The dominance of English in academic discourses is well established, with increased English publication used to evidence its increasing use at the expense of national language publication. However, while English publication frequency has increased over time, few studies have examined how university faculties outside higher education's Anglophone center have changed their language of publication frequency. Thus, in this investigation, we analyzed a Japanese national university's medical faculty's overall frequency of publication along with publication frequency by language medium, expanding on an earlier diachronic analysis of university publication reports. We previously found English language publications largely replaced Japanese language publications for journal articles and that overall publication frequency dramatically increased. However, that initial diachronic analysis did not show when those changes manifested. The current investigation explores this through a decennial time trend historical document analysis of publication reports from 1979 to 2020. This analysis elucidates how publication frequency, type, and language medium have changed. Specifically, we find that the largest change in the overall frequency of publication is between 1989-1990 and 1999-2000. These changes are primarily driven by conference papers and other publications, publication types not typically examined in analyses of journal citation databases. Our findings establish a foundation to discuss potential causes of the trends we identify in this Japanese national university's medical faculty's publications.

We investigate how competing forces interdiscursively manifest in Japan-based higher education through a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1993, 1995). Higher education job advertisements are constitutive of institutions' public images that are targeted toward academics in specific fields. They are discursive spaces where marketized discourse has colonized previously dominant discourses of universities as independent authorities (Fairclough, 1993, 1995). Such marketized discourses within higher education express neoliberal ideologies and free-market conventions (Ball, 1998; Pack, 2018). However, the international extent of university discourse marketization is largely implicitly assumed rather than empirically examined, hence we investigate these forces with respect to Japanese higher education.

In this investigation we use keyword analysis to critically analyze higher education discourse, specifically job advertisements. Using two sets of advertisements, one from Japan-based and another from US-based institutions, we examine what is indexed (Blommaert, et al., 2015) in the advertisements, considering how those indexes are differentially scaled by each. We discuss these scales (Blommaert, et al., 2015) from the viewpoint of the process of the advertisements’ creation as encompassing multiple stakeholders and discourses that intersect with different degrees of tension and agreement. These tensions manifest in the advertisements through how they differentially scale the concepts they index. Finally, we consider the implications of our analysis for understanding higher education discourse. Specifically, this analysis helps reveal how antiracist, or “woke,” inclusionary ideologies expressed in the advertisements tend to use formulaic language that signals their relatively low priority scaling relative to the other features (Khaitova & Muller, 2022) that they index.

Despite increasing demands to publish in English, publishing in private publishing houses’ small number of prestige journals remains a benchmark of journal and manuscript quality. How such journals have responded to increasing demand for English language publication has been well-documented. However, the perspectives of editors working in non-prestige journals not affiliated with large, private publishing houses remain underrepresented, particularly concerning academic editorial work. To better present a diversity of editors’ perceptions, this collaborative autoethnography explored the views of five applied linguistics and TESOL journal editors working in journals unaffiliated with private publishing houses. Issues explored included our respective journals’ struggle to compete, such as in bibliometric assessment and maintaining quality review processes. Our explorative narratives of editorial perceptions revealed issues internal and external to journal editorial practice. Internally, ‘quality’ in blind and non-blind reviewing, evaluation criteria, reviewer bias, and field-specific norms of academic writing were problematized. Externally, issues of open access, author publication fees, bibliometric indexing, and our journals’ positionings in their fields were raised. We believe that sharing our views through this collaborative narrativization can help broaden understanding of editorial practices and, by highlighting issues of interest to editors more broadly, can help to foster a sense of common purpose.

This manuscript uses a joint autoethnographic methodology to explore the experiences of two language teacher scholars working in the academy outside the global centre in Japan. Emphasis is given to how the methodology used, cycles of reflective writing, reveals commonalities and differences in our respective experiences of working in the Japanese academy. Our accounts are interlinked with literature on global flows of labour and the marginalized position of non-Japanese within the Japanese academy. We present our reflective methodology as a tool of empowerment that allows for otherwise marginalized voices to be explored, heard, and shared with the larger academic community.

Studies into multilingual, ‘periphery’ scholars’ experiences of English publication for academic purposes suggest that they face a number of obstacles in seeking publication in EFL and applied linguistics language journals (Belcher, 2007; Canagarajah, 1996). Some journals located outside of the Anglophone center have sought to adapt their review processes to be more accommodating toward these generally less experienced, potentially ‘off-networked’ (Swales, 1996: 45) scholars (Nunn and Adamson, 2007; Adamson and Muller, 2012). Yet the literature to date tends to approach this topic from one of two perspectives; exploring the editorial, journal review process from the perspective of editors (Adamson, 2012; Belcher, 2007) or author-focused explorations of writing for academic publication practice (Lillis and Curry, 2010; Okamura, 2006). This paper seeks to bridge this gap by outlining the efforts of one Asian-based journal, Asian EFL Journal, to raise awareness among reviewers and editors of the needs of multilingual scholars and data from an investigation into Japan-based authors’ practices of writing for academic publication. How our findings can inform journal policy and implications for reviewing practice more broadly in light of reviewer and author experiences is considered.

This chapter presents a pedagogical investigation of three students’ written reflections on a short Medical English course taught at a Japanese public university. This research has several complimentary objectives. One is to examine what insights the students’ written reflections offer into their agency as enacted in (and in response to) the course. Another is to determine whether and to what extent the course goals of promoting criticality were accomplished. A final objective is to evaluate the efficacy of the research methods employed here – examination of students’ reflective assignment writing as a means of revealing in-course, in-context agency and development, particularly over short spans of time.

There has been considerable debate regarding how to introduce new language in the task-based classroom, yet the nature of language scaffolding as it influences student classroom production and ultimate uptake remains largely unexplored, despite some research interest in the topic (Boston, 2008). This chapter addresses the issue by exploring, through discourse analysis, two different means of scaffolding, one materials mediated student-student interaction and the other teacher-mediated student-student and teacher-student interaction. Through two different Japan-based classrooms, we examine how the means of mediating communication in those classes appears to influence classroom discourse, and outline issues pertinent to scaffolding in the language classroom.

I wanted to introduce task based learning to my small class of false beginners at a private English school in Japan, to give them more opportunities to speak. In this chapter I explain how I adapted a vocabulary-focused lesson from the Presentation Practice Production (PPP)-based textbook that I was using, and suggest some ideas for other tasks that can be generated from non-TBL textbooks.