Levi Durbidge

Networked online spaces have emerged as significant sites for language learning, often celebrated for their democratising and collaborative potential. However, these spaces can also reinforce existing power structures and commodify user engagement. This study investigated a large, English-dominant online community dedicated to learning Japanese, analysing how language learning is discussed and understood. Through Thematic and Critical Discourse Analysis of high-engagement posts, the study reveals that the community subscribes to an ethos of ease, efficiency, and enjoyment, largely motivated by interest in Japanese popular culture. The findings show how techno-masculinisation of language learning practices emerges through the intersection of geek culture, masculinities, and cyberlibertarian ideologies, including techno-solutionism. The community's commenting culture constructs learner subjectivities that prioritise consumption and technical optimisation over social interaction, with authority built through participatory dynamics that emphasise detail, systemisation, and digital technology use. The study underscores the importance of critically examining the ideologies and subjectivities produced in online language learning communities, particularly as they reflect broader shifts toward convenience-driven, consumer-oriented paradigms of learning.

There is growing recognition that study abroad is seen as a resource for shaping neoliberal subjects who possess the skills to join a mobile, globalised workforce. While existing research has explored the advantages study abroad offers sojourners in their careers, less attention has been accorded to how individuals experience return contexts in light of these social imaginaries of study abroad. This paper utilises theories of scale and positioning to examine the return experiences of 12 Japanese high-school students who spent a year abroad in various locations. Through qualitative analysis of interviews conducted a year after their return, our findings illustrate how the linguistic resources acquired by the informants abroad were marginalised within the local scale of the return classroom, particularly in languages other than English. Further, the results show how upon return, the informants struggled to occupy legitimate Japanese identities and were instead positioned as outsiders. We therefore argue that the tensions between globalising imaginaries of study abroad and local imaginaries of identity create a disjuncture, with ramifications for sojourners’ desire and ability to maintain multilingual repertoires cultivated abroad. This has implications for both individuals who elect to study abroad and for wider policy aims to develop globally competent workers.

This book argues for a view of study abroad as emergent of, and negotiated through, tensions between localised and globalised imaginaries of language, identity, and place. By examining the experiences of a group of Japanese high school students during, and after, a year embedded in families and schools abroad in countries across Europe, Asia and North and South America, it provides the first in-depth exploration of the role of mobile communications technology in study abroad. This includes its facilitation of strategic language learning, host community participation and the construction of multilingual identities. The student accounts covered in this book explore a number of other critical issues in contemporary study abroad including translanguaging practices, racialized identities, the role of the host family and the status of English as a lingua franca in multilingual environments. The results demonstrate the importance of understanding study abroad and related language learning as intersecting with global flows of people and information.