The English Languages

The English Languages
Author: Thomas Burns McArthur
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1998-03-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521485821

Plural? Monolithic? Legion? - Tom McArthur explores the nature of English in its local and global contexts.

Beyond Native-Speakerism

Beyond Native-Speakerism
Author: Stephanie Ann Houghton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317286502

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.