42早稲田教育評論 第 36 巻第１号Brown, 2017）.With the growing need for support for struggling EMI students, previous studies have identified EMI student needs. Tahara et al. （2021） identified the difficulties of class tasks and their occurring frequencies in EMI. They discovered that one top challenging task is spontaneous speaking in their second language （L2） English, such as refuting the instructor’s opinions in English, discussing the content of the academic subject with the entire class, and presenting the content of group discussions to the entire class. Other studies that have investigated students whose English proficiency level is around 500 on TOEFL ITP have also found that spontaneous L2 speaking was one of the top perceived difficulties or the lowest in their self-evaluation （Kudo et al., 2017; Matsumura, 2020; Suzuki et al., 2017）. These studies have revealed the difficulties Japanese students face in EMI classes, which are generally assumed to be associated with distress. However, the ways in which difficulties in EMI are linked to distress are still unknown.Concerning distress, previous studies have associated spontaneous L2 speaking difficulty with anxiety （Horwitz et al., 1986） in the Japanese EMI context （e.g., Kudo et al., 2017）. However, anxiety itself is not distress. While anxiety is “the most misunderstood affective variable” （Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015, p. 177）, much research in SLA has concluded that L2 anxiety brings about both inhibitory and facilitative consequences （Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014）. For example, while anxiety negatively affects various stages of language use, anxiety may induce an increase in effort as a response （MacIntyre, 2002）. In other words, anxiety can be a positive or a negative stressor depending on an individual’s perception. Meanwhile, apart from anxiety, there are also other emotions such as embarrassment and frustration that seem to be relevant in understanding EMI students’ distress. Therefore, this paper attempts to demonstrate how these emotions, including anxiety, evolve into distress. I define distress as “a type of stress that results from being overwhelmed by demands, losses, or perceived threats” （American Psychological Association, n.d.） and that brings about damaging consequences. Understanding EMI students’ distress deserves more attention as it can detriment their engagement in EMI studies.Since there is scarce literature on EMI students’ difficulty in terms of distress despite its compelling need, this paper aims to understand EMI students’ spontaneous L2 speaking difficulty in terms of their distress. The study takes a narrative-oriented case study approach, exploring a narrative of a focal student who experiences critically detrimental distress concerning spontaneous L2 speaking, while also providing context from other data sources such as weekly student journals and class observation data. Narrative refers to “a discrete unit of discourse, an extended answer by a research participant to a single question, topically centered and temporally organized” （Riessman, 2008, p. 5）. By taking a narrative-oriented approach, the purpose of this study is to illuminate the lived experience of the focal student’s distress.This study takes the second language socialization （SLS, as a field in applied linguistics） Theoretical Perspectives
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