Acceso usuarios
Mayu Konakahara
This paper investigates how two Japanese informants who completed a 15-week specialised course in Global Englishes (GE) developed their attitudes towards English and intercultural communication over time through their post-instruction experiences. While recent theories of multilingualism highlight the multilingual, fluid, and emergent nature of English as a lingua franca, this nature is not reflected in language attitude research because it frequently examines static responses elicited from aggregates of participants at a single point in time. Additionally, although the positive impact of GE-oriented instruction on students’ attitudes towards English has been reported, its long-term effects remain unexplored. This paper aims to fill these gaps through a longitudinal case study of the two Japanese informants’ attitudinal development over four to five years. The qualitative analysis of diary entries and interview responses found that both informants generally enhanced inclusive attitudes, including a favorable view of ‘non-native’ English accents and an emphasis on message delivery. However, the informant with an inferiority complex about her pronunciation since childhood continued to devalue Japanese-accented English, while another informant, identified as having ‘good’ pronunciation since childhood, showed communicative capability, flexibly navigating between grammatical correctness and communicative effectiveness depending on communicative needs. The paper elaborates on these points.
