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ABSTRACT Focusing on the narratives of two Japanese undergraduate students, this article examines their everyday experiences of using and learning English, situated within entangled relations of power. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of discourse, the study reveals how multiple power/knowledge systems—such as native speakerism, prescriptivism, English as a lingua franca, and English as symbolic capital—shape the participants’ investment in English. These discourses do not operate in isolation or as free choices but rather emerge as multiple realities in which English takes on different meanings (or ontologies) and imposes real‐life consequences on the participants. By investigating bottom‐up power dynamics in everyday language practices, this study elucidates how English learners/users are both embedded in and reproduce power/knowledge. We call for greater scholarly and pedagogical attention to local entanglements of discourses and ontologies that mediate language learners’ experiences and identity negotiations.
Tanaka et al. (Tue,) studied this question.