Beyond Native-Speakerism: Current Explorations and Future Visions [Hardcover]

Despite unsubstantiated claims of best practice, the division of language-teaching professionals on the basis of their categorization as native-speakers or non-native speakers continues to cascade throughout the academic literature. It has become normative, under the rhetorical guise of acting to correct prejudice and/or discrimination, to see native-speakerism as having a single beneficiary  the native-speaker  and a single victim  the non-native speaker. However, this unidirectional perspective fails to deal with the more veiled systems through which those labeled as native-speakers and non-native speakers are both cast as casualties of this questionable bifurcation. This volume documents such complexities and aims to fill the void currently observable within mainstream academic literature in the teaching of both English, and Japanese, foreign language education. By identifying how the construct of Japanese native-speaker mirrors that of the native-speaker of English, the volume presents a revealing insight into language teaching in Japan. Further, taking a problem-solving approach, this volume explores possible grounds on which language teachers could be employed if native-speakerism is rejected according to experts in the fields of intercultural communicative competence, English as a Lingua Franca and World Englishes, all of which aim to replace the native-speaker model with something new.

Introduction

Stephanie Ann Houghton, Damian J. Rivers and Kayoko Hashimoto

Part I: The Native Speaker Criterion: Past Traditions, Current Perspectives and Future Possibilities

1 The Idea of the Native Speaker

2 The Sociohistorical Foundations of Japans Relationship with the Native Speaker of Foreign Languages