Ideological becoming through study abroad: Multilingual Japanese students in Turkey

Abstract

Against the background of the current interest in identity in study abroad scholarship in applied linguistics, we focus in this paper on the case of non-Western students enrolled in study abroad programs based in non-Western countries. Drawing on face-to-face interviews with 25 multilingual Japanese undergraduates who studied in Turkey for a year and returned home 3–4 years ago as advanced speakers of Turkish, we problematize the Bakhtinian concept of ideological becoming that students experience as a result of their sojourn. More specifically, we investigate how ideological becoming is constructed across the three languages in the students’ repertoires that are in play in their study abroad experiences: Japanese, Turkish, and English. Our findings demonstrate that ideological becoming in the case of study abroad students concerns multiple languages in which students take active roles drawing on various timescales of their sojourn experience.