Language policy often prescribes a nation's collective identity. This inquiry tries to grasp the ways in which people perform the nationhood ideology in identity construction as to language policy. The paper examines the construction of attitudes and identity amidst the local and global flows of English. The data were generated as expository essays by Japanese university students. Discursive psychology was employed to assay the data. The finding proposes the policy and popular discourses on English do interact with each other, while people actively exercising agency in constructing their identity. The paper closes, noting that the popular discourse reveals the sign of emergent post‐national consciousness within a nation‐state society.