Gibsonian ecological approach implies that language activities, like all vital activities of living creatures, have a transactional relationship with their ecosystem(van Lier 2004). One's language development, is intimately linked to the perceived needs and opportunities in an ever-changing space around the learner. The approach is ontologically compatible with posthumanist applied linguistics (Pennycook 2018).

Inspired by an ecological perspective on language learning, this presentation discusses the life story narratives of two Japanese adults who spent their childhood years in English-speaking cities in Southeast Asia but did not become speakers of the arguably privileged language, English. The long and multiple life-story interviews were zoom-recorded, fully transcribed, and thematized, which resulted in maps of participants’ rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) language development marked by turning points, or nodes, which developed by negotiation with their spatio-temporal environment.

Kamata-san, male, 50, was a successful branch manager at a Japanese mega-bank. Returning from a Southeast Asian city after two years in elementary school, he rejoined his peer group in rural Japan without being marked as a returnee. Kamata-san had a generally successful life at school and work without speaking English. Edano-san, a 28-year-old office worker, also lived in an English speaking environment for two years when she was a preschooler. Her parents prioritized her impending schooling back in Japan, thus, did not enforce much English. While she later felt inferior about her spoken English, she did well in the competitive Japanese school system.

The life experiences narrated by Kamata-san and Edano-san were rich in episodes of learning new social languages (Gee 1996) , which the participants perceived as necessary for the maintenance and continuation of their well-being in time and place. In contrast, English as a named language valued in the discourse of globalization was not perceived as an affordance in the ecology of either participant.