日時：2022年2月19 日（土）14:00 –
場所：オンラインにて開催
プログラム
トム・ガリー氏 (KLA会長)
Capital, Commodity, and English Language Teaching
William Simpson
Junior Associate Professor
Tokyo University of Science, Institute of Arts and Science
＊発表言語は英語
Teaching is often seen as a respected profession, a vocation, and a social act of contributing to the public good. It is however, also a job – work performed by an individual in return for money in order to live. While there has been a great amount of research regarding how all manner of variables such as teachers, learners, contexts, etc. effect language pedagogy, far less attention has been paid to aspects of teaching as a job, such as workplace conditions, salaries, schedules, career trajectories etc., and how these influence the way languages like English are taught and learnt. In my forthcoming book: Capital, Commodity, and English Language Teaching (Routledge), I address these issues, examining the work-lives of teachers and asking how teachers’ working conditions interrelate with their practice as English teachers. I examine the multiple ways in which teachers are valued in terms of: wages; institutional evaluations; feedback from students; opinions of colleagues etc. Furthermore, I ask how all of these forms of valuation interrelate with one another, and what they mean to the teachers themselves who are subject to being valued in these ways. In this talk I will give an overview of some of the main themes of the book by drawing on data collected from commercial English language teaching (ELT) in Japan, describing the ways in which the English lesson is produced under the influence of multiple and often contradictory forces and interests which shape how the lesson takes place. Following this, I will open a discussion about the extent to which the issues highlighted in the commercial sector of ELT are, or are not pertinent to current events and developments within non-commercial language teaching in Japan, in for example public or state-regulated forms of education such as high schools or universities.
Languages without names: constructing native-speakerism in a multilingual context
Xinqi He
Ph.D. candidate
The University of Tokyo
＊発表言語は英語
This talk will focus on the construction of native-speakerism ideology in terms of how migrant students frame native-speakerist discourses to experience, reinforce, or challenge this ideology. Native-speakerism refers to a prevalent idea in the language education field where those labeled as ‘native-speaker’ (NS), or languages as well as teaching methods that attached to them, are positioned as superior to their ‘non-native speaker’ (NNS) counterpart (Holliday, 2006). The emergence of the NS concept in both English and Japanese language occurs to identify and exclude the language of NNS, namely the Other. This establishment of native-speakerism thus illustrates nationalism as its foundation. In addition, linguistic research tradition, based on the nationalist assumption, also produces discourses where NS and their languages are placed in authoritative positions. However, the nationalist assumption of native-speakerism is challenged by migrant students who bring diversity in various social categories such as culture, ethnicity, and language across the border. To understand how native-speakerism is preserved in a global society with a mobile population, four migrant students who were learning the English language in Japan were selected as the participant for multiple-round interviews. The interview result demonstrates that all participants experienced exclusion under native-speakerism due to their NNS status. Although they all possess the potentiality of challenging native-speakerism ideology, they tended to reinforce this ideology rather than produce discourses to challenge the ideology that excluded them. Participants' narratives towards their language learning experience demonstrate the reason for their reinforcement that native-speakerism intertwines with other ideologies in the education and labor market, which also put the mobile population at the risk of alienation. In other words, participants reinforced native-speakerism to avoid exclusion under the neoliberalist meritocracy system, English imperialism, and racism where native-speakerism is embedded within education and the labor market. This tendency explains why native-speakerism could preserve itself in a global era with an increasingly mobile population. Yet, participants also produced fluid linguistic discourse, which could challenge native-speakerism in a space where English native-speakerism collides with Japanese-native speakerism. This implies that the conflict between the inclusive exclusion tendency of English native-speakerism and the absolute exclusion tendency of Japanese native-speakerism emerges a space that allows a new linguistic phenomenon to challenge native-speakerism itself. This thus implies a self-denial tendency of native-speakerism.
Lexical Phrases and Perceived Fluency
Yoko Asari, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Commerce, School of Commerce, Waseda University
＊発表言語は英語
There is now a general consensus among language researchers that the use of formulaic language is positively correlated with perceived proficiency. In this talk, I will share a line of studies I have been conducting which looks into how the use of lexical phrases, a term for particular formulaic language units which serve pragmatic functions, can help EFL learners come across as being proficient speakers of L2. In the first study, a one-minute monologue was collected from 191 EFL learners, who were all university students in Japan. The monologues were then assessed by nine judges with regard to fluency using a five-point scale. The results revealed that learners who were perceived to be fluent used lexical phrases in a variety of ways (e.g., self-talk fillers and rhetorical device), to increase fluency. The second study then looked at how raising awareness of different types of lexical phrases can help learners use them in their oral production. 10 EFL learners summarized a short passage once a week for six weeks. Every week, they were made aware of how lexical phrases can help facilitate fluency. Their oral summary was then assessed by five judges. The results showed that while some learners did increase their use of lexical phrases from the first week to the sixth week, this did not seem to have a major impact on the judges’ assessment. As this is still a work in progress, I hope to exchange ideas on the use of lexical phrases in playing a role in facilitating perceived fluency.
松坂 ヒロシ氏 (TALK会長)