1.2 Key terms

The concepts of native and non-native speaker（hereafter NS and NNS）have widely penetrated into both social life and academic fields. In English teacher employment，for example，a large number of institutions list “native speaker of English” as one necessary requirement. The implicit message of this principle is “we need an American or British” rather than “we need an expert in language teaching”. Native speakers are assumed to have perfect language competence and should be definitely superior to non-native speakers.

In many research studies，it has been observed that without considering the potential effect of these NS and NNS labels，there runs a risk of blending ethnic categories and linguistic competence. Rampton（1990）criticizes the NS and NNS terms are embedded with an implicit discrimination which prioritizes the ethnic factor rather than the language competence，ignoring the variety of language learning background. Rampton（1990：98）adopts the perspective of “nobody’s functional command is total：users of a language are more proficient in some areas than others”，and he instead proposes two new terms：expertise and affiliation. Although the term “expertise” does not cover the ways in which language can stand as symbol of social group identification，it broke the mystique of NS and NNS concepts. This shifting from “who you are” to “what you know” establishes the ideological foundation of language education. It releases the learners from unachievable NS model to more realistic goal. More important，it offers our society a more equal standard to evaluate education outcomes and to treat individuals fairly.

The present study investigates the relationship between identity and second language use. I first define two terms：identity and the second language user. The term “identity” is defined in deliberately broad and open-minded，“Identity is the social positioning of self and other”（Bucholtz and Hall，2005：586）. The term “second language user”means those who use an additional language in interaction with others；including both expert and novice. The word “second” neither means the order of acquiring nor to draw a fixed category as to which language is primary and which is secondary but rather it is used to mean an additional language to the primary language in a broad sense. The word “user” is different from “learner” which does not focus on learning，but on using.

For the consideration of investigation，the language that participants acquired in a multi-lingual environment are not considered as second language. For example，one participant is Tasha who had lived in Ukraine before she came to Japan at the age of 20. She speaks both Russian and Ukrainian at home. She had learned English in school education，but she has learned Japanese upon coming to Japan. In Tasha’s case，Russian and Ukrainian are considered her first language and English and Japanese are categorized as her second language. Of course，there are cases that people are born in a multi-lingual environment and acquire multi-language in the environment. In order to limit the scope of this study，these cases are not considered as part of this study.