Learning Japanese As an Additional Language: an Investigation into Second Language Identitydevelopment

Given the pressure on learners to achieve high secondlanguage proficiency, one question worth asking is, what arethe consequences of additional language on the sense of self? Toexperience personality and emotion, hold values and to display norms of thehost society, even the desire to assimilate into a target culture arenot influence free. This book attempts to make a contribution by investigatingthe social, linguistic and philosophical dimensions that promoteJapanese language learning. The four purposes of the studymotivated a qualitative approach using an edited topical lifehistory technique to collect data. Four Caucasian Australian women and twoCaucasian Australian men where chosen from a pool of Japaneselanguage learners using Japanese in the workplace. Emergingfrom the analysis of the data comes the term 'identity slippage' whichis discussed throughout the book.