INTRODUCTION
Learner Identities and Transitions
Christina Gkonou, University of Essex
Yoshio Nakai, Doshisha University
Jim Ronald, Hiroshima Shudo UniversityW

elcome to the third issue of the Learner Development Journal. Let’s start by looking
at the words of the theme of this issue, Learner Identities and Transitions. First,“learner” may sound like some eternal journeying condition, never reaching the topof the slope, never reaching mastery—a life sentence, unless we give up first! For many of us
language learners that may strike a chord. There is, though, another side to the coin, anotheridentity, in fact: that of being a user of other languages, a social, professional, or academic language user who may be increasingly able to do more through these languages. Whichbrings us to “identities”, the plural form rather than the abstract uncountable or singularform, telling us both that this issue is largely concerned with people rather than concepts,
and also that we may have more than one identity, whether at the same or different times. Asfor “transitions”, this reminds us that language learners’ circumstances change, often drastically, and that these changes impact or change our identities.
Pinning down learner identity/identities—in some way that is one common challenge foreach of the papers in this issue. More than that, the second half of title of the issue sets thebar higher; the word transitions reminds us that for many of the studies reported here the goal
is not simply pinning identities down, like dead butterflies on a cork board but, rather, theobservation and recording of the living identities of language learners and users as they andtheir circumstances change.
Reflecting on identities and transitions brings us to our own language learning stories, which
are written below. These stories did not determine how we are as teachers, but they are a partof our current identities and they do continue to inform how we inhabit our roles as teachers,
and how we relate to our learners, each with their identities, emotions, and motivations.

Christina’s Language Learner Identity/Journey
I started learning English at the age of seven, in a private language school located in an extraordinarily beautiful house on the seaside of my hometown in Greece. I feel I owe a lot tomy teachers from that school, for different reasons which I was not able to understand backthen but greatly appreciated in later years and upon reflection. The school was not using anyof the traditional English language teaching textbooks—the only exception being exam-oriented classes—but mainly short stories and comics suitable for each level of proficiency. The
school teachers had compiled what would for many seem a quite unusual grammar book,which comprised important grammar rules without using metalanguage. In fact, I learned themetalanguage at a very much later stage, mainly during my university studies and throughmy own teaching experiences. The vocabulary book included drawings in black and white,which we learners would colour in and write the English word next to them. What was also
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particularly nice about that school was that students could play in the beautiful garden during
breaks and watch the sea!
I strongly feel that this early experience of learning English shaped my learner identity
and the way I have since been viewing language learning, and further encouraged me to takeFrench and Italian classes at university. Clearly the way French and Italian were taught toadults in my case differed considerably from the stress-free and creative English classes described above, but love for languages had already been cultivated in me prior to learning more
foreign languages. Learning languages was a tough process, which required effort, persistence
and a mindset of believing in oneself and in improving through hard work. Using English
in the UK where I then moved for studies in the first instance was perhaps among the mostvaluable experiences obtained throughout the years of learning foreign languages, because all
linguistic knowledge that was acquired had to be put into practice for the purposes of academic achievement and above all communication—and survival! My attempts to use English
in an English-speaking country put me in a position of re-learning and re-studying aspectsof the language but from a more ‘communicative’ perspective.
My early English language learning experience informed my transition from being a learner
to becoming a teacher and now to convening university modules on language teacher education development. I still feel though that I am often oscillating between two identities, that ofa language learner and that of a language teacher, with each identity informing the other!

Yoshi’s Language Learner Identity/Journey
Looking back on my life of learning language, it seems that I have different meanings in eachof the languages I have learned. The languages are English, German, Korean, and Chinese.
The first experience of learning a language is learning English at a small private English conversation class when I was at elementary school. I don’t remember why I decided to go there,
but surely remember that I was so excited by the English I listened to in front of me. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t continue studying and don’t remember why I quit after a few times,
either. Almost of my memory of it has already gone, but it was still a great time for me.
I started learning English again at junior high school. I had been looking forward to learning
English, and enjoyed learning about the grammatical structure of English and the sound of pronunciation—but it doesn’t mean that I was good at them! English sounded smart and cool to me.
The second experience of learning a language was learning German as a “second foreignlanguage” at university. I studied German for 2 years, but none of it has remained in me. It
was still interesting, but just a school subject, not attractive in the way that English was. At
the same time, I started getting tired of learning English, because reading was the main partof our English classes.
After graduating from university, the akogare, the appeal or attraction, of English was stillinside me, so I quit my job and, getting prepared to go to Australia for a working holiday. I
went to English conversation classes. In Australia, I was happy to use English and to stay inthis English-speaking environment. I didn’t study hard but I went to language schools there
to improve my English. I felt cool, speaking English and making connections with a newworld I hadn’t belonged to before.
Job hunting after coming back to Japan, I happened to hear about the job of Japanese language
teacher. My life as a language teacher started then. As I worked with young students, mostly
from other Asian countries, who wanted to go to university in Japan, I saw many of the problems in the context of Japanese as Second Language (JSL). To understand it better and to be able
to change the situation, I entered graduate school and conducted research to get close to theselearners’ experiences of living in Japan, to get some insights about how to make JSL better. At4

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that time, I was trying to support learners in Japan, to help them enter university and to participate in Japanese society. I thought myself not as a teacher but as a supporter close to them.
While teaching Japanese at a language school, I studied Korean and Chinese because I wanted to understand what our students were talking about in front of me. I built up my knowledge of the two languages by asking the students what they were talking about. After a few
years, I became close to a friend from China and we still have a good relationship. I wasn’t
so interested in learning Chinese at that time, but as our families became very close, I started
learning and using Chinese to talk with his family and friends in China. For me, even now,Chinese has been not an object of learning but a language deeply related to my life. Meanwhile, as I was opening up with them to face up to the reality of their life in Japan throughresearch using narrative approach, I found my own reason to be a language teacher.
Dialogue with learners and moreover with my Chinese friend’s family led me to reflect on
myself and to rethink the language environment in which I have been brought up. I am a
CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) who grew up experiencing the two cultures of the deaf and thehearing and integrated into these two cultures. I realized I had tried to participate in Japanesesociety as an alien from the parallel society of those people who communicate in a strange
way. Unconsciously, I blanketed my experience of life with a mask hiding our family’s language situation. However, finally it was revealed to me that this is the reason why I want
to be involved in languages, and why I have been a language teacher aiming to support foreigners in the same position in Japan. After realizing this, my beliefs regarding language andlanguage teaching have become clear and changed dramatically. Now I describe myself as acitizen in Japanese society who is translanguaging (learning and using) Japanese, sign language, a bit of Chinese and English to live my own life. My identity as learner and user has
been constructed through interaction with the people around me.

Jim’s Language Learner Identity/Journey
Since the age of about eight or nine, French language proficiency has remained an important part of my identity. Around that time, on a family trip to France, I recall being challenged
by French friends to say the French word for “squirrel”, écureuil, along with an elder brotherand sister—and being the one who could do and sound French. With no shadow of critical age
interpretation to temper my pride in this ability, it confirmed to me that I was naturally goodat French. The youngest member of the French family we were friends with was the mostbeautiful girl I had ever seen and I fell in love with her on the spot—coup de foudre, as it’s
expressed in French. I decided, despite being shy and six months younger than her, that one
day we would be married and living in France. A couple of summers later, when visiting thisfamily again, I saw that she was reading a novel by Maupassant called Bel-Ami, perhaps asa summer assignment. I might have been too shy to talk to her much, but if I could read thesame book as her, it would somehow bring us closer. Back in England, I went to my school
library and found the book, in French, and read all 300 or so pages. I can’t have understood
the whole book, but I did understand enough to get through it, and to realize that I could now
read books in French. And so I kept reading French books.
This near daily contact with French through reading, together with my very personal motivation, meant that at school French was very easy for me, and I was good at it. A holiday
in France with three school friends at seventeen confirmed this. While my friends were also
good at French in class, they were nervous about actually using it and would push me to bethe speaker for our group.
One decade later, coming to Japan, I focused on living in Japan, learning Japanese, andlearning to teach English. France, French, and my childhood French dreams, were far away.
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After two or three years in Japan, on a trip back to England I had a couple of days in Franceand found, with a shock, that I couldn’t speak French anymore, that I couldn’t easily find thewords I needed for even a short conversation.
Returning to Japan, I started to try to reclaim the French ability that I had lost. I foundsome French books and reading in French once again became part of my life. I also placed aninvitation in a local English-language magazine for French speakers to meet in a local café
once or twice a month. Each time, about five or six of us, French, north African, and Japanese
speakers of French, would get together and just chat for a couple of hours. These gatherings
continued for about a year and, together with the French reading, restored my ability to communicate easily in French.
Apart from French and Japanese, to me, my language learner identity is largely as someone
who has failed to learn much of the half dozen other languages I have studied, formally orinformally. To my students, however, I am seen as a polyglot, a successful learner of foreignlanguages, since I can at least greet them in each of their respective second foreign languages:
French, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, or German.
The learner identity I try to project for my students is perhaps closest to my experience ofFrench: I think of myself not as a learner of the language but as a user, whether reading forpleasure, talking in French for the enjoyment of it, or looking for opportunities to use French.
These are within their reach, too, for English, and possibly for other languages. In this respect, my identity with regard to my students may be as senpai: someone who has alreadygone through what they are facing.
Christina was keen to get involved in co-editing this issue because learner identities are so
closely intertwined with emotions, which is her main area of research specialisation, that itis difficult (if at all possible) to understand one without the other. In addition, Christina herself has gone through multiple transitions of her learner (and teacher) identities; she therefore
viewed this issue as a unique opportunity to read about colleagues’ and their learners’ identity-related experiences. One reason Yoshi was happy to to co-edit this issue of the Learner Development Journal is that to be a journal editor using his English sounded so challenging, as if hewere asked to do so by his PhD adviser (and co-founder of the LD-SIG) Naoko Aoki. The othermeaningful reason is that as he considers why he got involved in teaching Japanese as a second
language, research on L2 identity is core to these ongoing reflections on his own identity. Twoopposing feelings attracted Jim to be involved in this project: growing acceptance that learner
identities are of fundamental importance to language learners and their teachers together withawareness of his ignorance about issues relating to language learner identity/ies.

Overview
This issue starts, following this Introduction, with an investigation by Ryo Moriya and Ami
Ishizuka of how the self-esteem of language learners changes. Daniel Hooper, Jo Mynard,
Ross Sampson and Phillip Taw focus on the changing identities of the users of a Japanese
university’s English-using social learning space. Caroline Hutchinson addresses learner
identities of students as they live through their first year of English at university, with expectations and opportunities very different from those in high school. Next, reporting on aJapanese language course in Australia, Takuya Kojima and Chihiro Thomson tell how a solitary student challenged their beliefs regarding the validity of aiming to create a communityof practice. Paula Kalaja and Maria Ruohotie-Lyhty highlight the value of narratives both tounderstand and to help develop learner identities, while Masuko Miyahara’s focus is on theimpact on both language learners and researchers of reflections on identities. Andy Barfield

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uses narratives, poems, and visual representations to investigate culturally or linguistically complex learner identities, a reminder that much of our multifaceted language learneridentities may be in opposition to some kind of oppressive, othering normal: a monolingual,monocultural, standard language speaking norm. Noriko Iwasaki, too, uses language portraits to help learners record changes in national or linguistic identities as they experience thechallenges of studying abroad. Kie Yamamoto focuses on one Japanese learner’s experience ofstudying abroad and the confusing and liberating challenges to her identity brought throughthis experience. Finally, Ana Mari Ferreira Barcelos draws everything together through thelenses of language learner beliefs and emotions.

Editor BiosYoshio Nakai is Assistant Professor at Doshisha University and promotes collaborative learning in his teaching in order to help learners of Japanese as a second language to be moreautonomous and more reflective on their learning and themselves. For his PhD research, heanalyzed learners’ motivation using a modified grounded theory approach and illustrated theprocess of construction of motivation schematically. Now he researches autonomy and identity of language learners and users through qualitative narrative approach. Moreover, he tries
to discover issues in a Japanese society through reflective dialogue with linguistic minorities.
E-mail: uminchufunto@gmail.com
Dr Christina Gkonou is Associate Professor of TESOL and MA TESOL Programme Leader inthe Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, UK. She is also Deputy
Director of Education in the same Department. She convenes postgraduate modules on teacher education and development, and on psychological aspects surrounding the foreign language learning and teaching experience. She is the co-editor of New Directions in LanguageLearning Psychology (with Sarah Mercer and Dietmar Tatzl) and New Insights into Language
Anxiety: Theory, Research and Educational Implications (with Jean-Marc Dewaele and Mark
Daubney), and co-author of MYE: Managing Your Emotions Questionnaire (with Rebecca L.
Oxford). Her new book, entitled The Emotional Rollercoaster of Language Teaching (co-editedwith Jean-Marc Dewaele and Jim King) will be out in June 2020. E-mail: gkono@essex.ac.uk
Jim Ronald is one of many professors in the Department of English at Hiroshima Shudo University. He holds a PhD in Vocabulary Acquisition from Swansea University. His goal in histeaching, at all levels, is to apply awareness of learner development and pragmatics for thebenefit of the language learners in his care. He is currently working on a collection of pragmatics activities for the classroom, Pragmatics Undercover, due out in early 2020, co-editedwith Gerald Talandis, Jr and Donna Fujimoto. E-mail: jmronald@gmail.com

Acknowledgments
First of all, we would like to express our thanks to each of the writers whose papers make up
this issue, and for giving each other feedback at an early stage of their papers: a long journeythat asked a lot of each person. We appreciate you! Our heartfelt thanks, too, to the wonderful
Learner Development Journal Review Network team—Sabine Little, Thomas Bieri, Michelle
Golledge, Ted O’Neill, Akiko Takagi, Katherine Thornton, Fumiko Murase, Hugh Nicoll, Alice
Chik, and Colin Rundle—for going the extra mile in helping the authors, and us, make thisissue better. To the journal’s steering group—Darren Elliott, Alison Stewart, Tim Ashwell,and Dominic Edsall—thank you for your guidance, input, dedication. We needed steering!
And Andy Barfield, this issue is all the better for your input—thank you. Finally, our thanks
to Malcolm Swanson for the skills, care, and patience that you have brought to the layout anddesign of this third issue of the Learner Development Journal.
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