Power of language ideologies: Challenging the notion of foreign loanwords in Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classroom

In foreign language (FL) classrooms, students are rarely alerted to the politics behind a particular use of words. The recent introduction of critical literacy in some FL classrooms has pushed students to understand the ways texts influence how we perceive and act in society. Nonetheless, some of the basic linguistic notions have yet to be challenged in FL classrooms, preventing critical literacy from achieving its full potential. We examined Kumagai's critical literacy project in an intermediate Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classroom at a college in the north-eastern US. The project encouraged students to question the textbook's prescriptive explanation regarding the use of katakana (a Japanese syllabary system that the textbook explains to be for foreign loanwords). Analysis of classroom interactions and students' reflection papers revealed that the notion of foreign loanword stifled the students' critical thinking. We argue that it is because the notion supports an absolute and static foreign/Japanese distinction, the idea of language as a homogeneous and bounded unit, and marking of only certain ‘foreignness’. We call for FL education to include critiques of taken-for-granted linguistic notions in order to make students become aware of the role that language plays in maintaining or transforming social orders.