Academic Writing in a Japanese Situation: Drawing on the Design Perspective towards an Affirmation of English as a Lingua Franca

The contents of this article concern ELF 500, a course in graduate school academic writing that adopts an ELF-aware approach. In my discussion, I will first review the literature on language, ideology and power as it relates to Japanese cultural politics. Following this, I will draw on the notions of critique and design as described in Lillis (2003) as critical transformative strategies to encourage student academic writers to become more conscious of: (1) the constructed and situated nature of knowledge and meaning making as viewed by scholars in the area of academic literacies; (2) the importance of their own agency towards realizing their potential as academic thinkers and writers; and (3) the importance of understanding the fluid, dynamic and performative nature of English in its role as a lingua franca as a means towards constructing meanings that are valuable and unique to their own emergent ontologies as Japanese users of ELF. My discussion is, throughout, very much motivated by a professional concern that the teaching of academic writing should be carried out within an overall pedagogical framework that recognizes the importance of the humanizing and transformative role of language education.