Beginning in April 2020, the Japanese government continued its English education language policy reform by introducing foreign language instruction as an academic subject for Grade 5 and Grade 6 students. The purpose of this study was to investigate how stakeholders across the education system have contended with policy creation, policy interpretation, and policy appropriation in public elementary school classrooms. Using a conceptual framework of ethnography of language policy and open systems theory, this multiple case study was designed to investigate policy as text, policy as discourse, and policy as classroom practice. In order to achieve these aims I used qualitative methods of data collection that included content analysis of policy documents, and interviews with national policymakers, educational authorities from local Boards of Education, school principals, and classroom teachers. In addition, observations of English lessons at three public elementary schools within the same prefecture were analyzed to understand how the schools approached policy implementation and how close did the teachers’ appropriation of EFL lessons correspond with the goals of the 2020 Course of Study. The 2020 Elementary School Course of Study established English as an academic subject for students in Grades 5 and 6. An analysis of the policy documents revealed positive changes in the realignment of the purpose and aims of education from elementary school through high school. In addition, the 2020 Course of Study introduces an updated assessment framework for teaching and learning across all subjects for elementary school, junior high school and high school. However, how English is conceptualized and integrated into the national curriculum appears in places not to match some of the new aims of the 2020 Course of Study and uses ambivalent terms, such as language activities with little guidance for teachers on how to teach English. The interviews with participants provided insights from various stakeholders on their beliefs and experiences towards educational language policy creation, transmission, and implementation. A total of 72 interviews were conducted for this study. National-level policymakers and advisors spoke of the politics during policy formulation. In addition, discursive struggles between conservative and progress views of education and foreign language education also influenced policymakers’ objectives. A discourse of expertise, which restricted agency and voice for certain participants, also emerged from the interview data. All of these points and others created a situation where policy implementation took on a form of bricolage. During the 17 months of field work at the three participating schools, 58 lessons were observed, recorded, and analyzed. The findings from the classroom observations revealed that each school’s approach to implementing English as a subject in Grades 5 and 6 changed each year. Teachers had difficulties navigating shifting discourses towards English lessons, along with understanding new and ambiguous terminology towards teaching practices and assessment. The findings showed that teachers were generally meeting the goals of the 2020 English Course of Study; however, the teaching of reading and listening were problematic for many teachers. The discussion section comprises implications for future policy creation and implementation, classroom pedagogy, and the theoretical implications. The intended audience for this investigation includes stakeholders interested in applied linguistics, language policy and planning, comparative education, and Japanese studies. This study contributes to the research on educational language policy and our understanding that policy is more than declaring and seeking particular outcomes, but a consistently evolving process with conflicting discourses and ideologies. This study adds to our understanding how the structure of Japan’s education system and the social organization of the schools can enable and inhibit certain stakeholders positioned across the education system. Lastly, this study contributes to our understanding of what it means to be an English teacher in Japan’s public elementary school schools. / Applied Linguistics

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This study is a longitudinal, qualitative, interpretive inquiry into the work motivation of four novice EFL teachers at public secondary schools in Japan. I employed constructivism as my philosophical framework and narrative inquiry as my primary methodological tool, and attempted to capture the four young teachers’ changing motivation as embedded in their life histories and teaching trajectories over their first two years of teaching. The narratives of the four participants, constructed mainly from the multiple interviews, revealed various kinds of tensions in their transitions from student to teacher. Such tensions included a chasm between classroom realities and their beliefs, conflicts between collegiality and individuality, and also tensions that derived from the inherent nature of teaching such as uncertainty, extensive range of duties, and reflection on the self. In varying degrees and frequencies, all these tensions damaged the participants’ occupational motivation, demonstrating the vulnerable side of novice teachers’ motivation. The same narratives, however, also displayed a completely opposite feature of young teachers’ motivation: resilience. In the midst of the adverse circumstances, the participants continued to engage in the profession, sometimes restoring their motivation through interactions with students and colleagues, and other times returning to their original goals and ambitions. Among various sources of the sturdiness of their motivation, what was unique to novice teachers was a sense of discovery (Huberman, 1993). The four teachers’ discoveries included not only learning about teaching techniques or social norms but also new understandings of themselves as a teacher, and as a person. Although the process of negotiating and reshaping their self-concepts (Dörnyei, 2005, 2009; Markus & Nurius, 1986) disturbed their emotions and damaged their motivation temporarily, all four participants exhibited robustness of their self-concepts and motivation when they rediscovered their motivational goals at a higher level of self-awareness. The four young teachers’ narratives invite authorities such as policy makers, teacher educators, school administrators, and researchers to seek ways to support the growth of young teachers more effectively. In my conclusion, I suggest several measures to reduce the amount of tension and pressure to ease novice teachers’ entry into secondary school teaching. / CITE/Language Arts

Research has shown increasing interest in the influence of learner psychology on second language acquisition (e.g. Ellis, 2019; MacIntyre, Gregersen & Mercer, 2019). This research has demonstrated that motivation, focus, and feelings of autonomy and self-efficacy are particularly important in creating the necessary conditions for learning to occur (e.g. Dörnyei, 2009; Norton & Toohey, 2011; Piniel & Csizér, 2016; Robinson, 1995, 1997). When these factors converge, a learner can experience flow, which has been described as the “optimal experience” of engagement (Csíkszentmihályi, 1975, 1990, 2008) and has been linked to language learning success (Hong et al., 2017). Existing research has shown that student-centered, open-ended, authentic, and competitive activities tend to generate more flow than their opposites (Egbert, 2003; Zuniga & Rueb, 2018). However, these studies are scarce and have focused on a very limited quantity of immediate language-class activities, thus excluding many other possible flow experiences from consideration. To expand this line of research, this study seeks to determine what types of language-class activities generate the most flow, as well as which of the theorized psychological components of flow are most strongly associated with such experiences. Eighty-two North American undergraduate, intermediate-level (estimated CEFR B1/ACTFL intermediate mid-high) students of French, Italian, German, and Spanish completed a questionnaire about their lifetime language-learning experiences. First, the participants rated a list of activities on perceived overall flow using a Likert scale. Next, they rated the same activities on four theorized psychological components of flow (enjoyment, focused attention, control, positive challenges) also on a Likert scale (Csíkszentmihályi 1975, 1990, 2008; Egbert, 2003; Zuniga & Rueb, 2018). Finally, they answered open-ended questions about salient language-class experiences. The results of this study support the hypothesis that student-centered, open-ended, authentic, and competitive activities would generate more flow than their opposites (teacher-centered, closed-ended, inauthentic, and non-competitive). The results also revealed that enjoyment and challenges best predict flow. While competitive activities were shown to be particularly strong flow generators in the quantitative analysis, the qualitative analysis of the open-ended survey responses showed student-centered activities to be particularly associated with high-flow experiences, though usually in conjunction with other flow-generating categories. When taken together, these results suggest that, in order to create learning-favorable conditions through flow, teachers should use activities that belong to as many flow-generating categories as possible while also paying special attention to students’ perceptions of enjoyment and the challenges-skills balance. / Spanish

This study is a longitudinal study that investigated the development of English oral proficiency—complexity, accuracy, and fluency—under the pre-task and on-line planning conditions with task repetition among Japanese high school students. This study is unique because it is longitudinal and includes qualitative data. The participants were 15 Japanese high school students whose English proficiency level is categorized as low proficiency. Narrative tasks, post-task questionnaires, journals, and interviews were used in this study. In the narrative tasks, they were asked to describe a four-picture story three times with two minutes planning time, when they were allowed to listen to an ALT (assistant language teacher) tell the story and take notes. They completed a post-task questionnaire and a journal after completing the task. Interviews were conducted two times to further investigate their questionnaire responses and what they wrote in their journal entries. The results showed that low proficiency learners increased oral fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and syntactic accuracy through repeating the same task within a single session, and syntactic complexity and lexical complexity through repeating the same type of task during the academic year. The aural input between the first, second, and third performance can lead them to draw their attention to form-meaning connections, resulting in increased oral performance. In addition, low and intermediate beginners benefited in increasing oral fluency, syntactic complexity, and syntactic accuracy, while high beginners benefited in improving oral fluency and lexical complexity under pre-task and on-line planning conditions with repetition during the academic year. The study suggests that the combined use of pre-task planning, on-line planning, and task repetition have a cumulative effect and can facilitate the development of oral fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and syntactic accuracy for low proficiency high school learns of English. If learners are given the opportunity to plan before and during task performance with repetition, and to make the condition that draws their attention to both form and meaning, it is the most effective strategy to improve oral fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and syntactic accuracy in task-based teaching in the classrooms. / Language Arts

The Swedish curriculum is and has been evolving for as long as it has existed. Since 1994 the communicative proficiency has been one of the most central aspects of the English subject in Swedish elementary school. However, an ever-evolving issue is the increasing Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) and Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) among pupils. This causes difficulties in the development of communicative proficiency. This literary review aims to find aspects of the educational situation which can be altered to decrease pupils FLA and FLCA. This paper has a basis of five articles and one thesis which have been reviewed and analyzed. The results show several aspects which can have an impact on pupils FLA and FLCA. One of which being that students are less anxious when they feel that mistakes are a natural part of the learning process. Another aspect that can decrease pupils' FLA or FLCA is when they can experience their proficiency evolving. For this development to occur the amount of time spent learning the subject is central. The conclusion of this paper brings forward several both social and organizational factors that can be altered in favor of the pupils feeling less FLA and FLCA. / Kursplanen i engelska har under de senaste 40 åren fokuserat mer ochmer på den kommunikativa förmågan. Samtidigt har elevers ängslankring att kommunicera på engelska ökat. Att elever upplever en ökadForeign Language Anxiety (FLA) och Foreign Language ClassroomAnxiety (FLCA) skapar ökade utmaningar för att i klassrummet kunnautveckla elevernas kommunikativa förmåga. Under dennalitteraturöversikt undersöks och problematiseras hur elevers FLApåverkas av tidig språkstart, men även hur man kan planeraundervisningen för att minska FLA in klassrummet. För att besvaradessa frågor har artiklar och avhandlingar sökts fram i flertaletdatabaser. Resultatet som framkommer är att elevers FLA och FLCAminskar då de inser att misstag är centrala för språkinlärningensamt att deras förmågor utvecklas med tiden. Det framkommer även attelever har en större språklig utveckling av att börja med engelska tidigt,dock är det inte fastställt att detta har med åldern på eleverna att göradå det även kan bero på fler undervisningstimmar. Sammanfattningsvisbeskrivs både sociala och organisatoriska aspekter avundervisningssituationen som är centrala att överväga för att påverkaelevers FLA och FLCA.

Anyone who has been learning a new language knows the feeling of anxiety when facedwith the task to use it in the classroom and in real life. Foreign Language Anxiety isconcept developed by Horwitz et al. (1986) to describe and measure this specific form ofanxiety. In this study, the anxiety levels of a class of Chinese senior middle schoolstudents taking an English class have been measured. The levels were measuredaccording to the Foreign Language Anxiety Scale, developed by Horwitz et al. (1986). 59informants participated in the study. The data were analysed to find which factors invokethe most anxiety. To gather qualitative data and gain further insight, two sets of groupinterviews were performed. The results show that a majority of the students suffer fromanxiety in class. Teacher-generated anxiety seems to be the most provoking factoraccording to the analysis. / Alla som har studerat ett främmande språk känner igen den ängslan man upplever närspråket ska användas i klassrummet eller i en autentisk situation. Språkängslan införfrämmande språk är ett begrepp som utvecklats av Horwitz et al. (1986) för att beskrivaoch mäta den här specifika formen av ängslan. I den här studien har nivån av ängslan ien kinesisk högstadieklass som studerar engelska mätts. Nivån har mätts i enlighet medskalan för språkängslan i samband med undervisning i främmande språk (författarensöversättning) utvecklad av Horwitz et al. (1986). 59 informanter deltog i studien. Datananalyserades för att se vilka faktorer som framkallar mest ängslan. För att samlakvalitativ data och få djupare insyn genomfördes också två gruppintervjuer. Resultatetvisar att en majoritet av studenterna lider av ängslan i klassrummet. Lärargenereradängslan är den mest bidragande faktorn enligt analysen.