Implications for Identity: Inhabiting the 'Native-Speaker' English Teacher Location in the Japanese Sociocultural Context.

Abstract

This chapter showcases the ways in which narrative accounts and thus identities manifested, are manipulated, restricted and/or empowered by the complexities of the ‘native-speaker’ English teacher location within the Japanese sociocultural context. The study participants are initially bound together by the national context in which they reside, their location as minority members of society (across a variety of criteria), their shared employment in the domain of foreign language education, and most importantly, their institutional categorization as ‘native speakers’ of English. In turn, the role of categorization is particularly pertinent to the process of identity development as it permits the label of ‘native-speaker’ English teacher and ‘the complex baggage of “nativeness” as it is constructed in the field of English language teaching’ (Stanley, 2012: 25), to be conceptualized as a bounded space in which one is able to reside either voluntarily or otherwise.