TAKEI Mitsuko    Department   Hiroshima shudo University  The Faculty of Global and Community Studies    Position   Professor
Date	2022/03/19
Presentation Theme	Significance and potentials of L2 Japanese learners’ contact with L1 speakers in a virtual “third” space
Conference	2022 AATJ (American Association of Teachers of Japanese) Annual Spring Conference
Promoters	AATJ (American Association of Teachers of Japanese)
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Collaborative
Venue	USA (virtual)
Publisher and common publisher	Mitsuaki Shimojo, Miho Fujiwara and Mitsuko Takei
Details	Over the extraordinary years of 2020 and 2021, Japanese as a foreign language teachers outside of Japan have sought opportunities for their students to interact with L1 speakers of Japanese. They typically look to virtual spaces to realize such contact situations, often dubbed “virtual exchange” (O’Dowd, 2016), mainly because neither incoming nor outgoing mobility is feasible. In the literature, virtual spaces have often been discussed in relation to their thirdness. Since Bhabha (1994) developed the concept in his postcolonial theory, thirdness has been theorized in various disciplines, such as “third culture” in foreign language education (Kramsch, 1993) and as “third place” in urban sociology (Oldenburg, 1999). Dooly (2011) investigated online interaction discourse and identity constructed in a virtual third space. Markiewicz (2019) argued for the notion of a “virtual third place” with the emerging technology that creates a new kind of communication in the virtual space. This study explores how learners of Japanese as a foreign language in U.S. universities perceive their virtual contact experience with L1 speakers in Japan and other learners of Japanese in the U.S. In the small-scale project conducted in November 2021, learners participated in two types of task-based conversation sessions via Zoom, firstly only with L2 learner(s) and then with L1 speaker(s). The post-session survey and interview were designed to investigate the learners’ perception of where the conversation took place in terms of the two situations and how the presence of other (native or non-native) speakers influenced the interaction. A reflexive thematic analysis of the survey/interview data has revealed the learners’ mixed perception of virtual L1 and other L2 speaker contact, which hints at characteristics of thirdness. The results from the analysis will also be discussed to present insights for future virtually designed exchange activities with L1 speakers.