The Native Speaker English Teacher and the Politics of Globalization in Japan

Abstract

In light of the global spread of English and the concomitant growth of the English language teaching industry, there has been much discussion about the ‘ownership of English’ (Widdowson, 1994) and the status of speakers and varieties of the language in its various global contexts. The field of World Englishes has traced the pluralization, change and spread of English and advocated the legitimacy of the different varieties of English that have developed around the globe (Kachru, 1992). While initially undertaken primarily in postcolonial contexts, such studies have now been extended to most national contexts where English is learned as a foreign language, and include an extensive amount of work on the role of English in Japan (e.g. Kubota, 1998; Matsuda, 2003; Moody, 2006; Seargeant, 2009; Stanlaw, 2004, 1992). As the plurality of English in its various contexts has increasingly been recognized, questions have repeatedly been raised about issues such as codification, standardization, categorizations of ‘deviation’ or ‘error’, the validity of the native speaker teacher and the choice of a teaching model (e.g. in Strevens, 1980; Quirk and Widdowson, 1985). While ‘native speakers’ were traditionally touted as ideal language teachers because of assumptions that they inherently possess a superior command of the language and intimate knowledge of English-speaking cultures, the World Englishes paradigm has forced a reconsideration of the role of the native speaker English teacher in contexts such as Japan where the learning of English plays an important role in the school curriculum.