earticle

영어

As globalization in the society advances, the language environment in Japan has become more and more diverse, reflected by the increasing number of communicative situations in languages other than Japanese. It is obvious that many of the foreign residents in Japan are transnational in nature and this may have affected their linguistic repertoires as well as their awareness on language use. The present paper analyses the findings of a questionnaire conducted in 2014 and 2015 in order to find out how migrants in Japan, particularly international students in this paper, use and evaluate languages in various types of situations, and what kinds of communication problems they face. Altogether, answers from 71 international students in a university in the Tokyo metropolitan area were analyzed. This paper presents the findings related to their language use by looking at how they self-evaluate their Japanese language ability and their linguistic profiles.