According to the teachers, correctness was not fixed to the language; rather, its context wasa significant determinant of it.

Three out of the six teachers described the importance of correctness in the Japanese language inrelation to formal settings and different levels of formality.

All six participants considered the Japanese language to be linguistically and culturally diverse inrelation to place and culture. For example, Yamada sensei, a teacher from the Chubu region, focusedon the specificity of language practices, widening this out from Japanese to all languages, and notingthe variation that distances can cause. The cultural background was inextricable from regionallanguage practices, and he made this point a number of times during the interview and emailexchanges

Overall, it appeared that language was understood by the teachers in relation to both diversity andstandardisation, which were often inextricably intertwined. This will be addressed with regard tolanguage awareness associated with Japanese language diversity, English language diversity, and thecontext of ELT.

n Europe, LA has been employed as a pedagogical approach to improve education in schools (Hélotet al., 2018). It takes into account the growing diversity of languages spoken by students, which areregarded as students’ full linguistic repertoire through which knowledge is shared. LA researchers (e.g.,Hélot et al., 2018; Putjata, 2018) have studied language practices in multilingual classrooms wherestudents speak different languages at home. In contrast, Japanese high school classrooms are generallyconsidered to be “monolingual” where students speak the same language at school and home. However,research on multilingualism in Japan disagrees with this “monolingual” assumption (Fujita-Round,2019; Maher & Yashiro, 1995; Shoji, 2019). Likewise, this study adopts LA to investigate language,language practices, and speakers in the field of ELT in Japan from a holistic perspective.

Before the monolingual assumption—that everyone in Japan speaks the same language—becameprevalent, Japan was considered to be linguistically diverse (Gottlieb, 2005). Under the TokugawaShogunate (1603–1867), Japan was divided into 250 autonomous domains called “han” where localdialects flourished