Over the period, the researcher conducted a few months of online observation of the SNS platform, namely Instagram, questionnaire surveys, and interviews with online users. The ongoing analysis reveals that Japanese participants using social media exploit their translingual capacity creatively, expressing themselves using rhymes, metaphorical expressions, and other language plays. The analysis of questionnaires and interviews suggests that they often provide different identities depending on the languages. This research in progress embosses the Japanese participants’ creative capacity of using English for self-expressive purposes in the transnational online context.

The textual analysis of Japanese undergraduate students’ creative English use, which is the core of this study, was presented at the Japanese Association for Studies in English Communication (JASEC), The 30th Annual Conference in October 2021. The manuscript of the contribution for JASEC Bulletin Volume 30 on this presentation is currently in progress. In addition, a book review on an edited book about creative writing in the digital age was published in Journal of Literature in Language Teaching volume 11(1). Finally, the abstract for the poster presentation on creative language use and self-presentation in social media was accepted and will be presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 24 in Belgium in 2022.