limited so it may be difficult to introduce
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technology.” I wonder why she sees technology as something separate from other activities inschool, rather than something that is integral to learning and development? Now a graduate
student, Maki had taken the teaching licence course as an undergraduate and intends to work
as a schoolteacher when she completes her master’s degree. I hope that she takes inspirationfrom Norton’s examples, but I suspect she may find herself constrained by the lack oftechnology and in-service training that she noticed when she was at school, and later as ateacher trainee during her practicum.

Looking BackAt the end of the academic year, as I look back over the Moodle posts and reflect on thediscussions that we had in the class, I see that there was a qualitative shift in the nature of
the posts between the first and second semesters. From some confusion and uncertainty, thestudents, particularly Michihisa, Miho, and Yuichi, became more assured not only in talking about
multilingual concepts, but also in arguing for SLA concepts, which they saw as still relevant toJapanese society and education. I wonder how much the make-up of the class contributed to thisshift. The participation in the first semester of Ryutaro and Rin, neither of whom had any priorexperience of Applied Linguistics or English Education, helped to bring more diverse perspectives
and opinions into the mix. But did their absence in the second semester make it easier for theremaining students to share and support their beliefs about SLA?
I can’t answer that question. I can say that all the students commented in their final
posts that they found it interesting to find out about the multilingual turn and relished theopportunity to talk about language and language learning in Japan’s changing society. Only
one of the students, Shota, came to the class with prior knowledge of critical linguistics
and his understanding of language ideologies was enormously helpful in creating a shareddiscourse or repertoire for talking about multilingualism and SLA. I am especially grateful
to him for his contribution. But I appreciate the persistence and openness to new ideas of
all the students. In the final week, Yuichi and Shota presented Piccardo and Aden’s chapter,
Plurilingualism and Empathy: Beyond Instrumental Language Learning. The authors write:
One cannot simply “be plural” and find a way between cultures and languages without
any support or scaffolding. Translanguaging and moving back and forth between cultures is
a process acquired through the acceptance of others, the capacity to see oneself as another,and it requires the ability to change points of view about situation, the others and oneself.
Changing a point of view leads to empathy, as we must put ourselves in someone else’s place.
(Piccardo & Aden, 2014, pp. 246–247)
In reading the volumes by May and by Conteh and Meier with my students, I have tried to
put myself in their place, to understand their struggles with the concept of multilingualism,
and to accept that there are considerable pressures on them to preserve the basic assumptions
that underpin traditional SLA and linguistics. These are ideological pressures—thecommonsense assumption that Japan is a homogeneous society, for example, but thestudents also face institutional and personal pressures from my colleagues who specialisein linguistics, or from the schools where many of them will go to work as teachers after
graduation.
The effect of ideologies is to “erase” certain identities so that we don’t think about certain
people or groups, or perhaps don’t even see them at all (Block, 2008). I hope that, throughthe experience of reading and reviewing the two books on multilingualism together, thestudents have started to look at Japan’s society in a different way, and that they have started
to appreciate that the ideas and examples we have examined are not solely “out there,” butare relevant here in Japan too.

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Author Bio
Alison Stewart is professor at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, where she leads seminars on
language education and multilingualism for undergraduate and graduate students. Her main
research interests are learner autonomy and learner and teacher identity, particularly as they
pertain to social justice issues in the increasingly diverse society of Japan.
スチュワート・アリソン。学習院大学（東京）の教授として，学部生や大学院生を対象に言語教育と多言語主義に関するセミナーを担当。主な研究テーマは，学習者オートノミー，学習者と教師のアイデンティティ，特に多様化する日本社会における社会的正義の問題との関連性を取り上げている。

Review ProcessThis paper was open-reviewed by Elizabeth Bekes, Colin Rundle, and Dominic Edsall.
(Contributors have the option of open or blind review.)

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Appendix A
Language & Education Course Schedule
SpringSemesterClass content

Class leader(s)5/12Introduction: Introducing the Multilingual Turn (May)

Alison5/19

What’s new about Multilingualism? (May)

Alison

5/26

Disciplinary Fields (May)

Alison6/2

LEAP: A multilingual resource in NZ (May)

Alison

6/9

Multilingualism in a Chinese Textbook (Hu & McKay)

Maki, Hirota, Rin

6/16

Limitations of SLA (Ortega)

Alison

6/23

Usage-Based Linguistics (Ortega)

Alison6/30

Between bi- and mono-linguals: Australian context(Cruickshank)

Michihisa, Miho,
Akemi

7/7

Moving beyond “lingualism”: embodiment in SLA (Block)

Alison

7/14

Moving beyond “lingualism”: multimodality in SLA (Block)

Alison

7/21

Looking through the language lens in Alsace (Young)

Ryutaro, Yuichi,
Shota

168

Learner Development Journal • Volume 1: Issue 5 • December 2021

Alison Stewart

Fall
SemesterClass content

Class leader(s)9/15Theorising a competence for translingual practice in thecontact zone (Canagarajah)

Alison9/22

Performative competence (Canagarajah)

Alison9/29

Identity, Literacy, and the Multilingual Classroom (Norton)

Alison

10/6

Multilingual education in Primary Settings (Conteh et al)

Hirota, Maki

10/13

(Leung) Communication and participatory involvement inlinguistically diverse classrooms (Leung)

Alison

10/20

Communicative competence and participatory involvement(Leung)

Alison

11/10

Translanguaging pedagogy in the US (Garcia & Kono)

Miho, Akemi

11/17

Multilingualism and common core standards in the UK(Garcia & Flores)

Alison

11/24

Who’s teaching whom? Co-Learning in Multilingual
Classrooms (Wei Li)

Alison

12/1

Co-Learning in Multilingual Classrooms (Wei Li)

Alison12/8

Beyond multilingualism: Heteroglossia (Blackledge, Creese& Takhi)

Alison

12/15

Pluralism and empathy (Piccardo & Aden)

Yuichi, Shota

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