ABSTRACT
An initiative termed “Global 30 Project for Establishing Core Universities for Internationalization” (hereafter G30) in Japan aims for the recruitment of an additional 300,000 international students by 2020 to study in Japan in English, and also aims to send many more Japanese university students overseas than are now studying outside Japan. There are a number of related substantive issues involving globalization, academic mobility, and the development of an active global-minded citizenry through higher education that are inextricably linked in this paper to research how key educational stakeholders at the micro (hereafter local) levels of foreign-English language policy and planning (hereafter ELPP), such as teachers, through their agency as policy-planners, enact language policy, and planning at a private university in Japan. A quasi-ethnographic approach to data sources, interviewing, historical documentation, observations, and narrative will be used to help explore the higher educational experiences and expectations of these stakeholders, and how these experiences and expectations contribute to perceptions and attitudes related to issues of curriculum planning and enactment, with particular regard to how ELPP does or does not connect to higher education internationalization–globalization efforts in Japan. We underline the importance of gathering key local-level stakeholders’ understandings and support of ELPP, as these agents are potential enablers of both macro (hereafter national) and higher educating meso (hereafter institutional)-level innovation and change.
