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Going cosmopolitan, staying national: Identity construction in popular discourses on English as a lingua franca
Author(s) -
Saito Akihiro
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/ijal.12130
Subject(s) - ideology , identity (music) , national identity , agency (philosophy) , sociology , english as a lingua franca , consciousness , lingua franca , language policy , political science , gender studies , media studies , linguistics , social science , epistemology , law , aesthetics , politics , pedagogy , philosophy
Language policy often dictates a nation's collective identity. The aim of the study is to understand the ways in which people perform the nationhood ideology in identity construction as regards language policy. The article explores the construction of attitudes and identity amidst the local and global flows of English. The data were produced as expository essays by Japanese university students. Discursive psychology was used to analyse the data. The finding suggests the policy and popular discourses on English do interact with each other, while people actively exercising agency in constructing their identity. The article closes, noting that the popular discourse evinces the sign of emergent post‐national consciousness within a nation‐state society.