To Align or Disalign: Navigating Japanese First-Person Pronouns from the Classroom and Beyond

First-person singular pronouns in Japanese act as a salient tool for identity construction. Japanese speakers have dozens of pronoun options available to them, with each indexing manifolds of pragmatic information such as masculinity/femininity, assertiveness, and social distance. Despite this, Japanese second-language (L2) classrooms typically take an over-simplistic and prescriptivist approach to Japanese speech styles, begging the question of how those who have learned the language primarily through classroom instruction are able to navigate such a highlypragmatic pronominal system, especially when existing literature overwhelmingly focuses on L2 speakers who have experience in full-immersion settings. To address these discrepancies, I conducted a focus group with five English-speaking classroom learners of Japanese. By taking a grounded approach and subsequently coding the data for affective stances, I found that certain stance-takings allowed participants to either align, or disalign with the pronoun choices that were taught to them in the classroom. It was additionally found that the intersubjective tactics which shaped participants’ pronoun choices were highly contextual and learner-dependent, with the symbolic authoritative power of academic institutions playing a crucial role in hindering not only L2 identity construction but also L2 identity exploration. As such, this study calls for critical pedagogy where classroom learners are empowered, rather than prescribed the L2 identities they are able to negotiate.