Over c. 50 years, language education has been a significant site of ideological struggle over England’s position in the world, and the last two decades have seen intensification in the assertion of English nationalism in central government. Our analysis of this history starts with the development of multicultural language education in the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting the factors that contributed to this: activist pressure from minority communities, educational philosophies valuing the ‘whole child’, educational decision-making embedded in local democratic structures, and a legislative strategy that promotied good community relations. This started to change in the 1990s, with the curriculum centralisation and the side-lining of LEAs initiated by the Thatcher government. Efforts to regulate increased population movement also made borders and immigration status more of a priority than multiculturalism, and after 2001, security, social cohesion and the suspicion of Muslims started to dominate public discourse. These developments are analysed in six areas of language education policy: standard English, English as an additional language for school students, English for adult speakers of other languages, modern languages, and community languages in mainstream and supplementary schools. Finally, we consider the role of universities in these processes.

In order to set the scene for this volume, I begin the chapter with a narrative of my experience on the day when I got promoted to a professor at a Japanese university by combining my professional experience to the ideologies of native-speakerism and trans-speakerism. I also include the overall background of the study through providing the aims of the research, explicating the significance of the current inquiry, and outlining the core ideas of this book: native-speakerism and trans-speakerism. In other words, this chapter delineates how these two influential ideologies in language education come together in this book and makes a case for why the present inquiry is a fertile endeavor to make. The chapter concludes with a brief description of the structure and content of the volume.

The current chapter delves into the experiences of NNES university professors in Japan, scrutinizing noteworthy events and incidents that they came across while working in their particular settings. The chapter opens, much like Chapters 4 and 5, by offering narratives from four university professor participants. As with the previous narratives, these ones also represent the initial phase of data analysis as well as a portion of the research results. These narratives were then subjected to constructing grounded theory approaches, which led to the discovery of several notable and oft-repeated codes. These were subsequently organized to construct a conceptual framework. This chapter justifies and explains the multifaceted, yet interconnected, principal categories and their incumbent subcategories of university professor participants’ experiences involving native-speakerism and trans-speakerism: they are linguistic, cultural, and professional native-speakerism, in addition to Global Englishes, intercultural competence, and professionalism (including contextual knowledge) in relation to trans-speakerism. Pertinent excerpts and anecdotes from the interview data are used to establish and expound upon the categorizations. Finally, the chapter concludes with the conceptual framework of the university professors’ experiences and several recommendations for practice involving native-speakerism and trans-speakerism.

This chapter describes the origin, development, and subsequent conceptualization of native-speakerism, as well as profiling relevant research on it. Importantly, it also offers my own understanding and interpretation about the notion. To do this, the chapter presents a selection of previous discussions and empirical research into native-speakerism and documents some of the most deleterious effects that native-speakerism has had on the lives and identities of both NESTs and NNESTs worldwide – specifically the effects on NNES teachers and researchers in Japan, who are the focal points of this book. I commence this chapter with a theoretical overview of the ways in which native-speakerism came to be recognized and defined. I then introduce my own analysis of what native-speakerism entails at this moment in time within the ELT field. Afterward, I provide an overview of germane conceptual and empirical studies on native-speakerism while offering my own critiques of them as I do so. With the key points and positionings of the discussion established, I conclude this chapter by positing my case for the originality and significance of this endeavor and by presenting the focal research questions which the research within this volume attempts to answer.

I commence this chapter by introducing the narratives of four graduate school student participants who partook in this endeavor. The participants’ narratives are a representation of the interview data that were relayed to me. They function as the initial phase of data analysis as well as serve as part of the findings because they are presented largely intact as concise stories which are both the basis for analysis and the vehicles for portraying the interview data pithily. The analysis involved subjecting these narratives to constructing grounded theory methods in which I sorted, synthesized, integrated, and formulated a number of prominent and recurrent codes in order to determine several categories and eventually a conceptual framework (theory). I introduce in this chapter primary categories concerning linguistic, cultural, and academic native-speakerism, in addition to Global Englishes, intercultural competence, and professionalism (including work ethics) related to trans-speakerism. I explore and illustrate these by referring to germane excerpts and anecdotes from the interview data to support and expound on the categorizations. This chapter ends with a conceptual framework (theory) and recommendations for practice.

I open this chapter with a discussion about an alternative concept to native speakerism – trans-speakerism. This is a modern ideological viewpoint that is devoted to enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion for all language speakers, teachers, and researchers in the field. I begin by comparing the notion of trans-speakerism with the idea of native-speakerism, then proceed to present its definition, highlight its significance, and introduce the terminology it spurns for describing persons who are subsumed within its precepts: global speaker of English (GSE), global teacher of English (GTEs), and Global Englishes researcher (GER). I continue this chapter with an outline of the research upon which this book is based, which includes: (a) a description of the ways in which I selected the participants and ensured ethical compliance, (b) information about the participants, and (c) an account of how the data collection procedures were followed as well as how the data were treated, analyzed, and interpreted.

In this chapter, I introduce the narratives and primary categories of the secondary school teachers within this inquiry. They include linguistic, cultural, and pedagogical native-speakerism, in addition to Global Englishes, intercultural competence, and professionalism (including second language learning experiences) related to trans-speakerism. I explore and extrapolate these by selecting germane excerpts and anecdotes from the interview data to support and elucidate these categorizations. I do so while being fully cognizant of, first, the conditions under which they occurred (i.e., excerpts of particular experiences of particular participants in their particular contexts) and, second, the circumstances in which they were presented to me during the interviews (i.e., stories constructed in particular ways at a particular moment of their professional lives with me as their particular interlocutor). The narratives presented in this chapter were drawn from four secondary school teachers in Japan.

This final chapter, divided into three major parts, draws together the findings and discussion presented in previous chapters and provides recommendations and implications for stakeholders and researchers. The first part outlines summaries of findings and relevant literature followed by a conceptual framework, which exhibits diagrammatically the findings of this study and their interrelationships. The second part regards recommendations for further research and the limitations of my study. A narrative of my reflection on the journey of the study and the writing of this book concludes the volume.

This provides an overview of trends in heritage language research focusing on Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Each country has its own history of colonization, historical and contemporary policies affecting heritage language transmission, and current areas of interest and concern, and these are explored at the beginning of each country’s respective section as necessary contextual background. Then, the past and current research trends for heritage languages in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, respectively, are presented. This discussion, situated alongside a broad definition of “heritage languages,” includes both native and immigrant languages in each of the two countries. Aotearoa New Zealand’s more than 160 languages and Australia’s more than 360 languages are acknowledged and broadly discussed. Similarities and differences in research across heritage language groups (e.g., te reo Māori, New Zealand Sign Language, Pasifika languages, Aboriginal languages, Torres Strait Islander languages, and immigrant languages) and across countries are presented, revealing which areas have been focused on as well as areas in need of future research.

This book aims to shift the focus from the instrumental to the symbolic dimensions of language that account for its awesome power to affect people’s view of themselves and the world. It takes a post-structuralist approach to the study of language – language not, as Dwight Bolinger wrote in 1980, as a loaded and potentially dangerous weapon, but as a discourse with symbolic effects. The chapter defines symbolic power as “the power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming their vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world” (Bourdieu 1991) by mobilizing not only their minds but also their emotions, beliefs, memories, imaginations and aspirations. It will therefore revisit some of the mainstays of language study that are usually taught as linguistic and discourse structures and show how these structures are vectors of a symbolic power that manifests itself in all areas of everyday life from boardrooms to classrooms to courtrooms. It will show the fundamentally paradoxical nature of symbolic power that at once enhances individual language users’ ability to act upon the world through the use of symbols, and limits their ability to do so in order to be seen as legitimate members of the group that speaks that language.