Using L2 socialization theory as a theoretical framework, this book investigates the ways in which four learners of Japanese exercise their agency to pursue their learning goals and documents how the diverse ways in which they do so form different trajectories of learning and create different experiences of L2 socialization.

Chie Muramatsu holds a PhD in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Iowa, USA and has worked as a teacher and lecturer in Japanese, most recently at Stanford University, USA. Within the fields of second language acquisition, her work focuses on Japanese as a foreign language and her particular interest is in narrative inquiry, the stories of second language learners and the dynamic yet intimate interplay between their personal variables and the social world in which they live.