The Off-Duty Expectations of International Volunteer Language Teachers: A Middling Transnational Perspective

Abstract

This chapter examines the off-duty expectations of three international volunteer Japanese language teachers (JLTs) who were soon to depart for South America, where each volunteer was under contract to teach Japanese as a heritage language in a different Nikkei, or Japanese descendant, community through a government-sponsored program. Drawing on interview data collected during the volunteers’ pre-departure training sessions, the study presented in this chapter outlines how volunteers’ destination choices were largely based on their expectations for language study outside of work. In that sense, these volunteers, or “middling transnationals,” each situated their language teaching volunteer work within the mobile futures they imagined—futures in which knowing particular languages had more or less value for their anticipated lifestyles. This chapter thus shows how volunteer JLTs’ expectations for the ways in which language learning would influence their social and economic trajectories shaped the choices they made about where to teach Japanese. In that sense, volunteer JLTs strategically managed their own language-related resources by (re)producing dominant ideologies about different languages’ use values.