Uncovering the ideologies of internationalization in lesson plans through critical discourse analysis

The Japanese government has made kokusaika, questionably translated as "internationalization," a cornerstone of all aspects of education, though the concept is particularly linked to foreign language study. However, official ideologies are not always directly translated into the ideologies present in classroom practice. In order to examine how the ideologies linked to kokusaika are or aren't enacted in university English classes in Japan, this project examines a large corpus of lesson plans published between 2011 and 2016 in The Language Teacher, the primary journal for the Japan Association for Language Teaching. Using a critical discourse analysis lens along with the tools of corpus linguistics, it was found that even though the issue of internationalization was rarely raised directly, nonetheless the discourse as a whole did perpetuate a number of the attitudes linked to kokusaika policy. In addition, a close analysis of lesson plans where the topic was raised provides insight into how specific linguistic and pedagogical choices on the part of the authors and editors can result in widely differing ideological consequences.