Learning Japanese as an Additional Language: An Investigation into Second Language IdentityDevelopme

Given the pressure on learners to achieve high secondlanguageproficiency, one question worth asking is, what arethe consequencesof additional language on the sense of self? Toexperience personalityand emotion, hold values and to display norms of thehost society, eventhe desire to assimilate into a target culture arenot influence free. Thisbook attempts to make a contribution by investigatingthe social,linguistic and philosophical dimensions that promoteJapaneselanguage learning. The four purposes of the studymotivated aqualitative approach using an edited topical lifehistory technique tocollect data. Four Caucasian Australian women and twoCaucasianAustralian men where chosen from a pool of Japaneselanguagelearners using Japanese in the workplace. Emergingfrom the analysisof the data comes the term 'identity slippage' whichis discussedthroughout the book.