Plurilingual Education in a Monolingualised Nation

Book excerpt: This book explores alternative approaches to foreign language education in a context which is traditionally dominated by English-only approaches, and widely viewed as highly monolingual. It examines the grassroots classroom practices of teachers and their assistants involved in plurilingual education in the first longitudinal research of its type in the Japanese context. These practices are grounded in depictions of the practitioners’ personal and professional trajectories through explorations of their visual linguistic autobiographies. The holistic ethnography thus deepens understanding of plurilingualism in a hitherto underexplored context, and should be of interest to students and researchers of language teaching, teacher training, language policy, sociolinguistics and plurilingualism.