Critical Inquiry in Language Studies Rethinking Nativeness: Toward a Dynamic Paradigm of (Non)Native Speakering (original) (raw)
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Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching, 2019
Within English language teaching (ELT), critical scholarship has paid ever-increasing attention to identity, experience and (in)equity, and thus to privilege-marginalization: where it comes from, how and why it manifests, who (potentially) experiences it, and what might be done to address inequity in (and potentially beyond) the profession. This dialogue is intertwined with broader attempts in the field to account for the complexity of identity and interaction in settings around the globe. In this article I discuss how categorical apprehensions of identity, experience and privilege-marginalization, and approaches to (in)equity, have framed discourse within critical scholarship. I then survey how more recent work has called into question many of the critical “assumptions” (Pennycook, 2001) both shaping and shaped by such theory and inquiry. This scholarship contends that critical lenses predicated upon categories of being, while calling attention to idealized nativeness embedded in ELT, fail to account for the contextualized, sociohistorical negotiation of privilege-marginalization within and transcending communities around the globe. Next, in order to contextualize and unpack these divergent lenses, I provide a review of critical dialogue attending to Japan, both in and beyond ELT, noting in conclusion how privilege-marginalization within ELT is intertwined with the sociohistorical negotiation of “selfhood” and “otherness” pertaining both to Japanese society and Japan and “the world beyond.” I close by briefly commenting on future directions for critical scholarship in ELT, and the challenges facing, and yet to be faced by, its stakeholders.
Towards post-native speakerism: dynamics and shifts
Current Issues in Language Planning, 2018
This book provides an important contribution to the rapidly growing literature on post-nativespeakerist future in language education. The contributors in this volume Towards Post-Native Speakerism: Dynamics and Shifts examine English and Japanese native-speakerism in the Japanese context by providing theoretical and practical perspectives, both at the micro-and macrolevels. The book explores the crucial question of how the role of language teachers will evolve in the future as we move beyond the native-speaker learning model in language education, a topic that has not been yet explored elsewhere in detail. The new insights gained from the chapters of this volume provide a much-needed starting point on how educators can realize a post-native-speakerist future for the language classroom. English teacher-researchers firstly discuss their experiences and challenges they have faced in the classroom and at the institutional level due to the prominence of the native-speaker ideology in English language teaching field in Japan. Japanese teachers of Japanese, similarly, provide insights on how the concepts of 'native-speaker' and 'non-native speaker' are understood and experienced in their field. Finally, the book examines these issues in a wider context on a global scale while it attempts to present solutions and appropriate ways of moving past native-speakerism in language education. The book is divided into four sections. Part one of the book titled 'Individual Teacher-Researcher Narratives Related to Workplace Experience and Language-Based Inclusion/Exclusion' is made up of three chapters. In chapter one, Ng, a Singaporean Professor of English at a Japanese prefectural university, shares his personal journey of how institutional ideology rooted at native-speakerism undermined his professional identity and how he overcame this self-doubt about his professional legitimacy through critical and reflective classroom practices. Ng firstly discusses the subtle processes, such as teaching responsibilities, teaching materials, and differing professional expectations, that perpetuate the unexpressed bias towards nativespeakerism at his institution. He then details the steps he took, including educating himself about the NNEST/NEST dichotomy, reflecting on his teaching, and discovering ways to empower his students, not despite but because of his own non-native speaker status, to regain his self-confidence as a legitimate educator. Ng concludes the chapter by stressing the importance of the need to educate Japanese administrators and institutions about the dangers of this underlying bias towards native-speakerism, most importantly because ultimately, it has a negative effect on students. Bouchard, in chapter two titled 'Native-Speakerism in Japanese Junior High Schools: A Stratified Look into Teacher Narratives,' examines teacher narratives of four teachers in addition to examining their classroom materials, government policies about English education, and government-prescribed textbooks for junior high school. Through this analysis, the author discovered that both in discourse and in practice these teachers supported the monolingual paradigm of categorizing Japanese learners as unauthentic English speakers who will always be deficient speakers of English. This strong linguistic dichotomy was accompanied by beliefs of Japan's cultural isolation having a detrimental effect on students' ability to learn English and NESTs being the ideal L2 models for their students, although the teachers also CURRENT ISSUES IN LANGUAGE PLANNING
Idealized Nativeness, Privilege, and Marginalization in English Language Teaching
TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, 2024
The field of English language teaching (ELT) emerged out of global, imperialistic attempts to create colonial subjects and assert control over their minds and resources. ELT thus served as a means both to impose essentialized ways of thinking, speaking, sounding, behaving, and knowing upon local populations, and to devalue and erase localized being, knowing and doing via both epistemic and actualized violence. ELT was predicated upon an idealized nativeness in English affording authority and corresponding privilege to select, white members of colonial societies both domestically and abroad. White, Western "native speakers," whose identities corresponded with notions of idealized nativeness, were imagined as ideal instructors of the "English language." The monolingual principle (Howatt, 1984), or the view that English should be taught exclusively in English, was a further means to marginalize locals as "non-native" learners, users, and teachers. Idealized nativeness has served as an (unachievable) benchmark for "success" in (and beyond) ELT, in diverse, contextualized ways. Whether presented as a theoretical abstraction, or as the foundation for conceptual frameworks detailing "normative" behavior, idealized nativeness continues to influence approaches to theory, research, policy, materials development, teacher education, classroom practice, and hiring in ELT settings around the globe. Colonialism past and present, and the ever-increasing local-global movement of people, information, technology, goods, and finances, have resulted in the emergence of a wide array of contexts, varieties, and functions of "English," and of unique ways of being, becoming, and belonging. Colonialism and movement have also perpetuated the now dominant neoliberal narrative found both within and beyond ELT, that English is "the" global language. Attention both to the history of ELT, and to diversity and complexity, has led to critical problematizations of ELT
Reconceptualizing the Native/Nonnative Speaker Dichotomy
Journal of Language Identity and Education, 2011
This study reconceptualizes the native/nonnative dichotomy and provides a powerful lens to examine linguistic identities. In a study of 25 linguistically diverse teacher candidates in Canada, the respondents' native and nonnative self-ascription and self-assessed level of proficiency was juxtaposed with the judgment of their instructors. This process revealed that the native/nonnative dichotomy falls short in capturing the multifaceted nature of individuals' diverse linguistic identities and tends to misrepresent them. Within the specific social context under investigation, 6 linguistic categories that better represented the true linguistic identity of participants were identified. This inquiry reconceptualizes the controversial native/nonnative dichotomy by suggesting that linguistic identities should be viewed using a sociocultural lens whereby the dynamic, dialogic, multiple, and situated nature of identity is emphasized. The reconceptualization of the native/nonnative dichotomy indicates that individuals negotiate various linguistic identities in different social contexts for specific purposes.
Countering Native-speakerism: Global Perspectives
London, UK Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 187 páginas ISBN 978-1-137-46349-4 (Paperback) (En)Countering Native-speakerism: Global Perspectives is a compilation of Native and Non-Native English Teachers' perceptions towards native-speakerism ideologies inside the @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ (1) Exposing the Ideologies Promoting Native-speakerist Tendencies in ELT ideologies, (2) Native-speakerism and Teachers of English, (3) Native-speakerism and Perceptions of Identity and (4) Native-speakerism in the Academic Environment to four researchers' qualitative studies focused on different branches affecting the particular days as a student of sociology, Holliday has been developing his writings around the social social and anthropological aspects of language, still exists a lack of studies concerning these Canterbury Christ Church University came up with the idea of gathering their colleague's and As Kumaravadivelu states in the book's foreword, native-speakerism is the inequality betw...
(Non)native Speakered: Rethinking (Non)nativeness and Teacher Identity in TESOL Teacher Education
Despite its imprecision, the native-nonnative dichotomy has become the dominant paradigm for examining language teacher identity development. The nonnative English speaking teacher (NNEST) movement in particular has considered the impact of deficit framings of nonnativeness on "NNEST" preservice teachers. Although these efforts have contributed significantly towards increasing awareness of NNEST-hood, they also risk reifying the notion that nativeness and nonnativeness are objectively distinct categories. This article adopts a poststructuralist lens to reconceptualize native and nonnative speakers as complex, negotiated social subjectivities that emerge through a discursive process that the author terms (non)native speakering. It then applies this dynamic framework to analyze "narrative portraits" of four different archetypical language teachers, two of whom seem to fit neatly into (non)native speakerist frames of language and culture and two of whom deviate from them. It then reflects on how these preservice teachers negotiate, re-create, and resist the produced (non)native speaker subjectivities, and considers the complexity, fluidity, and heterogeneity within each archetype. In the conclusion, the author consider implications of (non)native speakering as a theoretical and analytical frame, as well as possible applications of the data for teacher education.
The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker
2003
This paper asserts that uses of a tongue other than one's own can reveal unexpected ways of dealing with the cross-cultural clashes that second language learners encounter as they migrate between languages. It notes that learners' appropriation of foreign languages enables them to construct linguistic and cultural identities in the interstices of national languages and on the margins of monolingual speakers' territpries. The paper discusses the notion of the native speaker, noting how people from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds interpret the concept of privilege. It suggests that seen from the perspective of linguistic travel and migration, rather than from the perspective of the traditional sedentary, bounded opposition native/nonnative, the notion of native speakership loses its power and significance. It also suggests that far more interesting are the multiple possibilities for self-expression in language, because in that regard, everyone is potentially, to a greater or lesser extent, a nonnative speaker, and that position is a privilege. (Contains 29 references.) (SM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
“Feathering our NNEST- An investigation into the native/non-native speaker debate”
The following essay will look at the debate about native speaking English teachers versus non-native speaking English teachers (hereafter referred to as NEST and NNEST) and try to establish its dimensions in the modern world. I will look at select examples of NNEST prejudice, cherry-picked by necessity, but highly valid nevertheless and I will argue that like any other discrimination there is no room for it in contemporary society.
Natives, as anthropologists like to imagine them, are (…) rapidly disappearing (Appadurai 1988, p.39) In this paper, we review the debates about " new speakers " of regional minority languages in Europe and discuss how they can be understood as a phenomenon that challenges the linguistic ideologies that emerged with the development of nation-states, industrial capitalism and colonization. We apply the term " new speakers " to a variety of labels used in contexts such as Wales, Ireland, the Basque Country or Brittany to people who do not learn the local language through conventional family transmission, but more typically through education, e.g. bilingual or immersion schools or adult language courses (O'Rourke et al. 2015). It is not a new phenomenon in the sense that such profiles of speakers have always existed. What is new is the fact that the numbers of new speakers have become so large that they emerge as a distinct social category in these contexts. The ways these new speakers learn and the ways they speak these minority languages is perceived as noticeably different from what made up these linguistic communities in the past. As such, their presence unsettles the inherited ideological repertoires that articulated language, identity, authenticity and national belonging in the modern period. From this viewpoint, they constitute –we argue-one more amongst the many dissonances that contemporary sociolinguistics has identified in the received notions of languages as bounded entities inscribed in communities and territories in specific ways. The leaders of the COST New Speakers network have attempted (and only partially succeeded) to query researchers in other areas such as the sociolinguistics of migration or " world Englishes " so that they explored the connections between contentions over identity, authenticity and linguistic ownership in European minority language contexts and their own material. Given the fact that new speakers are by definition " non-native " speakers in the strict sense, the label can arguably be applied to examine other issues occurring around the emergence of new profiles of speakers due to migration, the appropriation of English in former colonies and also the internationalization of English. Thus, in this paper, we review mostly research on European territorial minorities; but we also spell out how we see the potential connections with these other fields within a wider theoretical framework. The concept of " the native " becomes therefore important in this context, and it connects with wider debates on the " native " in linguistics and anthropology about the politics that inform these disciplines. Our argument is that ideologies of nationalism and colonialism help understand why the category of " native speaker " provides the basis for ideological and political tensions that emerge in different though connected ways both in minority language contexts in Europe and North-America, and in former British colonies. We look at the ways in which these tensions are played out both in relation to language policies and on how academic disciplines like sociolinguistics, applied linguistics or linguistic anthropology inform the politics of language in these contentions.
Rethinking the "Native Speaker"/"Nonnative Speaker" Dichotomy
2013
The study focuses on the concept of the “native speaker” and the “native”/“nonnative speaker” dichotomy. It recognizes the “native speaker” concept primarily as a political and ideological construct and the “native”/“nonnative speaker” dichotomy mainly as a basis for division and discrimination. The study believes that a strict adherence to “native”/“nonnative speaker” dichotomy as a framework of analysis in linguistics, especially applied linguistics, overlooks certain alternative ways of understanding the speakership of a given language and the possibility of there being covert but more intense forms of language-based division and discrimination. Based on the findings of empirical research conducted at Ohio University in 2011/2012, involving 173 Ohio University undergraduates who considered themselves “native speakers” of English, the study recognizes certain patterns that indicate that the divisions within the “native speaker” category are stronger and more intense than the division between the “native speaker” and “nonnative speaker” categories.